those days are over for good; and when we all believe it their
fight will be won. When the union label deserves public confidence as a
guarantee against such things, it will receive it. When I know that
insisting on a union plumber for my pipes means that the job will be
done right, then I will always send for a union plumber and have no
other. That is the whole story, and on that day the label will be
mightier than any law, because the latter will be merely the effort to
express by statute the principle it embodies.

Stragglers there will always be, I suppose. It was only the other day I
read in the report of the Consumers' League in my own city that "a
benevolent institution," when found giving out clothing to be made in
tenement houses that were not licensed, and taken to task for it, asked
the agents of the League to "show some way in which the law could be
evaded"; but it is just as well for that "benevolent institution" that
name and address were wanting, or it might find its funds running short
unaccountably. We _are_ waking up. This very licensing of tenement
workers is proof of it, though it gives one a cold chill to see thirty
thousand licenses out, with hardly a score of factory inspectors to
keep tab on them. Roosevelt, as governor, set the pace, going himself
among the tenements to see how the law was enforced, and how it could be
mended. Now we have a registry system copied from Massachusetts, where
they do these things right and most others besides. An index is so
arranged by streets that when the printed sheet comes every morning from
the Bureau of Contagious Diseases, with name and house number of every
case of smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc. reported during the
twenty-four hours, a clerk can check one off from the other in half an
hour, and before noon have every infected flat quarantined. Word is sent
to the manufacturer to stop sending any more supplies there, and the
garments in the house are tagged till after disinfection. And by the
same means all the cards are laid on the table. If a merchant in
California or in Florida brags that he buys only factory-made goods, the
customer can find out through the Consumers' League if it is true. If
the register shows that the manufacturer has filed lists of the
tenements where his goods are made up, it is not true. All of which
helps.

But Massachusetts is Massachusetts, and New York is New York. A
tenement-house population of more than two millio