As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" which
made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of
inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health,
supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it
proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a
year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to
bear, and then there were no store inspectors.

Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to
persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed
inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year
ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under
factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'
Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what
they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor
Hughes, however, signed the bill.

In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred
infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No
less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken
out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were
sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con sumers'
League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been
justified.

To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women
capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition,
a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly
fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its
enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business
men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only
in terms of money profit and money loss.

In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have
succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the
stores supported by their patronage.

The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would
concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one.
The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the
stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the
custom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled every