The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law of the State of Illinois.  The Manufacturers’ Association, through the W.C.  Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit to test the constitutionality of the law.  Two Ritchie employees, Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts.  Their appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them by the ten-hour law.

There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched state of women’s wages in the State of Illinois.  If women of mature years—­one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over thirty years—­are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no position freely to contract?  For who, of her own free will, would contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?

There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge R.S.  Tuthill.  When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth.  For Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department, forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.

Immediately a number of women’s organizations joined hands with the women’s trade unions in the fight to save the bill.  When it came up in the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on hand.  This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers’ League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had toiled for many months.  The World’s Experience Against the Illinois Circuit Court, this document might well have been called.  It was simply a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on the succeeding generation.  Incidentally the brief contained three pages of law.

The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.

“Medical Science has demonstrated,” says this most important paragraph, “that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or exhaustion is abnormal....  It has discovered that fatigue is due not only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue, entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin.  It has been shown that when artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin causes death.  The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body.  But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin.”