opped in the factories, but no one can stop it in the tenement so long
as families are licensed to work there. The wrecking of the home that is
inevitable where the home is turned into a shop with thirty cents as a
woman's wage is that; the overcrowding that goes hand in hand with
home-work is that; the scourge of consumption which doctors and Boards
of Health wrestle with in vain while dying men and women "sew on coats
with their last gasp" and sew the death warrant of the buyer into the
lining, is a threat the gravity of which we have hardly yet made out.
Courts and constitutions reflect the depth of public sentiment on a
moral or political issue. We have been doing a deal of dredging since
then, and we are at it yet. While I am writing a Tuberculosis Committee
is at work sifting the facts of tenement-house life as they bear on that
peril. A Child Labor Committee is preparing to attack the slum in its
centre, as we stopped the advance guard when we made the double-decker
unprofitable. The factory inspector is gathering statistics of earnings
and hours of labor in sweat shop and tenement to throw light on the
robbery that goes on there. When they have told us what they have to
tell, it may be that we shall be able to say to the manufacturer: "You
shall not send out goods to be made in sweat shop or tenement. You shall
make them in your own shop or not at all." He will not be hurt, for all
will have to do alike. I am rather inclined to think that he will be
glad to take that way out of a grisly plight.

[Illustration: Label of Consumers' League.]

For he has seen the signs of a flank movement that goes straight for his
pocket-book, an organized public sentiment that is getting ready to say
to him, "We will buy no clothes or wear them, or any other thing
whatsoever, that is made at the price of the life and hope of other men
or women." Wherever I went last winter, through the length and breadth
of the land, women were stirring to organize branches of the Consumers'
League. True, they were the well-to-do, not yet the majority. But they
were the very ones who once neither knew nor cared. Now they do both.
That is more than half the fight. Whatever may be the present results of
the agitation, in the long run I would rather take my chances with a
vigorous Consumers' League and not a law in the state to safeguard labor
or the community's interests, than with the most elaborate code man has
yet devised, and the bargain counter