Chapter VII · THE RIGHTS OF PURCHASERS, AND THE COURTS

The more closely the rights of purchasers are scrutinized, the more clearly it appears that they are social rights. However much they may present themselves to the mind as individual, personal rights, the effort to assert them invariably brings the experience that they are inextricably interwoven with the rights of innumerable other people. In the last analysis they cannot be asserted without the previous assertion of the claim of the weakest and most defenseless persons in the community.

It has been suggested in a previous chapter that the most obvious rights of the purchaser are, to have his goods as they are represented, and to have food pure and garments free from poison and infection when bought of reputable dealers at the price asked; and, finally and most important, to be free from participating indirectly, through the purchase of his goods, in the employment of children and of the victims of the sweating system.

Before, however, these fundamental rights of any purchaser can be established as a matter of course, it occurs incidentally that the lives of infants must be safe from the poison of unclean milk and adulterated foods, and the consciences of the wage-earners cleansed of the degradation implied in preparing impure foods for the market. In the process, honesty must be forced upon the poisoners (by means of adulterations in food and germs in apparel) who now thrive upon the ignorance and credulity of the buying public.

Before the individual purchaser can vindicate his own personal rights, the whole body of purchasers are constrained to save childhood for the children, and home life for the workers who dwell in tenements. The garret of the humblest widow must be safe from invasion by the materials and the processes of industry. The childhood of the dullest orphan must be secure from the burden of toil. On no easier terms can the conscience of the citizen as purchaser be freed from participation in the meanest forms of cruelty, the sacrifice of the weak and the defenseless to the search for cheapness.

These ends can be accomplished, however, only by comprehensive statutes sustained by decisions of the highest courts, and enforced by endless effort of the purchasers and the wage-earners defending their interests together. Under the pressure of competition, the highest ethical level possible to our social life can be reached only through legislation in this, its highest and finest sense.

The New York Decision of 1884; (In re Jacobs).—These truths find an illustration in the history of a disastrously unsuccessful effort of the cigarmakers to protect by statute their own exclusive interests, through the enactment of a measure prohibiting the manufacture of cigars and the manipulation of tobacco in tenement houses in the state of New York. In 1884, when this effort was made, tenement-manufacture was of relatively slight extent compared with its subsequent development, and was confined almost exclusively to the materials mentioned. The sweating system, as we know it, was then in its earliest infancy, and the manufacture of garments and other articles under it was so slight as not even to suggest to the cigarmakers the inclusion of the needle-trade workers in the struggle for the statutory prohibition of work in the tenements.

When the law prohibiting the manufacture of cigars and the manipulation of tobacco in the tenements had been in force less than a year it was pronounced unconstitutional by the Court of Appeals, in the decision of the case of in re Jacobs.⁠[14]⁠

Had that earliest statute been sustained by the Court of Appeals of New York it is safe to assert that the odious system of tenement manufacture would long ago have perished in every trade in every city in the Republic.

Because it was undeniably class legislation, applying only to those tenement-dwellers who were employed in producing the commodities including in some form tobacco as an ingredient, and omitting all others, it is impossible to defend the statute. But the deplorable results of the decision of the Court of Appeals, which its defective form called forth, are of such far-reaching ethical, industrial and social character as to deserve careful consideration.

The framers of the law described it in its title as “An Act to Improve the Public Health,” by prohibiting certain narrow lines of manufacture in the tenements. But the court held that its title did not properly describe it,—that it was not, in fact, a measure calculated to improve the public health.

On this last point the court was clearly in error as to the facts. The proof of the pudding is in the eating; and, since the annulment of the prohibition, tenement-house manufacture has developed enormously, has produced disease unceasingly by overcrowding not merely individual tenements, but whole districts of every city in which it has existed, and has distributed disease in the communities into which the manufactured goods have carried germs emanating from infected tenements.

Physicians, nurses, inspectors of numerous kinds, friendly visitors of divers charities, residents of settlements in districts in which the sweated industries are carried on, all testify to the impossibility of preventing the spread of disease in the general public where this system of manufacture continues. In 1885, however, this was not yet the case. The germ theory was not yet so thoroughly a part of the public consciousness as it has since become. Nor was the present body of evidence as to the close connection of the diseases of the tenement-dwellers with epidemics in remote parts of the country, whose inhabitants wear tenement-made garments, then available.

A startling proposition contained in the decision in re Jacobs is that the health of the employees is not the public health! “What possible relation can cigarmaking in any building have to the health of the general public?” asked the Court of Appeals of New York in 1885.

It is not long since a visiting nurse among the tenements of New York City found a dying consumptive licking the tips of cigarettes which he was manufacturing. This is but one of thousands of observations which have been made and recorded since the decision in re Jacobs embodied that cynical question. During the intervening twenty years the fact has been imprinted upon the public mind that the whole system of manufacture in the tenements does involve a degree of danger to the public health such that it is no longer to be tolerated; that this danger is not confined to the employees in the tenements themselves, but that it is shared by them with the whole purchasing public.

It is not now needful to prove that the health of the workers is an important part of the health of the public. Every epidemic during the years since 1885 has proved that the disease of the workers in the tenements becomes, with certainty and precision, the disease of the public, transmitted in the textures of the goods worked upon in the sickrooms of the invalids of the tenements.

A comparison of the text of this New York decision of 1885 with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Holden vs. Hardy in 1898, and of Lochner vs. New York in 1905, shows the vast transition which has taken place in the space of twenty years in the judicial view of the public health.

Says the court in the decision in re Jacobs: “To justify this law, it would not be sufficient that the use of tobacco may be injurious to some persons, or that its manipulation may be injurious to those who are engaged in its preparation and manufacture; but it would have to be injurious to the public health.”

In the later cases, cited in previous chapters, it has been shown that the whole contention of the United States Supreme Court is that the industry must be injurious to the persons engaged in it, in order that their freedom of contract in relation to it may be restricted by statute.

Because it was class legislation, by reason of confining its prohibition to workers in tobacco, and because it was not, in the opinion of the Court of Appeals, sufficiently obviously a measure for the improvement of the public health, the court pronounced the law prohibiting the manufacture of tobacco in tenements unconstitutional and void, alleging that it deprived the cigarmakers of “some portion of their personal liberty.”

But, in sustaining his “right to live in his own house, or to work at any lawful trade therein,”—a right of which the tenement-dwellers had laboriously striven to be rid, in order to gain instead thereof the opportunity of working in factories and workshops furnished by the manufacturer,—the court, in fact, established the “right” of manufacturers to turn the kitchens and bedrooms of the poorest of the poor into workrooms and storage places, a “right” of which the most ample use has for twenty years been made by the manufacturers.

While thus inadvertently defending the undesired “right” of the tenement-dwellers to suffer the invasion of manufacture into the innermost recesses of the family life, the court inadvertently deprived the purchasing public of the power of tracing the processes of manufacture which are carried on, in name at least, for its sake. It thus deprived the purchaser, in effect, of the power to exercise the right to knowledge of his sources of supply.

Moreover, by the decision, the right of the workingman who lives in a tenement house to enjoy his home, using it for the purposes for which a home is established and free from the intrusion of his daily bread-winning employment, was inferentially shown to be, like his right to leisure, one which must be achieved by the method of trade organization.

The Development and Regulation of the Sweating System.—This inference the tenement-house workers drew without loss of time. They abandoned all effort to secure sweeping prohibitions, and have since that time striven to deal with their problem by the twofold method of regulation by statute and regulation by public opinion. Sweeping prohibition being unattainable, the next step was towards partial prohibition. Work upon certain specified articles in kitchens and bedrooms was prohibited to all persons not members of the family. Although a man could not be shielded from the invasion of his dwelling by the materials of his industry, he could at least be spared the presence of strange men and women. An immediate consequence of this was the establishment of workshops in the rear of the tenements, sometimes with steam power, sometimes with foot power; but always with the custom of sending the handwork into the dwellings. The list of articles thus kept sacred to the family, short at first, grew from year to year, and now includes thirty-four items. Baking bread and cakes, cracking nuts for candy manufacturers, candying fruit for sale to school children, stringing beads for passementeries, pickling cucumbers, and drying maccaroni are a few of the items not yet embraced in the list.

