laws were passed in Illinois, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Missouri, and New
York. California passed such a law in 1868. In Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Maryland, and Minnesota bills were introduced but were defeated. Two
common features characterized these laws, whether enacted or merely
proposed to the legislatures. There were none which did not permit of
longer hours than those named in the law, provided they were so
specified in the contract. A contract requiring ten or more hours a day
was perfectly legal. The eight-hour day was the legal day only "when the
contract was silent on the subject or where there is no express contract
to the contrary," as stated in the Wisconsin law. But the greatest
weakness was a lack of a provision for enforcement. New York's
experience is typical and characteristic. When the workingmen appealed
to Governor Fenton to enforce the law, he replied that the act had
received his official signature and he felt that it "would be an
unwarrantable assumption" on his part to take any step requiring its
enforcement. "Every law," he said, "was obligatory by its own nature,
and could derive no additional force from any further act of his."

In Massachusetts, however, the workingmen succeeded after hard and
protracted labor in obtaining an enforceable ten-hour law for women--the
first effective law of its kind passed in any American State. This law,
which was passed in 1874, provides that "no minor under the age of
eighteen years, and no woman over that age" shall be employed more than
ten hours in one day or sixty hours in any one week in any manufacturing
establishment in the State. The penalty for each violation was fixed at
fifty dollars.

The repeated disappointments with politics and legislation led in the
early seventies to a revival of faith in trade unionism. Even in the
early sixties we find not a few unions, national and local, limiting