Toward legislation limiting the hours of labor of women the attitude of the courts has on the whole been favorable. Ten-hour laws have been sustained in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Washington and Oregon, and the Oregon decision has been affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States. Against these decisions must be set that of the supreme court of Illinois, rendered in 1895, declaring an eight-hour day for women to be unconstitutional. A ten-hour law, modeled upon that of Oregon, was enacted in Illinois in 1909, and a case involving its constitutionality is now awaiting the decision of the supreme court of the state.[57] The decision in the earlier Illinois case has been much criticized, and the opinion contains statements which at the present day would find the approval of few courts. Stripped of superfluous dicta, and reduced to its vital points, the decision stands for two things: that the adult woman is entitled to the same measure of constitutional right as the adult man, and that the court did not believe that an eight-hour day was a sanitary requirement even for women. “There is no reasonable ground,” the court said, “at least none which has been made manifest to us in the arguments of counsel, for fixing on eight hours in one day as the limit within which woman can work without injury to her physique, and beyond which, if she work, injury will necessarily follow.” This skepticism should not cause great surprise or indignation. Notwithstanding the rapid change of opinion within the last two decades in favor of restricting the hours of labor of women, an eight-hour maximum day for women workers is even now unknown in America or in Europe, and in Germany it took eighteen years, from 1892 to 1910, to reduce the workday of female factory hands from eleven to ten hours. It is easy to understand that a compulsory eight-hour day in 1893 or 1895 should have appeared to the court as an unreasonable and even arbitrary interference with private rights. To say the least the case for such a measure had not yet been made out.