es have enacted codes and
established inspection agencies to enforce sanitary conditions for
these workers, and to relieve the evils which seem everywhere to spring
up about them. To some extent the factory system operated under rigid
inspection has replaced home work, and has improved conditions; but
garment making is an industry midway in its course of being removed from
the home to the factory, and under pressure of intensive production,
home work in congested tenements has been difficult to eradicate.

[Sidenote: Dangers in home work system.]

The vice of this system is not merely the invasion of the home of the
worker, and the consequent enfeeblement of the family and family life.
Work done under such circumstances escapes the inspector, and the
crowded workers in the tenement are helpless in their struggle for
subsistence under conditions which are unrelieved by an assertion of the
Government's interest in the condition under which these workers live.
Moreover, wide distribution of garments made under such conditions tends
to spread disease, and adds another menace from the public point of
view.

[Sidenote: Standards inserted in contracts.]

The department determined, therefore, to establish minimum standards as
to wages, inspection, hours, and sanitation. These standards were
inserted in the contracts made for garment production, and a board was
appointed to enforce an observance of these standards. The effect of
this has been that it is now possible to say that no uniform worn by an
American soldier is the product of sweatshop toil, and that so far as
the Government is concerned in its purchases of garments it is a model
employer.

[Sidenote: The worker feels a national interest.]

This action has not delayed the accumulation of necessary supplies, and
it has added to our national self-respect. It has distributed national
interest between the soldier who wears and the worker who makes the
garment, regarding them each as assets, each as elements in our
aggregated national strength.

[Sidenote: The Ordnance Department.]

On the 1st day of July, 1916, there was a total of 96 officers in the
Ordnance Department. The commissioned strength of this department
increased substantially 2,700 per cent, and is still expanding. The
appropriations for ordnance in 1917 were $89,697,000; for 1918, in view
of the war emergency, the appropriations for that department aggregate
$3,209,000,000.

[Sidenote: Most difficul