THE RIGHT TO LEISURE
The effort to establish the right to leisure was a distinctive movement
of the nineteenth century, accompanying the development of machinery.
It assumed Protean forms, among others that of Sunday rest, the
Saturday half-holiday, Decoration Day, Labor Day, Lincoln’s Birthday,
Washington’s Birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, Good Friday, and Easter. The
early closing of the stores, wherever accomplished, is one result of
this effort. The prohibition of the work of women and minors at night
was an important aspect of the movement, and the effort on behalf of
child labor legislation is largely directed towards securing fourteen
free years for school and wholesome growth before children enter
upon the life of steady work. In its most virile form, the effort to
establish the right to leisure was known as the ten hours movement, and
later as the eight hours movement.
America having produced no great philanthropic leader devoted to
securing leisure for the young and defenseless workers, no Lord
Shaftesbury, the task of establishing their right went by default
to the trade unions, to whom is due the credit for all child labor
legislation prior to the year 1889. Now, however, the effort has
become national in its scope, enlisting the most diverse advocates.
Mr. Grover Cleveland and other members of the National Child Labor
Committee, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, in striving to
stop the work of children at night in manufacture and commerce, are
as truly enlisted in behalf of the right to leisure as are the miners
in Colorado, the butchers in Chicago, and the garment workers in New
York. The National Educational Association, working to prolong the
period of compulsory attendance at school, and the National Congress of
Mothers, with its standing committee on child labor, are pledged to the
same endeavor. To educate the purchasing public to act in considerate
recognition of the right of the clerks to leisure is one of the reasons
for being of the Consumers’ League. However different the methods of
these diverse organizations, their goal is the same,--the establishment
of reasonable daily leisure in the lives of working people.
The Supreme Court of the United States has made plain the way by
sustaining the constitutionality of statutes establishing the working
day of eight hours for persons in the employ of the federal government,
in the employ of states or municipalities under contract, and in the
employ of corporations where the nature of the occupation may be
injurious to health.
The establishment of universal leisure is increasingly recognized as a
social aim, an effort to be participated in by all those who care for
the social welfare, and as a national effort, since, under the pressure
of competition, the conditions prevailing in any industry must be as
nearly uniform as possible, and one part of the country cannot long
maintain itself far in advance of a different part having identical
industries, a truth which finds conspicuous illustration in the
experience of New England suffering under the pressure of competition
of the textile mills of Georgia.
The struggle for the shorter working day is commonly described as the
effort of the laborer to give as little exertion as possible in return
for the pay which he receives and many workingmen passively accept this
statement of the animus of their movement. It is, however, susceptible
of interpretation as the effort of wage-earning people to obtain,
in the form of leisure, a part of their share of the universal gain
arising from the increased productivity of every occupation, and due to
the incessant improvement of machinery.
Obviously the characteristic feature of the industrial life of the
nineteenth century was the unprecedented increase in the output of
all branches of production. Human needs were satisfied as never
before; famine was restricted before the close of the century to
portions of Russia and India, where misgovernment and imperfect means
of transportation together prevented the adequate production and
circulation of foodstuffs. Clothing and fuel of new and abundant kinds
removed the fear of destruction by cold. Shelter for people of all
sorts and conditions underwent transformations undreamed of in previous
centuries. The fundamental ethical question of the century was, in
essence, the equitable distribution of these newly acquired possessions
of the human race.
More precious, perhaps, than any of those enumerated is the immaterial,
imponderable human by-product,--leisure. Once the heritage and
distinctive privilege of a small class in any civilized community,
leisure was produced during the nineteenth century in such abundance
as to become the accepted right of a large proportion of the people.
Yet, by reason of its inequitable distribution, it remained, in the
crude and unsocial form of unemployed time, the bane and sorrow of
large sections of the working-class, who were constrained to devote
generations of organized effort to regulating, equalizing, and
redistributing their working-time and their free time, endeavoring to
transmute accidental, unsocial idleness into regulated and beneficent
daily leisure.
Assured daily leisure is an essential element of healthy living.
Without it childhood is blighted, perverted, deformed; manhood becomes
ignoble and unworthy of citizenship in the Republic. Self-help and
self-education among the wage-earners are as dependent upon daily
leisure as upon daily work. Excessive fatigue precludes the possibility
of well-conducted meetings of classes, lodges, coöperative societies
and all other forms of organized effort for self-improvement. No
experience of residents in settlements in the congested districts of
the great cities is sadder than the disorganization which befalls their
evening clubs and classes when Christmas approaches and the ablest
young people are detained for overtime work, the study and effort of
the other members is disorganized, and failure of the whole undertaking
often follows.
