halved his wages; that if no women were employed, the men would get much higher wages.  On the other side it was argued that the effect of the law would be largely immoral because it would simply prevent women from getting married.  Knowing that after marriage they would get no employment, they would simply dispense with the marriage ceremony; for it is obvious that under such legislation a man living with a woman unmarried could get double wages, which would be halved the moment he made her his wife.  This last was evidently the view which prevailed; and so far as I know, no such law has in the civilized world yet been enacted, though there is doubtless a much stronger social prejudice against women entering ordinary employments in some countries than in others.

The constitutional question underlying all this discussion was perhaps best set forth by an experiment of the late Mr. Edward Atkinson, which he always threatened to bring into the courts, but I believe did not do so.  “An Englishman’s house is his castle”; an English woman’s house is her castle.  Atkinson proposed that a woman of full age, living in her own house, should connect her loom or spindles by electric wire to the nearest mill or factory, and then proceed to weave or spin more than the legal limit of nine hours per day.  Would the state, under the broadest principles of English constitutional liberty, have the right to come in and tell her not to do so; particularly when the man in the next house remained free?  Up to this time there is no doubt that a factory, a large congregation of labor, under peculiar conditions, presents a different question and a different constitutional aspect from that of the individual.  This, indeed, is the principle which must justify the constitutional regulation of sweat-shops, as to which we will speak next.

The sweat-shop is the modern phrase for a house, frequently a dwelling, tenement, or home, not a factory, and not under the ownership or control of the person giving out the employment.

Now a factory may obviously be regulated under ordinary police principles; but when the first great case came up as to regulating labor in a man’s own home, even though it was but one floor of a tenement, it was decided by the highest court of New York to be unconstitutional.  The case was one concerning the manufacture of cigars, which by the statute was prohibited in tenement houses on any floor partly occupied for residence purposes.[1] Nevertheless it may be questioned whether, with the advancing social feeling in such matters, legislation would not be now sustained when clearly aimed at sanitary purposes, even though it interfered with trades conducted in a man’s dwelling house.  I hold that it is quite as possible for the arm of the state to interfere to prevent the baking of bread in bedrooms, for instance, as it is to seize upon clothing which has been exposed to scarlet fever.  A man’s home, under modern theories, is no more sacred against this police power than is his body against vaccination; and the last has been decided by the Supreme Court of the United States.[2]