“It is known to all men, and of what we know as men we cannot profess to be ignorant as judges: 

“That woman’s physical structure 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 it was the duty of a gentleman to drink to excess; and it was presumed that a guest had not enjoyed his dinner unless he was at least comfortably the worse for liquor.  This view of drunkenness is admirably depicted in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, where intoxication is treated throughout as something merely humorous.