As machinery becomes increasingly automatic, and the work of the
machine-tender reduces itself more completely to watching intently
the wholly monotonous performance of the one part confided to his
care, leisure becomes indispensable for him in order to counteract the
deadening effect upon his mind exercised by his daily work. Instead
of educating the worker, the breadwinning task of to-day too often
stupefies and deforms the mind; and leisure is required to undo the
damage wrought in the working-hours, if the worker is to remain fit for
citizenship in the Republic. Without regular, organized leisure, there
can be no sustained intelligence in the voting constituency.
In those occupations in which long hours of work prevail, the employees
are obliged to live near their place of work, and that congestion is
thus intensified which is one of the more unfortunate features of life
in large manufacturing cities. Shortening the hours of labor gives to
working people a wider range of selection in the location of their
homes, thus benefiting wives and children as well as the operatives
themselves.
Daily assured leisure serves a purpose of the highest social value by
enabling the wage-earner to husband that resource of nervous energy
which is required to continue active working-life after the passing
of youth. In the garment-trades, men are old at forty and women are
superannuated at thirty, largely by reason of the alternations of
overwork and enforced idleness, and the absence of that regularly
recurring sufficient period of rest between the close of one day’s
work and the beginning of the next, which alone permits body and mind
to bear years of continuous work without wearing out. Premature old
age is induced by overwork as effectively as by dissipation; and old
age in the wage-earning class means dependence, if not pauperism. To
assure a regular period of fifteen hours between one day’s work and the
next for young women and girls engaged in manufacturing and commerce
would undoubtedly do as much to prolong their years of self-support and
diminish their period of enforced dependence upon others as any measure
avowedly in the interest of hygiene and public well-being which could
be enacted.
The philanthropic world is all astir on behalf of the crusade against
tuberculosis. Funds are readily forthcoming for the foundation of
sanatoria for the use of working people, especially for young girls
and children. But tuberculosis is promoted by overwork as much as by
any other single cause. To shorten the hours of daily labor, to afford
daily leisure for rest and recreation to young employees during the
years of life in which the susceptibility to infection is greatest,
years which coincide with the term of employment of girls and women
in largest numbers, is quite as clearly a life saving service as to
build and maintain sanatoria. Moreover, the loss of time involved in
recovery from tuberculosis is accompanied by expenses to the patient,
her family and the community which might well all be spared, were the
young worker permitted to escape this enforced idleness by enjoying in
due time a rational measure of daily rest and freedom.
Vice flourishes wherever self-support for honest working-women is
unusually difficult, and the sweating-system is breaking down to
an alarming degree, in New York City, that domestic righteousness
which, for thousands of years, has distinguished the people of Jewish
faith. To establish effective restrictions upon the hours of labor in
the needle-trades would equalize the burden borne by these workers,
spreading work over more days and weeks, granting more daily leisure,
and thus making righteous living easier for tens of thousands of young
working people whose traditions are entirely honorable, but who are now
subjected to a pressure to which all too many victims succumb.
It may be fairly claimed, then, that the establishment of regular daily
leisure contributes to the health, intelligence, morality, lengthened
trade life, freer choice of home surroundings, thrift, self-help and
family life of working people. Granted that not all workers make
equally valuable use of free time, just as members of the leisure class
vary in the uses to which they apply their leisure, it remains true
that, without free time, these benefits are impossible. To be deprived
of leisure is to be deprived of those things which make life worth
living.
Leisure seems to have come to different groups of people in different
ways;--to some automatically without exertion on their part; to
others as the result of long, painful struggle; to many not at all.
The portion of society to which leisure has not come consists, on the
one hand, of the great body of children and young girls in the textile
and other industries in states in which no laws yet define the limit
of their working day and working week; and, on the other hand, of the
mass of unskilled workingwomen as unorganized and defenseless as the
children themselves.
