Limitation of Hours of Labor of labor which clearly and directly con serves the public health, safety, morals or welfare is valid and will be upheld in any court. Such a law is designed primarily to protect the public, as dis tinguished from the individual, and clearly falls within the requirements of the legal maxim, "Sic uiere tuo, ut alienum non laedas," upon which the police power rests and to the detailed enforcement of which it is generally confined. I. Laws Regulating and Limiting Hours of Labor Which Directly Affect the Public. It is difficult to conceive of labor laws which directly affect any one but the laborer himself, or, perhaps, the employer. To limit the number of hours a person shall work generally does not concern the public, at least not directly. We need not expect, there fore, to find many such laws. The cases in which such laws are considered are still fewer for the reason that their validity is seldom attacked. The only case in which the constitutionality of such a law was considered is that en titled, The Ten Hour Law for Street Railway Corporations, 24 R. I. 603, 1902, in which an act providing that a day's work for employees on street railways should not exceed ten hours' work to be performed within twelve consecutive hours was held valid. The Court said in substance that the purpose of the act is to guard the public (safety) from service too prolonged for alertness in the exercise of reasonable care. A similar statute applicable to railroads was involved in People v. Phyfe, 136 N. Y. 554, 1893, but the case turned upon another point and the question as to its constitutionality was not de cided. The Court said, however, that "in view of the great danger to, and
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even destruction of, life and property, which might result from an attempt of men who have become enfeebled by prolonged and exhausting effort to con trol engines and cars in motion," it might well be regarded as a reasonable exercise of the police power. The federal eight hour law, limiting the hours of employees engaged by inter state railroads, which went into effect a little over a year ago, is another sim ilar law and is undoubtedly sustainable on the same ground, namely, on the ground that it directly protects the public. These are perhaps the clearest illus trations of such a law. There are none beside these in which the hours of employees have been limited primarily for the welfare of the public, and which so directly affect the public. As soon as we leave clear instances like those above, we approach the border-line between those laws which directly af fect the public and those which do not, and become involved in the difficulty of determining to which class the par ticular law in question belongs, upon which determination, of course, depends the validity of the law. Here there is room for great differences of opinion, depending entirely upon the view which the court takes, and hence the conflict between the decisions of our best courts in passing upon the validity of the same law. To illustrate, a few years ago the legislature of New York passed a law making it a misdemeanor to employ a person in a bakery for more than ten hours in any one day. This law was sustained as a valid exercise of the police power by both the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, People v. Lochner, 73 App. Div. 120, 1902, and the Court of Appeals, id., 177 N. Y. 145, 1904, of the State of New York. This case properly falls under a later
