This legislation to reform sweat-shops is a field which has been almost entirely cultivated by what I have termed the moral reformers, with little or no help from organized labor.  One’s observation is that organized labor has been mainly concerned with the price of wages, the length of hours, and with the closed shop; it has devoted very little of its energies to factory or trade conditions, except, indeed, that it has been very desirous of enforcing the union label, on which it asserts that union-made goods are always made under sanitary and moral conditions, and implies that the goods of “scab” manufacturers are not so.

The usual sweated trades in this country are the manufacture of clothing, underwear, tobacco, and artificial flowers.  There has also been considerable regulation of laundries and bakeries, but not because they are what is commonly called sweated trades.

The bulk of factory legislation is too vast for more than mention in a general way.  It fills probably one-fourth in mass of the labor laws of the whole country, and applies in great and varying detail to the general condition of factories, workshops, and in most States to large stores—­department stores—­using the word in the American sense.  It may be broadly analyzed as legislation for the construction of factories, for fresh air in factories, for general sanitary conditions, such as the removal of dust and noxious gases, white-washing, sanitary appliances, over-crowding, stair-cases, fire-escapes, and the prohibition of dangerous machinery.  As has been said, it was begun in Massachusetts in the fifth decade of the last century, based originally almost entirely on the English factory acts, which were bitterly attacked by the laissez-faire school of the early nineteenth century, but soon vindicated themselves as legitimate legislation in England, although not even there—­still less in our States—­have we gone so far as the Continental countries.

Closely connected with this may be mentioned that vast domain of law which is known as employers’ liability.  Under the old strict common-law rule, a servant or employee could never recover damages for any injury caused in whole or in part by his own negligence, by the negligence of a fellow servant or even by defective machinery, unless he was able to prove beyond peradventure that this existed known to the employer and was the sole and direct cause of the accident.  As is matter of common knowledge, the tendency of all modern legislation, particularly the English and our own, has been to chip one corner after another off these principles.  The fellow-servant rule has been very generally abolished by statute, or in many States fellow servants have been defined and divided into classes so that the master is not relieved of liability when the injury to the servant is caused by the negligence of a servant not in actual fact his fellow, i.e., employed with him in his own particular work.  In like manner the exemption for contributory negligence has been pared down and the liability for dangerous or defective appliances increased, practically to the point that the master becomes the insurer of his machinery in this particular.  The recent English statute goes to the length of putting the liability on the employer or on an employment fund in all cases.