=The Unsought Leisure of Prosperous Women.=--The people to whom leisure
has come unsought, a free gift of the new industrial order, are the
women in prosperous circumstances. Never before in the history of
civilization have women enjoyed leisure comparable to that which now
falls to the lot of those in comfortable circumstances in America. The
modern conveniences of the city or suburban home reduce to a minimum
the unavoidable exertion (except such as is demanded by aseptic
cleanliness enforced by the fear of disease germs in dust and all
that harbors dust!). For the prosperous housekeeper flowing water,
gaslight and electricity, modern facilities for heating and cooking,
foods prepared outside the home, garments bought, whether ready-made
or made to order,--all these contrivances, together with the exodus
of the home-industries, yield to women a leisure which they accept
as an unqualified right. The wives of tens of thousands of business
men and well-paid employees enjoy unquestioningly, and as a matter of
course, a degree of leisure such as formed the exclusive privilege
of a small aristocracy in earlier centuries. The beneficent social
and philanthropic activities of public spirited women and the baneful
epidemic of gambling at cards which has run riot for several years and
shows no tendency to diminish, are twin offspring of this unearned
leisure.
As employers of labor in the home, women have been called upon to share
with their domestic employees some of the new-found leisure, and they
have not always discerned the importance of recognized and regulated
free time at the disposal of the employee as an element in determining
the quality of the “help” available in the labor market which they
frequent. Sunday rest, the Saturday half-holiday, early closing, and
the prohibition or restriction of evening work, have contributed
to make work in manufacture or commerce more attractive to large
classes of young girls in highly developed industrial communities,
than household labor with its indeterminate hours. And where women as
employers have discerned the intimate relation between the industrial
life about them and the domestic life under their own roof, they have
naturally viewed with a critical eye that tendency towards work in
other forms of industry in preference to housework, which presses with
ever increasing effectiveness upon their personal arrangements.
Women in their homes, in the full enjoyment of leisure as a human right
which no one disputes, see from afar and often unsympathetically the
effort of the wage-earners to secure for themselves similar leisure,
either by means of statutory provisions or by trade-agreements.
It requires cultivation of the imagination to enable women thus
fortuitously endowed with leisure to perceive an organic relation
between their own possession of it and the productive activity of
other women, and of children, in the manufacture and distribution of
many things which were formerly prepared within the home; to make
the connection between this free gift of the new industrial order to
themselves and the struggle of the garment-workers, for instance, to
secure by organization and trade agreements, and by statutes, the
assurance that the needle-workers need not work more than eight hours
in one day. The conductor of a railway train has regular “runs” upon
which he can count in advance, and in accordance with which he arranges
his seasons for sleeping, eating and recreation. His wife enjoys the
leisure which has come to her unsought. He can understand the effort of
the garment-workers to maintain their organization in its most militant
form, because he assures the permanence of his own leisure by helping
to sustain his own organization with its trade agreements. But his
wife cannot so readily understand or sympathize with the motive of the
garment-workers, because the leisure which distinguishes her from her
great-grandmother has come to her through no effort of her own, but
automatically by the introduction of mechanical improvements and by
the exodus of the industries from the home. It may be urged that the
leisure of prosperous women is only apparent; that each improvement has
entailed fresh duties of administration; that the standard of living
has been so raised that their time is as fully occupied as it ever
was. From the economic point of view, however, the new occupations are
distinctly of the leisure type,--not of any recognized productive or
distributive type.
To the credit of women of the prosperous class it must be said
that, within recent years, many of them have been making active and
intelligent efforts to establish legal claims to leisure for children
and for women industrially employed. The Saturday half-holiday, the
summer vacation for clerks, the child labor laws, and the prohibition
of work at night for women and children have had no more faithful
advocates among the wage-earners themselves than among members of the
Consumers’ League, the Church Association for Improving the Condition
of Labor and the women’s clubs. Just in proportion as women who enjoy
leisure in their homes come to see how far they owe that enjoyment to
the work of other people, and to recognize the just claims of those
others to a share of leisure, may we reasonably expect that the number
and effectiveness of such organizations will multiply. And it will
appear in the course of the present discussion that the need for such
organizations is an abiding need, aside from the maintenance of the
organizations of the workers themselves.
The share of credit due to these participants in the effort to
establish the right to leisure is the greater because, in their
capacity as housekeepers, they come into contact with precisely that
portion of the working-class whose method of establishing leisure
for themselves appears to be most trying. Gas-fitters, plumbers,
carpenters, upholsterers, paper-hangers, plasterers, painters, and
glaziers have not, on the whole, distinguished themselves, in recent
years, by that sweet reasonableness which might have ingratiated them
and their cause with families whose homes have needed alterations
and repairs. And the ability of thousands of house-mothers to rise
above their personal grievances and advocate a reform the attendant
disadvantages of which they have been made to feel in no gentle manner,
speaks well for the intelligence and the principle of modern women.