By adopting these partial prohibitions, while denying to the purchasers and the workers the protection of a complete prohibition of all manufacture in the tenements, the state has instilled into the minds of its industrially weaker citizens a sense of confusion mixed with contempt for the law. For, where a sweeping prohibition would have been logical and relatively easy to enforce, the petty, teasing restrictions enacted piecemeal have been fruitful of the spirit of evasion. When it was a misdemeanor for a man’s sister to sew a cloak in his dwelling, but perfectly legal for his wife to sew it, while his sister could legally sew an apron or a skirt for the same employer, the one impression conveyed to the mind of the newly arrived immigrant was that this law was not intended to be obeyed. And it never has been obeyed; nor is there any prospect, even in its present amended form, that it will be uniformly obeyed. For it is clearly non-enforceable.

In the vain effort to enforce partial restrictions which are in the nature of the case non-enforceable, a provision was enacted in 1899 requiring a license from the factory inspector for every person or group of persons who worked at any process of manufacture of some thirty articles, in any tenement house or in a building in the rear of one. After this provision had been in force for five years the writer one day, in 1904, observed a woman walking along Mulberry street, New York, carrying a huge bundle of knee pants on her head. The burden bearer mounted to the fifth floor of an Italian tenement and threw her bundle down upon a singularly greasy kitchen table. Asked to show her license to work, she brought out, with the friendly smile and courteous manner of the Sicilian peasant woman, a letter from the New York State Department of Labor, dated some seven weeks before, notifying her that her premises were unfit for licensing, and that no more work must be done in them until they had been thoroughly cleansed, re-inspected and licensed! The cheerful needle-woman, unable to read in any language, but reassured by the seal of the state of New York on the envelope, had assumed that this was the license for which she had been told to apply, and had worked away happy in the consciousness of having obeyed the law.

The only gain to any part of the community derived from the licensing law during the five years in which it retained its original form, was the discovery of the places in which manufacture was carried on. More than thirty thousand licenses were issued, and the ugly fact was brought to light that there were more licensed groups of tenement-workers in the four most undesirable streets of New York City, Mott, Mulberry, Elizabeth and Chrystie streets, than in any other streets.

Since the promulgation of the decision in re Jacobs, in 1885, the state and the trade unions have alike been burdened with the despairing duty of performing the impossible. It is utterly impossible to keep the system of manufacture in the tenements, and to avoid its evil consequences.

Tenement work means the underpaid husband letting his wife earn the rent with her needle, instead of insisting, as it is clearly his duty to do, upon wages enough to maintain his family. It means boys and girls of ten years kept at home from school, in violation of the compulsory education law, to do the housework and take care of the younger children while the mother sews for the market.

Tenement work means the use of foot power in competition with steam power, a ruinous strain upon the health of every man, woman and child subjected to it. Tenement work means an endless working day in the tenement at the foot power machine in the “rush” season, followed by the shutting down of the factory for want of orders.

Tenement work means steady downward pressure upon the wages of the factory workers, to whom it can always be said: “If you do not like our terms in the factory, we can send the work into the homes.” Tenement work means the unavoidable spreading of disease and the frequent breaking out of epidemics, not only in the cities where it is carried on, but in all those distant places to which the product may be sent.

In the effort to minimize the inevitable consequences of homework, the state has subjected the dwellers in the tenements to threefold inspection, in addition to the oversight of the federal government, whose tax collectors were already charged with the duty of following them up for the purpose of gathering the tax upon tobacco.

Because the personal liberty of a workingman would be interfered with, if his employer were prohibited from requiring him to work at home, the unhappy dwellers in the tenements have seen their homes invaded by all manner of materials, from tobacco leaves and stems, to the bales of paper and tubs of paste required for making paper bags, and by three sets of inspectors,—of the Board of Health, of the Tenement House Department, and of the Bureau of Factory Inspection.

