II
While legislation moves rapidly enough in the direction of detaching political powers from the people, it shows a growing disinclination to meddle with affairs between magnate and minion. Twelve or fifteen years ago, in certain sections, “labor” legislation had a flourishing career. The number of laws so classified, passed in a single three-year period in New York State, made a record for all time. Labor was then rapidly combining, and its lusty organizations made emphatic demands for protective laws. A Democratic Governor, not wholly regardless of hopes of the Presidential succession, for the time allied himself with the movement and secured the passage of many of these measures. With an alacrity much greater than that with which the Constitution follows the flag, judicial decisions in those days tended to follow the general policy of the party in power, and thus but slight trouble was experienced in securing constitutional sanction.
Other States followed, and for several years the astonishment and indignation of the Big Men were intermittently roused by the spectacle of Jacobinical legislators meddling in affairs outside their province. Mr. F. J. Stimson, in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1897, informs us that in the ten preceding years 1639 laws relating to labor had been passed in the various States and Territories. This is an average of 3.4 a year for each legislature, though the courts had modified the average somewhat by declaring 114 of these measures unconstitutional. Doubtless among those that escaped the “killing decree” of the courts were a number that benefited the worker, though it is doubtful if any of them served to modify his economic status.
However that may be, it is unquestioned that the tendency toward the enactment of this sort of legislation has suffered a decline. It is hard to fix the point of culmination, though probably it lies somewhere about the years 1896-97. In isolated instances, and under peculiar circumstances, it is conceded there is an occasional revival. The Pennsylvania legislature of 1897 showed a remarkable zeal, shortening the workday of women and minors, limiting child labor, establishing a bureau of mines, and making other regulations. Maryland, in 1898, imposed certain mining regulations and required seats in stores for women workers. Virginia and Massachusetts, in the same year, interfered slightly, the former with an arbitration act. In the spring of 1899, Kansas, Illinois, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Washington, and Wisconsin, all addressed themselves more or less earnestly to the redress of certain grievances; and they were followed by Iowa in 1900, by Massachusetts again in the same year, and by Alabama in 1901. In the present year New York, after five years of agitation, reluctantly granted a moderately expressed employers’ liability law.
Most of this legislation, however, was enacted in the newer States, and served only to push them along toward the standard set in the older States in earlier years. Advances of any sort are difficult to discover. As for the year 1901, the record of progressive legislation is almost bare. Congress suppressed the Eight-hour, Anti-injunction, and Prison-labor bills, and mutilated the Chinese bill. A convention of the National Association of Railway Commissioners, comprising representatives from twenty-five State boards and from the Interstate Commerce Commission, petitioned Congress, in June, 1901, to enact a number of measures regarding railway traffic; but our lawmakers appear to have been too busy with other matters. Factory legislation has suffered a relapse in all of the States. “The statutes of 1901,” euphemistically writes Mr. Horace G. Wadlin, in the New York State Library’s “Review of Legislation, 1901,” “which may be classed as protective legislation, intended to safeguard the workman in his employment or to secure to him his wages, are neither very numerous nor very radical.” Something better, however, as Mr. Adna F. Weber points out in the same volume, was done in regard to shorter workdays. California passed an Eight-hour law for State work; Minnesota, with certain liberal exceptions, another; while Utah penalized infractions of an existing law. Even Pennsylvania, generally so sensitive in the matter of interfering with the rights of her workers to employ themselves in any manner they are constrained to choose, made the daring innovation of prohibiting a longer workday than twelve hours for women and minors in bakeries. Doubtless the lesson to be learned from this is a growing inclination toward the gospel of relaxation, which Mr. Herbert Spencer so emphatically invoked on his visit here twenty years ago. An industrial Feudalism is not inconsistent with a moderate workday, and it is not unlikely that some further experiments in this line may be made.