=Enforced Idleness is not Leisure.=--In some occupations the nature
of the work to be done involves interruptions which force the workers
to await the resumption of activity; and these interruptions may be
welcome and beneficent, or they may be veritable paths to destruction,
their effect depending upon the circumstances under which the working
people are able to meet them.
Thus the sailor spends weeks on land in enforced idleness through
no choice of his own but because the vessel must load and unload,
or must await the regular day of sailing. Jack ashore affords the
classic example of the workingman harmed by unorganized and, therefore,
unprofitable, if not actively injurious, idle time as contrasted with
regular, organized, beneficent leisure. No stronger argument need be
found for the statutory establishment of daily leisure for employees
in all trades in which that is possible, than the evils entailed upon
sailors by the impossibility of distributing their idle time in ways
wholesome for themselves.
The long leisure of the northern farmer’s winter, recurring and
regularly prepared for, has, without doubt, contributed much to the
general high level of intelligence and character among the native
population of New England and the Northwest. The picture of the boy
Lincoln studying by the light of the fire on the hearth gripped the
imagination of the American people because it appealed to the personal
experience of a multitude to whom the leisure of the hearthstone was
the earliest recollection. The sharpest possible line of demarcation
divides citizens whose experience includes the long country winter from
those city-bred, to whom the seasons mean little more than the change
from the exhaustion of summer heat to a more bracing atmosphere, the
round of their work having no relation to the visible order of nature,
and their leisure being assured them by circumstances unrelated to
the time of year. The farmer’s family, accustomed to work without
ceasing at the harvest, as they rest at length during the winter (both
experiences being dictated by the nature of the work to be done and the
season of the year, over which they have no control), cannot readily
understand why thousands of tailors should strike for months together,
at the height of the season, in the hope of working an hour a day less
throughout the following year.
Yet it is by no means accidental that, in the garment-trades, strikes
habitually have to do with the maintenance of a trade organization,
or with the hours of labor, because the garment-workers, more than
any other wage-earners, suffer the disadvantages both of overwork and
of unemployment. The garment-workers endure the “dull season” because
garments vary with the season and orders are “slack” or “rush” without
reference to the preference of the needle-workers. One part of their
year brings with it overwork such as occurs in no other occupation,
while another entails idleness on the hardest terms known to modern
industry. The tailors’ long struggle to distribute their work over
the longest possible series of weeks, by shortening each working day
to ten, nine, or eight hours is, in essence, a struggle to attain
reasonable leisure in place of deadly haste followed by weeks or months
of corroding idleness.
While the winter leisure of the farmer is made safe by the assured
supplies of food, fuel and shelter prepared in advance for the season’s
need, the annually recurring dull season in the garment-trades is
a period of anxiety and suffering, when the grocer’s bill grows as
large as his good will ventures to permit, and eviction from their
tenement-dwelling is a calamity to be expected and endured by the
garment-workers’ families as the fortune of war. In this there is no
element of wholesome leisure. The words “dull season,” originally
referring to the state of the trade from the employers’ point of view,
describe but faintly the black despair which that season, under the
sweating-system, involves for the workers in the garment-trades.
In the needle-trades half the employees are women, young, non-voting,
temporary members of the body of wage-earners pending marriage or
disability. No part of the industrial army grows so rapidly as the
contingent of young girls between fourteen and twenty years of age;
and no part is so void of initiative for its own welfare, so unfit to
assert or maintain any right. Beginning work at the age of folly, they
readily accept as the regular working day ten hours in twenty-four,
increasing this to any length allowed by the statutes, and working
frequently without extra pay merely under the threat of dismissal
in case of their refusal. Of their own initiative, these young
needle-workers would never secure the half-holiday, a summer vacation
with or without pay, or even the enforcement of the legal restriction
upon their regular working time. They are a perpetual hindrance to the
efforts of the men who work with them to secure stable employment and
reasonable leisure. Overwork seems to come to these girls as blindly as
leisure has befallen the women in the well-to-do households.