Moreover, in the alleged interest of their “personal liberty” these victims of the sweating manufacturers have been constrained to live within walking distance of their employer’s place of business, for the burden-bearer between the merchant tailor and his home-worker is usually a woman or a child, reduced by the smallness of the pay to saving car-fare by living near the “shop.” Instead of able-bodied men and girls of the family, walking empty handed to and from their work, or riding perhaps to a desirable suburb by trolley, the burden-bearing woman or child has determined the distance to be traversed. Thus the tenement house problem has been artificially intensified and complicated; and by reason of the unlimited competition of the women of the tenements, wages have been kept at such a level that neither time nor car-fare can be spared by an adult for fetching and carrying. Hence some child is sacrificed by being kept from school to serve as beast of burden, whenever the goods are such as can safely be trusted to a child.

Moreover, all this sacrifice of the family leaves the task of the officials a hopeless one. No Board of Health has ever succeeded in knowing, every day in the year, where all the goods are concealed in the tenements, nor where all the children are who may be coming down with diphtheria, or shedding rags and patches of their skin after light cases of scarlet fever.

Trade Unions and the Union Label.—The decision of the Court of Appeals in re Jacobs virtually turned over to the wage-earners the task of providing, through the machinery of their organizations, for the protection of themselves and the purchasers against the evils of the sweating system. For twenty years the unions have faithfully striven to perform a task which it was, from the beginning, impossible that they should achieve. Just as they long before introduced child-labor legislation and factory inspection, which have come to be recognized as benefactions to the whole people; so they now invented that method of dealing with the sweated trades, by offering the label as a guaranty of conditions approved by the workers which is accepted as the best available under the circumstances, and in view of the conditions imposed by the decision of the Court of Appeals in re Jacobs. It is, of course, out of their power ever to do, with palliatives, what a sweeping prohibition could have done long since.

The public, however, cannot afford to allow the courts to relegate to the labor organizations the duty of protecting the public health against the reckless willingness of manufacturers to take risks. For, if the union is not strong enough to dominate the trade (and no union of garment workers has ever been strong enough to do this), the public must take the consequences in disease and death sent out from the tenement sewing rooms. Or, if a union were not only insufficiently strong but imperfectly honest as well, the public would pay the penalty for every label dishonestly sold to contractors for use in places which fell below the accepted standard of wholesome and clean conditions.

Or, let us suppose that a portion of the public may be honestly opposed on principle to the maintenance of trade unions; and unwilling, therefore, to purchase goods guaranteed by the union label. Such abstainers, if left without other means of discrimination in favor of goods made under wholesome conditions, are in danger, not only of incurring disease and death, but of disseminating them throughout the community.

Finally, a large part of the membership of the unions in the garment trades consists of immigrants so recently arrived from Eastern Europe as to have no adequate standards of wholesome conditions for home and workshop, of persons wholly unprepared to defend their own health, much more that of the general public. Clearly the unions, however valuable to their members and to the community in other relations, cannot, in the nature of things, be a sufficient guardian of the health and safety of all the purchasing public.

While, however, the unions have not achieved the impossible, and have not succeeded in performing a task of protection of the public health which should never have been asked of any voluntary organization, they have been vastly strengthened by the effort to do this. Baffled in the endeavor to do away with tenement work by law, they turned to the development of their label, advertising it, obtaining legal guarantees against infringement, and publishing all the abhorrent facts connected with the sweating system and attached, inferentially, to the goods which bore no label. Their label, whether or not it has always guaranteed satisfactory cleanliness and the absence of disease from the workroom, has announced to the world that the conditions as to hours and wages (the organization of employees being understood, of course), in the factories in which it was used, were satisfactory to the workers in those factories. This recommendation has gradually come to possess a value such that in some industries the manufacturers pay for the label a price which covers the cost of advertising on a large scale.

Since goods bearing the trade union label commonly cost somewhat more than other goods, the workingmen who take the trouble to pay the price required are stimulated to look sharply after the integrity of the union which offers a label.

