22 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
that manufacture and commerce need equitable conditions ; that legislative requirements of whatever kind, if imposed upon one, must be imposed upon all alike ; that discrimination must be avoided, not alone because it is unjust, but because it is fatal. Hence legislation regulating the conditions of employment is usually embodied in national measures, the execution alone being left to the local authorities, while broad, fundamental pro- visions are uniform for one industry throughout an empire, a republic, or a kingdom. In America alone the constitution leaves in effect to the states the regulation of the relations of employes to their work, and of the conditions surrounding and attending that work (except that employes who come under the interstate commerce act receive the benefit of certain safeguards precribed under that act).
When, therefore, state supreme courts take the position held by the Illinois court in its decision (Ritchie vs. the People) of March 15, 1895, annulling the Illinois eight-hours' law, viz.: that, in consequence of the fourteenth amendment to the con- stitution of the United States, the individual states also are prohibited from interfering with these relations and conditions, commerce and manufacture in states affected by such decisions are, pro tanto, worse off than in other states and countries ; for they are thus left without either state or national provision for that uniformity of relations which is one of their most vital inter- ests. This construction of the fourteenth amendment, adopted and disastrously applied in recent years by the supreme courts of Illinois and several other states, has exercised a doubly injuri- ous influence : it has minimized the power and efficiency of the states, and it has thereby deprived employes of a protection which they could derive from no other source. Incalculable national importance attaches to this decision of the federal supreme court, because it checks that blighting tendency of the state supreme courts.
But for the unwholesome decisions of state courts arbitrarily placing limitations upon the powers of the states and reducing to lawlessness (for lack of any legislative body recognized by the state courts as competent to deal with them) the relations