In the needle-trades, the effectual establishment of the legal working
day and working week serves, wherever this has been accomplished, as
for instance, in Massachusetts, to mitigate both the enforced overwork
and the enforced idleness which characterizes those trades when left
to the free play of industrial forces. Where the working time is
effectively limited, preparations are made systematically, in advance
of the height of the season, for meeting the coming pressure. Space
and machinery are provided, and extra hands are trained, by preparing
stockwork, for the finer work to be demanded of them later. Thus some
of the unemployed are temporarily absorbed into the regular industrial
army, and the contrast between the extremes of the seasons is mitigated.
It is evident upon close acquaintance that in the garment-trades the
injurious differences of season are only in part due to the conditions
inherent in the trades themselves. They are not like the midwinter
cold and midsummer harvest heat in the experience of the farmer. They
are far more subject to control than the managers of the industry have
ever been willing to admit. Moreover, the general purchasing public
has vastly more power of initiative, control and restraint than it has
ever been aware of, by means of the placing of “rush” orders, on the
one hand, and of voluntarily regulating the times of its buying on
the other. This has already been indicated in the matter of Christmas
shopping and its bearing upon the cruel overwork of children at that
season. The garment workers are not so obviously present as the
children in the stores, and it requires, therefore, more sympathetic
imagination to enable the shopping public to make the connection
between the excessive exertion which alternates with ruinous idleness
of the machine workers, and its own heedless crowding of the shopping
season into a few weeks in the spring and fall.
=Increased Speed Calls for Leisure.=--In the capacity of inspector for
the National Consumers’ League it has been the fortune of the writer
to visit and inspect a large number of factories in the stitched
muslin underwear trade during the past five years. In the course of
that time there has occurred a development of machinery so significant
in its consequences as to seem worth describing somewhat at length
as a concrete illustration of the process which is discussed more
abstractly throughout the present chapter. In all the best factories
within this trade the speed of the sewing-machines has been increased
so that they set, in 1905, twice as many stitches in a minute as in
1899. Machines which formerly carried one needle now carry from two
to ten, sewing parallel seams (for bones in waists, or for tucks,
or merely for decorative stitching). Thus a girl using one of these
machines is now responsible for twice as many stitches at the least and
for twenty times as many stitches at most, as in 1899. Some girls are
not capable of the sustained speed involved in this improvement, and
are no longer eligible for this occupation. Those who continue in the
trade are required to feed twice as many garments to the machine as
were required five years ago. The strain upon their eyes is, however,
far more than twice what it was before the improvement. In the case
of machines carrying multiple needles this is obvious; but it is true
of the single-needle machines also. It is the duty of the operator to
watch the needle so intently as to discern the irregularity caused by a
broken thread or broken needle, and to stop the machinery by pressing
an electric button before any threads are cut by the broken needle,
or any stitches of the seam are omitted because of the broken thread.
Now, when the needle set twenty-two hundred stitches a minute, as was
the case in 1899, the writer; whose eyes are unusually keen, could
see the needle when the machine was in motion. At the present speed,
the writer, whose eyes have remained unimpaired, is wholly unable to
see the needle, discerning merely the steady gleam of light where it
is in motion. To meet this difficulty, which occurs regularly in the
case of the operatives, it is now the custom to suspend an electric
light directly above the machine, so that a ray strikes the needle.
The strain upon the eyes of the operators is almost intolerable, and a
further winnowing-out of the women eligible for this occupation follows
the introduction of the present method of lighting.
It is reasonable to inquire what benefit accrues to a machine operator
who completes twice as much work in 1905 as in 1899, and the writer has
made this inquiry whenever opportunity has offered. On the whole, it
appears that there has been no proportionate gain for the operator. If
all the gain that is made by the improvement in the machines went to
the operators in the form of increased wages, it is doubtful whether
it would be compensation for the additional strain upon their eyes
and nerves. But no such share of gain falls to them. Their wages are
calculated upon the same basis as in 1899, namely, that employees of
the required speed and skill can be obtained in the required number
for six dollars a week, irrespective of their output of work. In
conversation with employers the writer is assured, from time to time,
that piecework prices are regularly calculated to afford a total of
six dollars a week for skilled workers, the stock phrase being: “If
a girl cannot earn six dollars a week at machine work after she has
been doing it from six weeks to three months, she is not adapted to
the work, and it is better to put another girl at her machine.” On
the part of the girls the statement is very generally made that, in
places in which the supply of help is abundant, the proportion of girls
receiving less than six dollars is kept large by constantly changing
hands, dismissing those whose wages are growing higher with increasing
skill, and taking on beginners. Combined with this constant changing
goes a frequent rearrangement of piecework prices, such that only a
small minority of the girls in a factory ever rise above the dead level
of six dollars a week, the same sum that was paid in 1899 for half the
work now done.
