turn
about and directly regulate the actual building of residences where
the trade is carried on. They can require not only so many cubic feet
of air per person in the sweat-shop, but so many cubic feet of air per
person in every bedroom; as Ruskin said, not only, of grouse, so many
brace to the acre, but of men and women--so many brace to the garret.
A California law[1] once made it a criminal offence for any person to
sleep with less than one thousand feet of air in his room for his own
exclusive use! It is indeed a crime to be poor.

[Footnote 1: See Ah Kow, Nunan, 5 Sawyer, 552.]

This legislation to reform sweat-shops is a field which has been
almost entirely cultivated by what I have termed the moral reformers,
with little or no help from organized labor. One's observation is that
organized labor has been mainly concerned with the price of wages, the
length of hours, and with the closed shop; it has devoted very little
of its energies to factory or trade _conditions_, except, indeed, that
it has been very desirous of enforcing the union label, on which it
asserts that union-made goods are always made under sanitary and moral
conditions, and implies that the goods of "scab" manufacturers are not
so.

The usual sweated trades in this country are the manufacture of
clothing, underwear, tobacco, and artificial flowers. There has also
been considerable regulation of laundries and bakeries, but not
because they are what is commonly called sweated trades.

The bulk of factory legislation is too vast for more than mention in a
general way. It fills probably one-fourth in mass of the labor laws
of the whole country, and applies in great and varying detail to the
general condition of factories, workshops, and in most States to large
stores--department stores--using the word in the American sense.
It may be broadly analyzed as legislation for the construction
of factories, for fresh air in factories, for general sanitary
conditions, such as the removal of dust and noxious gases,
white-washing, sanitary appliances, over-crowding, stair-cases,
fire-escapes, and the prohibition of dangerous machinery. As has been
said, it was begun in Massachusetts in the fifth decade of the last
century, based originally almost entirely on the English factory acts,
which were bitterly attacked by the _laissez-faire_ school of the
early nineteenth century, but soon vindicated themselves as legitimate
legislation in England, although not e