Her investigation shows that long hours of work by women, especially if performed in a standing position, mean to the community heightened infant mortality, a falling birth rate, and race degeneration, while to the workers themselves they mean every sort of disorder. In speaking of general injuries to health, Miss Goldmark says: “The fatigue which follows excessive working hours becomes chronic, and results in general deterioration of health. While it may not result in immediate disease, it undermines the whole system by weakness and anaemia.” On the other hand the good effect of short hours is shown by the growth of temperance, and “wherever sufficient time has elapsed since the establishment of the shorter working day, the succeeding generation has shown extraordinary improvement in physique and morals.”[9] Footnote 9: “Fatigue and Efficiency,” Part II, p. 290. Several pages of testimony from all over the world are submitted in support of the statement that “even the lightest work becomes totally exhausting when carried on for an excessive length of time.” She quotes from Dr. Ludwig Hirt’s “The Disease of Working People”: “No attitude of the body is harmful in itself; only in prolonging it until it produces harmful results; all the well-known disturbances, such as varicose veins, etc., etc., arise not through sitting or standing, but through excessively prolonged sitting or standing.”[10] Footnote 10: “Fatigue and Efficiency,” Part II, p. 321. For the protection of their women workers more than thirty American States have enacted laws limiting the hours of employment for women; but only three States,—Massachusetts, Indiana and Nebraska,—have passed a law in such form as to make it enforcible. Miss Goldmark defines “the rigid law, which prohibits overtime and night work,” as “one which provides fixed boundaries for working hours. It protects women from working after a specified hour at night, and more than a given number of hours by the day or week. The best exemplar of this kind of law in the United States is the Massachusetts statute which prohibits the employment of women in textile mills more than ten hours in one day, or more than fifty-four hours in one week, or before six o’clock in the morning or after six o’clock in the evening.... The law is final. Its provisions are clear cut. Employers, employes and inspectors know without disagreement or argument what constitutes a violation. Work continued after the specified closing hour is conclusive evidence of violation.”