What, now, is the position of that portion of the public which disapproves of the union and repudiates its guarantee and its label? Except within the narrow limits of the Consumers’ League, with its label on women’s and children’s white stitched underwear, such purchasers have no guarantee whatever. Moreover, only a small fraction of the innumerable industries involved in the preparation of apparel is included among the organizations of labor. While labels may be found in many cities by seekers after men’s hats and shoes, outer-wear, neckties, gloves, shirts, etc., none is discernible for woven underwear, on which much handwork is regularly done in homes; while for women the union label is scarcely upon the market outside of the shoe trade.

In the manufacture of garments and apparel of all kinds for women, the workers are chiefly young girls and women who have, hitherto, formed no stable union; who have no funds for advertising on a large scale, and no real power of enforcing any provisions for their own protection or that of the public, which has for twenty years left to them this impossible task.

A community which turns over to the working-women the task of assuring to it clean and wholesome workrooms in the tenements, for the production of its wearing apparel, gets exactly what it deserves,—the sweating system upon the largest scale that the world has ever seen.

After the state of New York shall have arrived at some method of doing away with tenement manufacture and sweating, after these twin iniquities shall have been effectually abolished, the trade unions will resume their normal function of guaranteeing to purchasers who ask for it, the fact that the hours of labor and the wages are satisfactory to the workers in the factory from which the label issues. It is preposterous ever to have asked of them, even inferentially, more than this. They have had imposed upon them by the indirect working of the decision of the Court of Appeals in re Jacobs, a task which it was clearly the duty of the state to perform; and it is in no wise to their discredit that they have failed to do the impossible. That discredit attaches to the community which imposed this unwarranted and unwarrantable burden.

Thus we have, after twenty years of effort, two ineffectual methods of dealing with tenement manufacture, pursued side by side. The state, by statute, legalizes the manufacture in the tenements of thirty-four articles, and proceeds by a cumbersome threefold inspection (by the State Factory Inspectors, the Board of Health Inspectors and the Tenement House Department), to minimize the danger to the public health, including that of the workers themselves. But, as has been pointed out, the public health is not really safeguarded. The people are merely lulled into a false sense of security.

The unions, meanwhile, have spent untold thousands of dollars in their effort to induce the purchasing public to avoid the dangers attending sweated goods, by the individual method of discrimination against tenement made products and in favor of goods guaranteed by the union label.

Ethical Loss Through Lack of Legislation.—The ethical loss by reason of this decision of the Court of Appeals of New York, quite apart from the loss of money in advertising by the unions and in futile, hopeless inspection on the part of the state, is quite beyond the possibility of calculation.

From the day when this decision became effective, the interests of the purchasing public and of the tenement dwellers have been practically identical, and both have been sacrificed to the convenience and the profit of the manufacturers.

For twenty years the state of New York has proclaimed through its highest court that it cannot protect the homes of its industrially weakest citizens from invasion by the materials of their industry. These materials are owned by rich and powerful employers, strongly organized locally and nationally, and are foisted upon the meager dwellings of the poor solely for the purpose of saving to the employers the cost of heat, light, cleaning and, far more important, rent of workrooms. For the convenience of the powerful, the weakest industrial factors in the community, the widows burdened with young children, the daughters kept at home by bedridden parents, have been invaded by industry and by inspectors. This forcing of industry into the tenements has fostered the belief that work must be done by all who live there, particularly if they are poor and sick. Thus devotion to the needle and the pastepot has become a sort of touchstone measuring the “worthiness” or the “helpableness” of the women who have dependent members of the family.

Meanwhile, the manufacturer or the merchant tailor, the owner of the goods, bears no responsibility towards the community, beyond the requirements that he must file with the factory inspectors, when so requested, a correct list, in the English language, of the addresses to which he sends his goods to be made up, and must, before sending goods into a tenement, inquire of the Board of Health whether there is recorded any present case of infectious or communicable disease on the premises.

