subject to different treatment, while not differing in the character of the work done. The difficulty can perhaps be avoided by construing the statute as applying only to mechanical employments in mechanical establishments. Where, as in Missouri, the law is limited to cities above a certain size, it may be argued plausibly that the loss of time in going to and from work in large cities is apt to be considerable and may be taken into account in determining the territorial application of the law. Another difficulty is presented by the demands created by conditions of emergency or an exceptional pressure of business. In condemning the New York ten-hour law for bakers, the Supreme Court of the United States referred disapprovingly to the absence of an emergency clause. On the other hand the constitutionality of the fifty-four-hour law for women of the state of Michigan is said to have been attacked on the ground that it makes an exception for employment in preserving perishable goods in fruit and vegetable canning establishments. Massachusetts allows a limited amount of excess work in seasonal industries, and the same is true under the German law. The following comment by the New York commissioner of labor[68] on the New York law regulating the hours of women is instructive in this respect: In its original bill form this act made an exception, adopted from the English law, in favor of factories manufacturing perishable and seasonal articles or the products of such articles, and allowed them to employ females over 18 for sixty-six hours a week in not to exceed six weeks a year. Similar exceptions are contained in the laws of almost all the nations of Europe and are permitted by the recent international labor treaty signed at Berne. They are based upon necessity and equity and are consonant with health, for the reason that in such industries limited overtime during rush periods or seasons would be counterbalanced by reduced hours in slack periods or seasons. But the provision aroused such a violent public protest that it was temporarily abandoned. That was the cause of great regret to me, for I believe that the health provisions of our factory laws should be limited to the reasonable requirements of health, and that particular industries should not be unnecessarily and unreasonably embarrassed for the sole purpose of keeping a regulation general and uniform. In those industries where the supply of the raw material, the fitness of the material or the ability to work is determined by the weather, it is impossible to divide the week, the month and the year into working days or weeks of approximately equal duration, as our law presupposes; and it is not a necessary or even a reasonable health regulation that forbids time lost by such cause to be in any degree made up when the weather permits. Reasonable variations from the more regular limitations imposed upon those industries in which work is or