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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 8 > Issue 1 (1909)

 

Abstract

There are few cases before the American courts today which are of more significance than that which has recently been brought in the Illinois courts by William E. Ritchie of Chicago and which seeks "to enjoin the prosecuting officers of the state from enforcing the provisions of the so-called Women's' Ten-Hour Labor Law. The case of course involves the somewhat mooted question as to whether the remedy in such cases, if remedy there be at all, is by injunction, or whether the slower and more unsatisfactory procedure of a writ of error is not technically demanded, but this question is merely one of detail and is by no means fundamental. The real importance of the case lies in the fact that in it the supreme court of Illinois will be called upon to review a prior decision which was handed down some fourteen years ago in the case of Ritchie v. People, and in the light of present-day experience and of all of the investigation and research which has been crowded into the years following this decision, to pass definitely upon the question as to whether or not the pressure of the modern industrial system is such and the importance of the welfare of the individual woman to the state is so well recognized, as to justify the legislature in interfering in the industrial conflict and exercising a guardianship over her. It will be a decision which will be rendered in a state which is preeminently industrial but at the same time typically American in its social and political structure. Illinois is a state of homesteads and of farnis. It is the state of Abraham Lincoln. But at the same time it is a state of a vast commercial development and manufacturing activity. It has within its borders and almost controlling its destiny the city of Chicago, a city in which the east and the west meet, a city in which, perhaps of all other American cities, the great social problems of the age are to be fought out and settled; a city in which is to be found the enterprise of the west and the conservatism of the east; the poverty and destitution of the newly arrived emigrant and the vested interest and capital of the native-born; the idealism of the church and of the college and the materialism of the marts of trade; the throbbing, pulsating American idea of universal equality and of equal opportunity and a discontent and poverty and destitution hardly surpassed in any other city of the world. Chicago is a city of all social and economic creeds -it is the melting pot of America.

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