the benefit of that one day’s rest out of seven which is so precious a legacy to us from the Jewish religion.[Footnote:  A joint legislative committee in Massachusetts in 1907 estimated that 222,000 persons in that State were working seven days in the week.  Similar, or worse, conditions exist throughout the country.] Those industries that require continuous use of machinery should employ three complete shifts of workmen; and those that must be run every day in the week should have enough extra helpers man.  This humanizing of hours cannot be done by individual action, where competition is sharp; but by legislation that bears equally upon all, a generous standard-the eight-hour day and six-day week -can be maintained, with hardship to none and a great increase in the health and happiness of the masses.  Especially jealous should the law be for the welfare of women workers.  In cotton mills in the South women work ten and twelve hours a day; in canneries in the North they work, during the short season, fifteen and eighteen hours a day, eighty or even ninety hours a week.  Particularly should women be protected during the weeks before and after childbirth; as it is, women workers are often ruined in health for life, the rate of infant mortality is shockingly high, and the children that survive are usually subnormal.  Girls through overwork are weakened too seriously to bear strong children- which, in any case, they have had no time or opportunity to learn how to nurture and rear.  No doubt women should work, as well as men; if not in the home, then outside the home.  But the contemporary economic pressure that bears so hard on so many girls and women must be eased not only for their sakes but for that of coming generations. [Footnote:  Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day.  S. Nearing, Social Adjustment, chap.  X. J. Rae, Eight Hours for Work.]

(3) The most piteous form of industrial slavery is that of young children, who should be in school or out of doors, developing their minds and bodies into some measure of readiness for adult work and responsibility, instead of prematurely losing the joy of life and stunting their mental and physical growth.  In 1910 some two million children under sixteen were earning their living in this country.  Even many thousands of children of twelve years or less are set to work in our factories and canneries.  These children get almost no development and wholesome recreation; in great numbers they die early, and if they live it is commonly to fall into some form of vice or crime, and to breed an inferior race.  Nothing is more inhumane or more mad than for the community to permit cheapness of goods at such a price.  Indeed, child labor means, in the end, economic waste; the ultimate loss in efficiency on the part of these undeveloped, uneducated children, far more than overbalances the temporary industrial gain.  The situation has been incredibly shocking; the employers who seek such an advantage over their humaner rivals, and the legislators