e number has been, or precisely what the economic or
psychologic factors have been, we have no means of knowing. It is worth
noting that many official investigations, futile though their results,
have probed into many other phases of capitalist fraud. But the
department stores over the country have been a singular exception.

Why this partiality? Because the public is never allowed to get
agitated over the methods and practices of the department stores. Hence
the politicians are neither forced, for the sake of appearance, to
investigate, nor can they make political capital from a thing over which
the people are not aroused. Not a line of the horrors taking place in
the large department stores is ever reported in the newspapers, not a
mention of the treatment of girls and women, not a word of the
injunctions frequently obtained restraining these stores from continuing
to sell this or that brand of spurious goods in imitation of those of
some complaining capitalist, or of the seizures by Health Boards of
adulterated drugs or foods.

Wherefore this silence? Because, unsophisticated reader, these same
department stores are the largest and steadiest advertisers. The
newspapers, which solemnly set themselves up as moral, ethical, and
political instructors to the public, sell all the space desired to
advertise goods many of which are fraudulent in nature or weight. Not a
line objectionable to these department stores ever gets into newspaper
print; on the contrary, the owners of these stores, by the bludgeon of
their immense advertising, have the power, within certain limitations,
of virtually acting as censors. The newspapers, whatever their
pretensions, make no attempt to antagonize the powers from whom so large
a portion of their revenue comes. It is a standing rule in newspaper
offices in the cities, that not a specific mention of any unfavorable or
discreditable matter occurring in department stores, or affecting the
interests of the proprietors of those stores, is allowed to get into
print. Thus it is that the general public are studiously kept in
ignorance of the abominations incessantly going on in the large
department stores.

OUTCASTS RATHER THAN SLAVES.

Notwithstanding this community of silence, in some respects akin to a
huge compounded system of blackmail, it is generally known that
department stores are often breeding stations of prostitution by reason
of two factors--extremely low wages and environment. Th