Before the case in re Jacobs can be reversed, and work in the tenements sweepingly prohibited in the interest of the public health, including the health of the workers, it may be necessary to provide—by way of one more last palliative experiment—for placing the goods-owner under a heavy bond for the literal fulfilment of the requirements of the legal restrictions by all the people to whom his goods are entrusted. This would be less than the manufacturer’s equitable share of the burden which he inflicts upon society. Since it is for his own convenience and enrichment that the evil of the sweating system is fastened upon society, he should bear the whole burden of the cost of inspection, disinfection of premises and of goods which have been exposed to infection, prosecution of offenders, etc.

The arguments against prohibition of work in the tenements are to be found in the decision in re Jacobs, printed in the appendix. The arguments for prohibiting outright all such work are twofold, those which affect the purchasing public in its health and conscience; and those which affect the workers in the tenements, in their health, their home life, their relation to their industry, and to the life of the community of which they form a part.

The fact that the cigar workers obtained the passage of the law prohibiting the manufacture of cigars and tobacco in the tenements, sufficiently indicates their position on the subject. All the restrictions which have been placed upon tenement-house manufacture during the twenty years since complete prohibition thereof was blocked, have been obtained either by the tenement-house workers, or with their eager help.

It may be urged, however, that they are not judges of what is best for themselves; that their arguments are not sound. It is, therefore, worth while to consider who the tenement-house workers are. They are, first, the able-bodied men whose fathers and sons working in other trades all have workrooms provided for them by their employers, such, for instance, as employees in the printing and binding trades, in wood-working, upholstery, boot and shoe making, and all the other industries in which the use of steam or electricity, or the nature of the goods, make it advantageous to the employer to have the work done in a factory or a workshop. What possible advantage is gained for these men by working in their kitchens and bedrooms, in the midst of the cooking, washing, scrubbing, and care of the babies? Obviously none!

The second contingent of home-workers are the able-bodied immigrant girls. These suffer the disadvantages of losing contact with the English speaking employers and fellow workers in the factory or workshop. They use foot power instead of steam or electricity, and thus earn less money with more exertion. They spend the day in the same air in which they had spent the night, losing the change and exercise which would attend travel to and from the factory. They lose the esprit de corps which arises from work in a group, and their wages are correspondingly wretched. There is no standard of wages and hours; they take what the employer gives them; and they work until the task is accomplished. For them there is no opening hour, no closing time. When work is done, they cease to drive the machine, not until then.

The children whose school life is sacrificed to the need of being on hand to fetch and carry are losers, pure and simple. So are the wretched little boys and girls who are still too young to fetch and carry, but can be employed in stringing beads and pulling basting threads, in pasting boxes and bags, in wrapping paper around strips of wire to make stems for artificial flowers, in digging the kernels out of nuts, or in cracking the nuts themselves.

Finally, there are the widows with young children, the daughters with bedridden old fathers or mothers,—the women who cannot leave home to work. For these persons, work in the home is an evil and an evil only. Not one of them can really support herself while doing the housework and caring for her dependents, and the community which requires that a woman so placed shall go through the forms of work for self-support, deserves all the punishment that it receives in the form of transmitted disease. All such women are already in the receipt of charitable aid, and the humane and enlightened thing for the community to do in their case is to make that aid adequate to their needs, absolving them from working for the market, on condition that they take suitable care of the invalids or the children who are dependent upon them. In the long run, the community pays many times over in the form of disease transmitted from the sickrooms, and of reformatory life provided for the children neglected by their overworked mothers in the effort to do the impossible, for every economy which it attempts to make by means of relief withheld from such dependent families.

The men in the trades afflicted with tenement work have always maintained that, if they could be freed from their slavery to their kitchens and bedrooms, and enabled to work in suitable workshops, they could then organize their trade in such ways as to command wages sufficient to support their families, including their sick and dependent relatives. It is only necessary to know somewhat intimately two brothers, one a tailor working at home and the other a printer working in a shop, to be persuaded of the truth of this contention. For the skill required in the two trades is of about the same grade, the difference being confined to the organization of the industry itself.

