years--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?

There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge
R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the
real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department,
forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.

Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in
the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and
bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and
especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on
the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three
pages of law.

The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the
testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.