requirement. After an experience of seventy years in England and nearly thirty years in Massachusetts, together with the more recent experience of twenty other American states, legislation reducing the hours of woman and minors in factories has justified itself as a proper action for any civilized state. It is true that local differences exist in the climate and other conditions, but these should not be considered decisive. Those states which are just now advancing to the position of manufacturing communities might well learn from these examples the lesson that permanent industrial progress cannot be built upon the physical exhaustion of women and children. Factory life brings incidentally new and depressing effects which those whose experience has been wholly agricultural do not appreciate. But the experience of states which have pushed their way from agricultural to manufacturing industries, and have found that their delay in protecting their factory employees has weakened the physical and moral strength of the new generation of working people, would seem to be an experience which the citizens of new manufacturing states would hope to avoid. A reduction in hours has never lessened the working people's ability to compete in the markets of the world. States with shorter workdays actually manufacture their products at a lower cost than states with longer workdays. Several witnesses before the Industrial Commission, both manufacturers and employees, have urged a national law reducing the hours of women and children in factories to a uniform standard. There is evidence that the demand for such a law is growing in strength. But federal legislation, with the attendant force of federal factory inspectors, is objectionable. Other countries, even Germany, with its federal form of government, have uniform factory laws covering all parts of the land; but it has been the pride of the American Commonwealth that, except in great emergency, no state should be coerced to do that which is either for its own interest or for the interest of other states. This principle is sound, but it cannot be overlooked that those states which profit by their strategic position to hold their sister states below the level of humane self-protection demanded by modern factory conditions

are storing up against themselves feelings of resentment and retaliation. It is certainly practicable for any state to bring its hours of labor for women and children in factories down to the standard of 55, set by New Jersey. This standard is near that of our principle competitor, Great Britain. This, at least for the present, should be the standard adopted on its own initiative by every state that enters the ranks of factory production.

Federal Legislation

While in manufactures and mining the regulation of hours belongs to the several states, yet in transportation the interstate character of the industry brings the subject under the powers of Congress. The policy of congressional action depends upon the need of protecting the traveling public and freight traffic, and the inability of certain classes of employees to organize for their own protection. On account of the nature of train service the hours of railroad employees are necessarily irregular. A certain distance must be covered before the train crew can be released, and the time required may be short, or, under exceptional circumstances, may be exceedingly long. There is, however, a very general tendency of railroad management to bring the hours of trainmen into reasonable limits, and the ten-hour day is the ideal standard established by agreement for such service. The principal motive actuating the management is the necessity that the trainmen should be wide-awake, and this acts as a protection against unreasonable demands; at the same time, prior to the organization of the railroad unions the workday was much longer than at present. Even now, in the case of the unorganized switchmen, telegraphers, track men, and station men, the hours are frequently twelve a day, and, in some cases, from sunrise to sunset. During the summer, when days are long, trackmen work fourteen hours on many roads. In emergencies all of these employees are also required to remain on duty much longer than twelve hours.

While it is true that the trainmen are especially responsible for the safety of the traveling public, it is also true, as stated

by the president of a leading railroad, that "of the twenty thousand names on our pay roll you could pick out very few who do not carry the lives of the passengers in their hands." Telegraph operators occupy a peculiarly responsible position in traffic operations, and it is no uncommon thing for a coroner's jury to ascribe the cause of a railroad wreck to the negligence of a telegraph operator who had been on duty for an excessive number of hours. Railway trackmen are the poorest paid and hardest worked of all employees. They handle heavy material, such as cross-ties and steel rails, and even heavy cars. Both on their own account and on account of the safety of the traveling public, the hours of labor of these unorganized classes of railway employees should be reduced to eight.

The legislation of the several states affecting the hours of employees limits such hours to ten or twelve, and in five states contracts for a longer time are invalid, and a company so contracting is liable to a penalty. The constitutionality of such statutes can now probably be sustained under the decision of the United States Supreme Court on the Utah mining law. Railroad labor, however, is undoubtedly covered by the interstate powers of Congress, and a federal law regulating the hours of labor would be constitutional. The limitation of continuous runs by engineers or continuous service by telegraph operators or switchmen without a period of sufficient rest, as well as other regulations affecting the surroundings and dangers of the employment are within the province of Congress. The Industrial Commission has recommended that Congress enact a code covering all the conditions of employment of railroad labor throughout the United States. Such a code would have the advantage of simplifying the conditions throughout the country, and, by the force of example, would lead the states, it is hoped, to voluntarily adopt the code in cases where Congress cannot properly interfere. This the commission believes to be one of the most important efforts in the labor interest to which the attention of Congress can possibly be invited.1

1 In 1907 Congress passed an act limiting the hours of railway labor. - ED.

3

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, gild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

1 By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English translation [Chicago, Charles II. Kerr and Company]. First published as the platform of the Communist League, an association of German workingmen, in 1848. It well sets forth the cardinal doctrines of modern socialism. Only Part I is reproduced here, Part II, entitled "Proletarians and Communists," being omitted. - ED.

2 By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor; by proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.

3 That is, all written history. In 1847 the prehistory of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Morgan's crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of these primeval communities society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this process of dissolution in "Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats," 2d edition [Stuttgart, 1886]. * Gild master, that is, a full member of a gild, a master within, not a head of, a gild.

In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, gild masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature; it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by close gilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The gild masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate gilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand, ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the