MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois.

The Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity to get an eight-hour day for themselves.

Sixteen years ago the Illinois State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it was unconstitutional.
The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without precedent.

Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States, until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective legislation for working women was invalid.
The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may appear obscure.
The explanation is, after all, simple.

The learned judges are men, and they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the working classes.