One skilled worker who left a factory for four years and returned to
the same machine which she had left, found it speeded up to double
its former capacity. Her work was doubled, but her wages increased
only from six dollars a week to seven, though she was one of the most
skilled persons in her trade, an experienced, strong, willing operator.
This girl was asked who, in her opinion, profited by the doubling of
the output of her machine. In reply she said: “I get a dollar a week
more. The company makes something out of the improvement, or they would
not have made it. But there have been so many cuts in prices that the
company don’t get as much as you’d think for doubling the speed of the
machines. I guess the people that buy the garments must get most of the
difference; they can get so many more garments for the same money.”
There is no doubt that this sewing girl was entirely correct in her
estimate of the effects of doubling her work. The purchaser, in the
long run, profits by every improvement in machinery and in the speed of
the workers. But the girls who stitch underwear are not only working
the same number of hours as in 1899; they are wearing themselves out
at a rate of speed such that the term of their whole working-life must
inevitably be greatly shortened. The nervous energy required from
day to day is more than can be supplied by the free time between one
day’s work and the next. A phrase in which they commonly describe the
experience of girls who have dropped out of the trade tells the whole
story: “She got too slow,--she couldn’t keep up with her machine any
longer.”
There is no immediate prospect of any material improvement in the
money wages paid to operators in this trade; for the employers have at
command, not only tenement-house workers and institutions maintained
out of the public funds and, therefore, willing to do sewing for merely
nominal compensation; they have also the pupils of the many charitable
and reformatory schools which persist in preparing every available
girl for this most undesirable of all skilled occupations. Since the
wages of the sewing machine operators are determined, not primarily
by the amount of their output, but by many other considerations (the
pressure of the tenement-house workers, the institution workers, and
the recruits in the trade sent out from the institutions, etc.), there
seems to be no need to fear that they would lose in wages if their
hours of labor were reduced by the enactment of a statute restricting
their working time to eight hours in one day and forty-eight in one
week. In the interest of their health this change appears to be
indispensably necessary. It has been, however, impossible for them to
make any permanent improvement in the conditions of their employment
by unaided effort of their own. There is no inclination visible on the
part of employers to reduce the hours of work. On the contrary, the
manufacture of stitched white muslin underwear has become as completely
a season trade as the preparation of Christmas tree decorations or
Easter bonnets. Meanwhile, the number of years during which a girl can
continue to earn a living at a sewing machine diminishes with every
improvement in her machine.
=Methods of Establishing the Right to Leisure.=--By the education of
public opinion something has been accomplished towards establishing
leisure in certain occupations. Thus an appeal has of late been made,
with promise of increasing success, to the more kind-hearted and
conscientious among the stockholders of Southern cotton-mills to vote
their stock in ways calculated to obtain more humane hours of labor
for the women and children employed in those mills. The hours of labor
of the clerks and cash children in the stores of many cities have been
improved in consequence of the efforts of the Consumers’ Leagues in
some places, and of the Retail Clerks’ Protective Associations in
others, to induce the shopping public to exercise consideration of the
employees in arranging the hours of shopping.
The cigar-trade has long enjoyed the benefits of the short working
day by reason of the relatively successful effort of the cigarmakers
to apply in practical form the principle which all trade unionists
acknowledge, and upon which thousands of them conscientiously act.
Millions of dollars have been spent in advertising their label; cigars
bearing it are made only in shops in which the working day is limited
to eight hours; and working men of all trades have taken the trouble
to give the preference in buying the cigars thus recommended. Here,
therefore, the establishment of leisure for the workers has been
accomplished by the effort of the workers themselves. The limitations
inherent in this method appear, however, when certain large employers,
selling cigars to customers not interested in the subject, employ young
girls who are not part of any organization, and can be induced to
work as long as the law allows. It is an interesting and significant
fact that the organizations mentioned as using this method are among
the most persistent advocates of legislation restricting the hours
of labor, acting on the principle that not one but all methods of
protecting the workers in their right to leisure must be followed,
and taught by experience how far more effective is their effort when
directed towards the enforcement of statutes than when confined to
persuasion alone.