The hours are generally eleven or twelve, instead of eight or nine as in England or the United States.  There is elaborate special regulation of times and conditions in labor in railways, laundries, bakeries, etc.  The English law generally divides persons, according to their age, into three classes, adults, young persons (from fourteen to eighteen), or children, and the system is most elaborate.  Generally no children under the age of eleven may be employed at all.

Sanitary and social regulations are far more intelligent than ours.  Generally, the employment of women in factories within four weeks after childbirth is forbidden; and in Switzerland it is forbidden to employ pregnant women in certain occupations dangerous to the health of posterity.  The German Civil Code declares that “A married woman has both the right and the obligation of keeping house.  She is obliged to attend to all domestic labor and the affairs of her husband in so far as such labor or occupation is usual according to her social condition.  She is supreme within her sphere, or at least has power to act or bind her husband in domestic matters, and he cannot limit her powers without a divorce.  He may, however, annul any contract made by her for her personal labor with a third party."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., p. 53.] [Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 77.]

The anti-truck and weekly-payment laws exist in all countries.  Europe generally, particularly Great Britain and the Roman Catholic countries, are handicapped by an infinity of holidays.  In Roman Catholic countries they are generally single days, saints’ days, etc., scattered throughout the year, but in Great Britain no skilled laborer will work at all for some weeks at a time.

The English law against intimidation is the model of the New York statute and most others.  It defines in great detail what intimidation is—­substantially, that it is violence or threats, the persistently following, the hiding of tools, etc. or the watching or besetting the house or place of business—­and menaces, as well as actual violence, are recognized as unlawful and punishable by imprisonment, in Germany, Italy, Sweden, and other countries.  Germany and Austria copy the English common law as to enticing from service.

There is as yet, however, no evidence in Europe outside of Great Britain of the American tendency to make a special privileged class of skilled or industrial labor.  So far as appears, there is no special legislation in any European country which is concerned particularly with the legal or political rights of industrial laborers.[2] There is much more co-operation and sympathy between employers and employees, at least in Continental countries, and possibly for this reason co-operation has proved far more successful.[1] State labor bureaus, state insurance, saving banks, and employment agencies are almost universal throughout the Continent.

[Footnote 1:  See Oilman’s “A Dividend to Labor,” Boston, 1899.  Jones’s “Cooperative Production,” Oxford, 1894.]