e time
and method of paying wages are ordered by the State, and in certain
industries the hours of labor are fixed by law. Women and children are
the special proteges of this new State, and great care is taken that
they shall be engaged only in employment suitable to their strength and
under an environment that will not ruin their health.

The growing social control of the individual is significant, for it is
not only the immediate conditions of labor that have come under public
surveillance. Where and how the workman lives is no longer a matter of
indifference to the public, nor what sort of schooling his children get,
what games they play, and what motion pictures they see. The city, in
cooperation with the State, now provides nurses, dentists, oculists, and
surgeons, as well as teachers for the children. This local paternalism
increases yearly in its solicitude and receives the eager sanction of
the labor members of city councils. The State has also set up elaborate
machinery for observing all phases of the labor situation and for
gathering statistics and other information that should be helpful in
framing labor laws, and has also established state employment agencies
and boards of conciliation and arbitration.

This machinery of mediation is significant not because of what it has
already accomplished but as evidence of the realization on the part
of the State that labor disputes are not merely the concern of the two
parties to the labor contract. Society has finally come to realize that,
in the complex of the modern State, it also is vitally concerned, and,
in despair at thousands of strikes every year, with their wastage and
their aftermath of bitterness, it has attempted to interpose its good
offices as mediator.

The modern labor laws cannot be credited, however, to labor activity
alone. The new social atmosphere has provided a congenial milieu
for this vast extension of state functions. The philanthropist, the
statistician, and the sociologist have become potent allies of the
labor legislator; and such non-labor organizations, as the American
Association for Labor Legislation, have added their momentum to the
movement. New ideals of social cooperation have been established, and
new conceptions of the responsibilities of private ownership have been
evolved.

While labor organizations have succeeded rather readily in bending the
legislative power to their wishes, the military arm of the executive
and the judi