liked so to do. But in New York at least (now followed
in Delaware, Maryland, and Oklahoma) it is now settled that so much
interference even with the rate of wages may be allowed, and as the
percentage of public employment is, of course, very large--covering as
it does not only all public contractors, but all labor in or for gaols
or public institutions--it will necessarily, it would seem, drag with
it a certain practical regulation of private industry corresponding to
the public rules.

In England, the New Zealand experiment has been tentatively begun;
that is to say, in the last radical Parliament, in the autumn of 1909,
the law was enacted, already referred to, for fixing wages by mixed
commission (see above, p. 159); but otherwise than as above there is
in the States and Territories of the United States, and in the United
States itself, no regulation of wages, even of women or children, and
no attempt, as yet, at a minimum wage law.

When we come to hours, the matter is very different. In the first
place, we must be reminded that without a constitutional amendment
you cannot have any direct or indirect legislation, as to general
occupations, on the hours of labor of a man of full age.[1] You can
have regulation of the hours of labor of a woman of full age
in general employments, by court decision, in three States
(Massachusetts, Oregon, and Illinois), the Massachusetts decision,
carelessly rendered in 1876, without citing any authority whatever,[2]
being based apparently on a vague notion of general sanitary reasons,
without argument or apparently due consideration of the historical and
constitutional law; but the Oregon case,[3] decided both by the State
Supreme Court and by the Federal Court in so far as the Fourteenth
Amendment was concerned, after most careful and thorough discussion
and reasoning, reasserted the principle that a woman is the ward of
the state, and therefore does not have the full liberty of contract
allowed to a man. Whether this decision will or will not be pleasing
to the leaders of feminist thought is a matter of considerable
interest. A similar statute in Illinois had been declared
unconstitutional twenty years before, largely on the ground that
to limit or prohibit the labor of woman would handicap her in her
industrial competition with man, pointing out also that the Illinois
Constitution itself prescribes and requires that the rights of the
sexes should in all respects be identical, s