The writer, acting as chairman of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniformity of Legislation appointed under laws of more than thirty States of the Union and meeting in Detroit, Michigan, in 1895, brought this matter up under a resolution of the Legislature of the State of Massachusetts requesting him to do so.  Nearly every Southern delegate and most of those from the West and from the Middle States were on their feet at once objecting, and the best he could do was to get it referred to a committee rather than have the Commonwealth of Massachusetts summarily snubbed.  This committee, of course, never reported.

Undoubtedly climatic effects, social conditions, and dozens of other reasons make it difficult, if not unwise, to attempt to have the same rules as to hours of labor in all the States of our wide country.  Boys and notably girls mature much earlier in the South than they do in the North; schooling conditions are not the same, homes are not so comfortable, the money may be more needed, the general level of education is less.  Doubtless there are still areas in the South where on the whole it is better for a child of fourteen to be in a cotton mill than anywhere else he is likely to go, schools not existing.  The Southern delegates resented interference with their State police power for these reasons.  The Massachusetts Legislature, on the other hand, had in mind the competition of Southern mills, with cheap child labor, quite as much as any desire to benefit the white or negro children of the South; but the writer’s experience convinced him that a constitutional amendment on this point is impossible, although one has been repeatedly proposed, notably by the late Congressman Lovering of Massachusetts, and such an amendment is still pending somewhere in that limbo of unadopted constitutional amendments for which no formal cemetery seems to have been prepared.

Even as to men, the labor of the Southern States is notably different from the labor of Lowell or Lawrence, Massachusetts, or even Cambridge; while on the Panama Canal or in most tropical countries the ordinary laborer likes to pretend that he is working eighteen hours a day, although most of the time is spent in eating or sleeping.  Nevertheless, under the Federal law, all employees at Panama have to be given the eight-hour day required by the Federal statute, the Supreme Court having upheld that act as constitutional.

It is curious to note, in passing, the alignment of our courts upon this subject of hours of labor and general interference with the freedom of contract of employment.  The Western and Southern States are most conservative; that is to say, most severe in enforcing the constitutional principles of liberty of contract as against any statute.  The courts of the North and East are more radical, and the courts of Massachusetts and the United States most radical of all.  I account for this fact on the ground that where the legislatures are over-radical, the