re and the performance of maternal
functions place her at a great disadvantage in the battle of life.

"That while a man can work for more than ten hours a day without injury
to himself, a woman, especially when the burdens of motherhood are upon
her, cannot.

"That while a man can work standing upon his feet for more than ten
hours a day, day after day, without injury to himself, a woman cannot.

"That to require a woman to stand upon her feet for more than ten hours
in any one day and to perform severe manual labour while thus standing
has the effect of impairing her health.

"And as weakly and sickly women cannot be the mothers of vigorous
children, it is of the greatest importance to the public that the State
take such measures as may be necessary to protect its women from the
consequences produced by long-continued manual labour in those
occupations which tend to break them down physically.

"It would seem obvious, therefore, that legislation which limits the
number of hours which women shall be permitted to work to ten hours in a
single day in such employments as are carried on in mechanical
establishments, factories, and laundries would tend to preserve the
health of women and assure the production of vigorous offspring by them
and would conduce directly to the health, morals, and general welfare of
the public, and that such legislation would fall clearly within the
police powers of the State."

IV. All phenomena that concern family life should be carefully studied
and their bearing on the state ascertained as exactly as possible.
There is no subject, for example, from which such wild conclusions are
drawn as the matter of divorce. The average moralist, but more
particularly the clergy, seeing the fairly astonishing increase in
divorce during the last decade, jump to the conclusion that family life
is decadent and immorality flagrantly on the increase. They point to the
indubitable fact that a century ago divorces were insignificant in
number; and they infer that morality was then on a much higher level
than it is now. Such alarmists neglect certain elementary facts. The
flippant manner in which marriage is treated by the Restoration
dramatists and by novelists of the 18th century, the callous sexual
morality revealed in diaries and in the conversations of men like
Johnson alone are sufficient to suggest the need of a readjustment of
one's view regarding the standard of morality in the past. A century ago