manufacturers who should grant it. This was the crowning effort of
the Pittsburgh mill-workers to obtain improvement. Strikes for higher
wages had failed. Strikes for a ten-hour day had failed. And now it is
pitiful to write that even this interstate coöperation on the part of
the girls for relief by a peaceful trade agreement failed, too, the
employers falling back upon their "undoubted right" to run their
factories as many hours as they pleased.

The women then appealed to the legislatures, and between 1847 and
1851, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all passed ten-hour
laws.[A] But they were not passed simultaneously, which gave the
employers in the particular state dealt with, the excuse that under
such legislation they could not face interstate competition in their
business, and since every law contained a saving clause permitting
contracting out by individual employers and employés, all these
beneficial acts were so much waste paper. The manufacturers expressed
themselves as willing enough to stand for the shorter work-day, but
absolutely declined to risk the loss of their business in competing
with those rival manufacturers who might take advantage of the "saving
clause."

[Footnote A: In the same year, 1847, a ten-hour law was passed in New
Hampshire and in Great Britain, with, however, very different outcome,
for in Great Britain the law was enforced, there being no complication
of state and national control there.]

For nearly fifty years after this period, the right to overwork
and the "right" to be overworked remained untouched by legislative
interference. And yet the need for labor legislation, restricting
hours, and for uniform federal legislation was as clearly evident then