24 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
hours of labor could be regulated by legislative enactment, as they are in the older industrial communities. The court, how- ever, makes the fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States the basis of its decision. If this position were sound, all efforts for legislative restriction of the working day would be wasted, since there is no prospect of any immediate change in the constitution of the United States.
"Happily the weight of precedent is not on the side of the Illinois court ; the precedents of the courts of Massachusetts and New York are in the other direction. In Massachusetts, for twenty years past, it has been an established principle of the supreme court that the hours of work of women and children may be regulated by statute. The Massachusetts precedent has had such weight in New York that no case has been carried to the supreme court or to the court of appeals. The constitu- tionality of the ten-hours' law, though suits have been brought under it repeatedly, has never been disputed. It remained for the supreme court of Illinois to discover that the amendment to the constitution of the United States, passed to guarantee the negro from oppression, has become an insuperable obstacle to the protection of women and children. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that this unique interpretation of the fourteenth amend- ment will be permanently maintained even in Illinois. When the observation of a few more years shall have convinced the medical profession, the philanthropists, and the educators, as experience has already convinced the factory employes, that it is a life-and-death matter to have the working day of reasonable length guaranteed by law, it will be found possible to rescue the fourteenth amendment from the perverted application upon which this decision rests. We may hope that Ritchie vs. the People will then be added to the reversed decisions in which the supreme court of Illinois is so rich." At that time no one could foresee that the Illinois decision would be overruled so promptly or so authoritatively as the event has proved.
Undeterred by the three recent and discouraging decisions of western courts, the people of Utah fell back upon the prece- dent of Massachusetts, whose supreme court had decided in 1876
