ed, nor permitted to work for wages, under
any conditions or terms, for longer hours or days of service than
is consistent with his health and physical well-being and ability to
promote the general welfare by his increasing usefulness as a healthy
and intelligent citizen," and fixed ten hours as the limit of work
consistent with such a measure of health and welfare, in work in any
mill, factory, or manufacturing establishment. This law was sustained
by the Supreme Court of that state and was carried on appeal to
the United States Supreme Court.[6] In support of the law there was
presented a voluminous brief giving a most impressive body of evidence
from scientific and from practical business sources, to show the many
evils, popularly unsuspected or underestimated, that result from long
hours even in industries of no exceptional hazards.[7] Physiological
and psychological tests demonstrate that the fatigue following more
than a moderate working period not only reduces immediate efficiency,
but so poisons the system that greater liability to accident, disease,
intemperance, immorality, and premature decay, results.

Two main purposes appear somewhat intermingled in this legislation
in limitation of hours. The first purpose is to protect the public
directly where the safety of others is dependent on the health and
efficiency of the worker. The second purpose is to protect directly
the worker's health and welfare, that policy being recognized to be
in the long run the best likewise for the public welfare. In legal
reasoning it is being recognized that the individual wage-worker, even
the adult male, is not in a position to judge the number of hours he
ought, for his own good, to work, and is unable to fix the length of
his own working day. As a matter of economic theory, the usance of a
child, a woman, or a man, is merely that kind and amount of
service that can be given out by each without repressing the normal
possibilities of growth, reducing the normal health and vigor, or
shortening the normal period of healthy productive human existence.[8]
It is becoming a general social policy to prevent the abnormal strains
of industry that cause the unnatural deterioration of the human factor
in industry. A wage-worker may be permitted to sell his daily _net_
fund of working power--his usance--but not his life.

Sec. 9. #Plan of the minimum wage.# Even more recent than the legislative
regulation of hours downward is the attempt t