The difficulty of regulating the hours of farm labor is, of course, obvious, and so far as I know, no attempt has yet been made.  The same thing remains still true of domestic labor, though it has been more questioned.  It should be noted that both domestic labor and farm labor belong to the class of what we call indefinite service.  Now, indefinite service must always be regulated very carefully as to the length of the contract, which is never to be indefinite; that is to say, if it be both indefinite in the services rendered and in the time during which they are to last, it is in no way distinguishable from slavery.  For instance, in Indiana, many years before the Civil War, there was an old negro woman who was induced to sign a contract to serve in a general way for life; that, of course, was held to be slavery.  More recently the United States Supreme Court has held that a contract imposed upon a sailor whereby he agreed to ship as a mariner on the Pacific coast for a voyage to various other parts of the world and thence back was a contract so indefinite in length of time as to be unenforceable under free principles, although a sailor’s contract is one which in a peculiar way carries with it indefinite service.  And a contract “a tout faire” even for a week might be held void.

In all these matters the labor of women, and even that of children, will very often control the hours of labor of men; for instance, in the mills of New England, more than half the labor is not adult male; yet when any large class of the mill’s operatives stop, the whole mill must stop; consequently, a law limiting the labor of women and children to fifty-six hours a week will be in practice enforced upon the adult males employed in the same mill.

Continental legislation has gone far beyond us in all these important particulars.  In most countries the conditions surrounding the labor of women, particularly married women, are carefully regulated by law.  She is not allowed to go back to the mill for a certain period after childbirth, and in many more particular respects her health is carefully looked after.  Such legislation would possibly be impossible to enforce with our notions in America.  The most interesting of all is perhaps the attempt made in the State of Connecticut within a few years to improve social conditions by providing that no married woman should be employed in factories at all.  The bill was not, of course, carried, but it raises a most interesting sociological question.  Ruskin probably would have been in favor of it.  He described as the very last act of modern barbarism for the woman to be made “to shriek for a hold of the mattock herself.”  It was argued in Connecticut that the employment of married women injured the health of the children, which is perfectly true.  Indeed, the death-rate in England is very largely determined by the fact whether their mothers are employed in mills or not.  It was also argued that her competition with man merely