holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of
uncompensated labor_.

No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted
in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to
five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase
after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six
o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in
the bookkeeping and auditing departments.

That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in
most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which
strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it
seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.

I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of
the largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and,
according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting
force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and
incapable--but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales are
posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business
force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week.
In some cases they work every night.

Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of
public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the
Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.

The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in
this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City
after city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in
1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was
organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society,
has be come a scientific association for the study of industrial
economics.

When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of
legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were
right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their
claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting
reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized
collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they
should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in
tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the spe