five or six representatives of the cigar-makers’ union, all of them foreigners――battered-looking men, with whom the battle of life had evidently gone hard. As this was long before I had established any real relations with, or had any real understanding of, the unions, while they felt that I was a crank, influenced by incomprehensible motives, we worked on entirely independent lines, neither side feeling altogether comfortable in the relationship. However, the main argument――and indeed almost the only argument――for the bill was made by me. I answered various questions which the Governor put to me. He afterwards called me up and told me that, though he felt very doubtful, yet that, in view of the state of facts I had set forth, he would sign the bill. The employers and tenement-house owners immediately contested the constitutionality of the act, and after the usual long delays the highest State court finally pronounced the measure invalid. The cigar-makers were poor, and the great majority of them were ignorant foreigners. They had no money and no special influence even in the world of labor. They could not employ counsel either to draw their bill well in the first place, or to present their case to the best advantage when it was before the courts. The great mass of respectable, well-to-do people were nervously sensitive to attacks on what they considered the rights of property, and regarded as an infringement on these rights any effort to correct the abuses of property. The judges, as was quite natural, shared the feelings of the classes from which they were drawn, and with which they associated. The decision went against the dwellers in the tenement-houses. Anything like an effective reformation of tenement-house conditions was thereby deferred for fifteen or twenty years, and during that time men, women, and children were guaranteed their “liberty” to fester in sodden misery.