There remains the method of legislation. While law follows in the wake of public opinion in a democracy, industrial betterment often lags considerably behind the general progress of public intelligence, and the law can push the backward employer up to the level of the more enlightened one. The great advantage of the legal method is its uniformity; it puts all employers and establishments on the same basis. Moreover, its gains are usually fairly secure. A standard once embodied in law is harder to break down than a mere trade standard attained by union pressure, for example. Hence in the case of women workers, where conditions for individual improvement are unfavorable, where union methods are difficult of application, the process of readjustment will doubtless go forward largely by legal enactment. We shall see an increasing body of law governing the conditions under which women work. As the community finds that it has no other way of protecting itself against the injury it suffers from present conditions of employment of women, it will more and more resort to the prescribing of minimum legal limits below which they may not be crowded. Fortunately for progress in this respect, our courts have generally looked with relative favor on legislation for women. The right of the state to exercise the police power to protect the health of women for the sake of future generations is now clearly established in the court of last resort. All that is necessary for the incorporation of a new requirement into the legal standard is to convince the courts of its relation to health--a method employed with success in the Oregon and Illinois ten-hour cases. Thus far such legislation has dealt chiefly with hours, but the principle is capable of almost indefinite extension. As we approach the question of general working conditions and the more purely economic consideration of wages, the limitations of the legal method come more clearly into view; none the less the use of that method must extend beyond the present limits.