We have dealt at length with this subject because it marked an important landmark.  It demonstrated to the wage earners that, provided they concentrated on a modest object and kept up a steady pressure, their prospects for success were not entirely hopeless, hard as the road may seem to travel.  The other and far more ambitious object of the workingman of the sixties, that of enacting general eight-hour laws in the several States, at first appeared to be within easy reach—­so yielding political parties and State legislatures seemed to be to the demands of the organized workmen.  Yet before long these successes proved to be entirely illusory.

The year 1867 was the banner year for such State legislation.  Eight-hour 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 their hours by agreement with employers.  The national unions, however, for the most part left the matter to the local unions for settlement as their strength or local conditions might dictate.  In some cases the local unions were advised to accept a reduction of wages in order to secure the system, showing faith in Steward’s theory that such reduction could not be permanent.