(1) Weekly or time payment laws.  These exist in more than half the States, and are always constitutional as to corporations, but are possibly unconstitutional in all States except Massachusetts when applied to private employers.

(2) Cash-payment laws, requiring payments to be made in actual money.  These statutes are commonly combined with those last mentioned and are subject to the same constitutional objections.  As a part of them, or in connection with them, we will put the ordinary anti-truck laws—­that is, legislation forbidding payment in produce or supplies or commodities of any kind.  Finally, the store-order laws forbidding payment to be made in orders for indefinite supplies on any particular store, still less on a store owned or operated by the company or employer.  Such laws have sometimes been held unconstitutional in all particulars, sometimes when they apply only to certain industries, as, for instance, mines.  In the writer’s opinion they are never constitutional when applied to corporations, nor are they class legislation when applied to mines, for the reason that it is well known that mines are situated in remote districts where there are few stores, and that the maintenance of a company store has not only led to much cheating but to an actual condition of peonage.  That is to say, the miners would be held in debt and led to believe that they could not leave the mine or employment until the debt was liquidated.  Belonging usually to the most ignorant class, it is matter of common knowledge that this has been done, and that Poles, negroes, or others of the more recent immigrants have been permanently kept in debt to the company store or by advances or in other ways, as for rent or board.

(3) Closely allied to such legislation, of course, is the legislation against factory tenements or dwellings, but there is probably less real abuse here, and therefore a greater constitutional objection against laws forbidding houses, especially model houses, to be built and rented by the employer.  Such efforts, unfortunately, have not usually been popular.  Far from helping labor conditions, they seem to have caused great resentment, as was notably the case in Pullman, Illinois, and very recently in Ludlow, Massachusetts.  It may be that the American temperament prefers its own house, and resents being compelled to live in a house, however superior, designed for him and assigned to him by his employer.

(4) The next matter which has evoked the attention of philanthropists and the angry resentment of the persons they supposed they were trying to benefit, is that of the benefit or company insurance or pension funds.  The principle of withholding, or contracting with the employees to withhold, a small proportion of their wages weekly or monthly to go into an endowment or benefit fund, even when the company itself contributes as much or more, was instituted with sanguine hopes some forty years ago, first in the great Calumet &