When we come to hours, the matter is very different. In the first place, we must be reminded that without a constitutional amendment you cannot have any direct or indirect legislation, as to general occupations, on the hours of labor of a man of full age.[1] You can have regulation of the hours of labor of a woman of full age in general employments, by court decision, in three States (Massachusetts, Oregon, and Illinois), the Massachusetts decision, carelessly rendered in 1876, without citing any authority whatever,[2] being based apparently on a vague notion of general sanitary reasons, without argument or apparently due consideration of the historical and constitutional law; but the Oregon case,[3] decided both by the State Supreme Court and by the Federal Court in so far as the Fourteenth Amendment was concerned, after most careful and thorough discussion and reasoning, reasserted the principle that a woman is the ward of the state, and therefore does not have the full liberty of contract allowed to a man. Whether this decision will or will not be pleasing to the leaders of feminist thought is a matter of considerable interest. A similar statute in Illinois had been declared unconstitutional twenty years before, largely on the ground that to limit or prohibit the labor of woman would handicap her in her industrial competition with man, pointing out also that the Illinois Constitution itself prescribes and requires that the rights of the sexes should in all respects be identical, save only in so far as jury and militia service and political rights were concerned. A new statute since the Oregon decision has been passed in Illinois and the law was sustained, reversing the older case. On the other hand New York courts take a position squarely contrary,[4] and so in Colorado.[5] The constitutional justification of these decisions must probably be that the health not only of the women themselves, but of the general public, or at least of posterity, is concerned, for, as we shall find more particularly when we discuss general legislation on the police power, to justify an interference with personal liberty of freemen there must, under English ideas, be a motive based upon the health, safety, and well-being of all of the whole community, not merely of the particular citizen concerned. He has the right to work in unhealthy trades at unhealthy times, or under unhealthy conditions, just as he has the right to consume unhealthy food and drink. If it be prohibited, it must be prohibited when it has a direct relation to the general welfare. For example, a railway engineer may be prohibited from working continuously for more than sixteen hours, for that is a direct danger to the safety of the public; but a man may not be prohibited from taking service for long hours as stoker on a steamship, although the life of a stoker be a short one and not over merry. Apparently, however, a woman can be; and indeed there have for