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restricted to a specified number of hours in the twenty-four, instead of being restricted to a specified number in the daytime, tacit permission for night work is thereby given. In most of the states which restrict labor to a certain number of hours in the twenty-four, usage prevents the employment of young girls and women at night. That usage need not so prevent their employ- ment is shown by Pennsylvania, where, until the recent law was enacted (May, 1905), little girls from thirteen years of age up legally (and many much younger illegally) worked ten hours every weekday night. The statutes of Washington and Oregon expressly state that women may be employed ten hours at any time, and women have accordingly been employed in Washington, not only for ten hours at night, but for almost twenty consecu- tive hours (in a mill) a period supposedly divided into two days' labor by the convenient hour of midnight.
Usage is thus no trustworthy safeguard: such protection always tends to break down when most bitterly needed. On the other hand, the legal prohibition of inhumane hours works no hardship to the employers who are humane, since precisely those competitors who are unfeeling in their requirements are authori- tatively checked.
Again, many of the existing statutes are marred, and some totally invalidated, by the damaging exceptions which they per- mit. - In New York, for instance, women are restricted to ten hours' labor a day, except when overtime is allowed to make one shorter workday in the week, supposedly a Saturday half-holiday. But such an exception is manifestly impossible of enforcement. Without an army of inspectors to see whether overwork is fairly compensated by off-time each week, such an exception merely makes the law evadable. Nine states render their restrictions non-en forcable by such exceptions, allowing overtime in order to make one workday in the week shorter, or on account of a break- down in the machinery. These states are California, Connecticut, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsyl- vania, and Rhode Island.
Progress and retrogression. Besides the defects in the pres- ent statutes, a recent and deplorable retrograde step should be
