cipal governments. Parliament has also passed acts regulating the number of hours a man may work in the manufacture of white lead and other deleterious materials. The factory inspectors of Germany have recently recommended to the government that imperial laws should regulate the hours of work in manufacture, according to the danger involved in the manufacturing process; that the legal hours of work in the manufacture of India rubber, for instance, be limited to an hour and a half per day. The German government is seriously considering these propositions, but we may easily imagine the derision with which an American manufacturer would greet such a proposal if it were advanced by a trade union. A law passed in Illinois in 1893 regulating the working hours of women who were employed in manufacture to eight hours a day, or forty-eight hours a week, was successfully resisted by the manufacturers, and declared unconstitutional by the Illinois supreme court. The argument urged by the manufacturers against its enforcement was that the Illinois employers could not sustain the competition of their rivals in other states, who were not restricted by the same law. The difficulty of limiting the hours of labor in some states and leaving them unlimited in others shows most clearly the magnitude of the undertaking assumed by the trades unions, and the unfairness of leaving the task to them.
5. The limitation of the number of apprentices is a position which the skilled trades-unionists have long held, but which is gradually being given up as indefensible. Still there have been reasons in the minds of trades-unionists, ethical concepts which did once induce them to undertake this line of action; just as governments may give up certain ethical standards which they formerly acted upon with a good conscience. The limitation of number of apprentices was instituted in those trades which required a long apprenticeship before a man became a journeyman or a master workman. The man who had submitted to this long course of training, from one to eight years, during which time he had earned but little, held that he had a right to secure to himself reasonable expectation that this trade would be valuable to him after it was once acquired; he
