Women and children are the special proteges of this
new State, and great care is taken that they shall be engaged
only in employment suitable to their strength and under an
environment that will not ruin their health.
The growing social control of the individual is significant, for
it is not only the immediate conditions of labor that have come
under public surveillance. Where and how the workman lives is no
longer a matter of indifference to the public, nor what sort of
schooling his children get, what games they play, and what motion
pictures they see. The city, in cooperation with the State, now
provides nurses, dentists, oculists, and surgeons, as well as
teachers for the children. This local paternalism increases
yearly in its solicitude and receives the eager sanction of the
labor members of city councils. The State has also set up
elaborate machinery for observing all phases of the labor
situation and for gathering statistics and other information that
should be helpful in framing labor laws, and has also established
state employment agencies and boards of conciliation and
arbitration.
This machinery of mediation is significant not because of what it
has already accomplished but as evidence of the realization on
the part of the State that labor disputes are not merely the
concern of the two parties to the labor contract. Society has
finally come to realize that, in the complex of the modern State,
it also is vitally concerned, and, in despair at thousands of
strikes every year, with their wastage and their aftermath of
bitterness, it has attempted to interpose its good offices as
mediator.
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