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Of course, it was a completely materialistic conception, a completely wooden and rigid idea. It was a mathematical idea, a belief that you could do all this by mathematics, just figure it out, get the right figure, and it would be all right. Of course, it was much more complicated than as I've described it.

There were a great many offshoots from that line of thinking. When I read about the Black Bill in New York, I thought, “Well, that's just one of those offshoots.” When I got down to Washington and realized that it was a pressing thing and that we had to deal with it, as Black was a Democratic, Senator, I looked into it more carefully, read it, got the solicitor's office to analyze it for me, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and other people to give me some real conception of how they'd work this thing out.

The Black Bill set up an absolute limit of thirty hours per week as the outside limit of the hours of labor for anybody under any circumstances. It had no minimum wage accompaniments whatever. It had no wages fixed, no way of fixing a wage, or of arriving at a just wage. But the hours of the labor for all persons in all occupations were to be limited to thirty hours in any one week. I don't remember now whether he said six hours a day, or not, or