The advisability of fixing the legal factory day at 10 or 11 hours is not to be disputed. It is just where the 10 or 11 hours day has not been secured by custom that, as a rule, the workmen and such managers as are willing are least in a position to extort it by way of self-help from other competing employers. And where custom has already led to the general adoption of the 10 to 11 hours working-day, it seems quite permissible to enforce it on such firms as have not adopted it. It is no sufficient argument against the introduction of the extended compulsory factory working-day, to say that the adoption of the working-day for women and young persons would necessarily entail the adoption of the working-day for men without recourse to legal enforcement, since men could not be employed beyond the specified number of hours, while this was forbidden in the case of women and young persons employed in the same business. As a matter of fact, the larger proportion of trades are carried on entirely, or mainly, by male workers, though there may be a certain amount of purely accessory work performed by women and young persons. Hence the adoption of the limited factory working-day (_i.e._ for women and children) by no means necessarily or uniformly entails its general adoption. Even in England this has not been the case generally, and although we find that the maximum working-day for men very largely obtains without legal enactment, this has not been the result of the adoption of the legal working-day for women and juvenile workers, but has been won by the healthy struggle of the trades' unions for the maximum working-day fixed by contract. Now the question arises whether the 11 or the 12 hours day is to be chosen, and whether the adoption of the factory working-day should be proceeded with in Germany without its being adopted at the same time by England and Belgium. Several of the German States have recently introduced the 10 hours working-day in their government works. This would point to a preference for the 10 hours day. The proposal made by Switzerland at the Conference for the adoption of this lower limit rests partly on the ground of its agreement with the duration of the 10 hours day for women and juvenile workers. But here some caution is necessary. Private enterprise is not so free from the dangers of competition as government enterprise; whilst Germany might very well do with the 11 hours day since Switzerland and Austria have been able to introduce it without harmful results.