There is a wide-spread belief that the prevailing cheapness of ready-made clothing is due to the utilization of the ill-paid labor of women and children in the tenement homes; that the wage-earner in the non-sweated trades profits by the sufferings of the sweaters’ victims, and wears better garments by reason of their poverty and the degradation of this great trade. This is, however, the exact reverse of the truth. The cheapness of our garments is attained in spite of the sweating system, not because of it. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the fall in prices of garments is commensurate with the fall in the prices of the cloth of which they are made. Certain it is that cloth is vastly cheaper than it was thirty years ago. The methods of placing goods of all kinds upon the market (garments and cloth for making garments included) have been revolutionized in the direction of cheapness within the memory of all of us. That part of the work of making garments which lies outside of tenements has also been cheapened by the general application of steam machinery to garment-cutting. These three great modern improvements have enabled the corporations which control the garment trade to prolong the life of the foot-power sewing machine and the tenement-house workroom.

The purchasing public, made gullible, perhaps, by its own greed for bargains, has willingly believed that in this one set of trades alone primitive machines and petty shops maintaining a multitude of middlemen were really cheaper in the end (because they employ the worst paid women and girls to be found in the field of manufacture) than well-equipped plants, with power furnished by steam or electricity and conducted by managers of higher intelligence.

It has become an axiom in political economy that high-priced labor stimulates the application of machinery. On the other hand, the presence in the tenements of girls who sew on buttons and run errands for wages ranging from thirty cents to seventy cents a week, and of women who sew at foot-power machines for $3.00 to $5.00 a week from ten to twenty hours a day during the five to seven months which form the busy season, and receive relief from public and private charities during the remainder of the year, distinctly tends to prolong the present primitive and belated equipment of this part of the garment trades. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that the thousands of women and girls in the tenements present a serious obstacle to the process of lifting the garment trades from their present degradation to the level of the factory trades.

Under the sweating system, the wholesaler or the merchant tailor shifts the burden of rent from himself to the tailor who sews in a tenement-house kitchen or bedroom. The wholesaler or the merchant tailor farther avoids the risk attendant upon maintaining a plant equipped with steam or electricity throughout the dull season. He offsets, as far as he can, the added expense of a horde of middlemen, by subdividing the work of the women and girls in the tenements and simplifying it to the utmost extreme, so that skill in the worker is reduced to the last degree, and wages follow skill in the direction of zero. Hence we find in the tenements “hand girls” whose backs grow crooked over the simplest of hemming, felling, and sewing on buttons, and “machine girls” whose exertion of foot power entails tuberculosis and pelvic disorders ruinous to themselves at present and to their children in the future. The foul, ill-ventilated, often damp shops, the excessive speed and intensity of the work, the ceaseless exertion of the limbs throughout interminable days, and the grinding poverty of these workers combine to render consumption the characteristic disease of these trades. The very youth of the workers increases their susceptibility to injury and disease. Young backs grow crooked over the machines, young eyes and membranes are irritated by the fluff and dust disengaged from cheaply dyed woolen goods by flying needles. The eagerness of young workers is stimulated to the highest pitch by ill-paid piece-work and the uncertainty of its continuance.

All this wretchedness, attending this belated survival of primitive organization in a great industry, surely cannot permanently survive in the face of the advantages which mechanical power possesses over foot power. It is only a question of time when the garment trades shall be placed upon the factory level.

This change, however, cannot reasonably be expected of the corporations which control the garment trades, or of the growing intelligence of the sweaters’ victims. It will be brought about, if at all, by an enlightened public refusing to wear tenement-made garments, and embodying its will in prohibitory legislation carried much farther than the tentative measures of regulation now in force.

A necessary preliminary to this revolt against tenement goods is a clear perception of the truth that no one (except possibly the wholesaler) profits by the pauperism and suffering of the men, women and children who work in tenement rooms.

To the decision of the Court of Appeals of New York in the case in re Jacobs, is directly due the continuance and growth of tenement manufacture and of the sweating system in the United States, and its present prevalence in New York.

Among the consequences and the accompaniments of the system are congestion of the population in the tenement districts; the ruin of home life in the dwellings used as workrooms; child labor in the homes; endemic disease (especially tuberculosis) due to the overcrowding and poverty of skilled workers; chronic pauperism of thousands of skilled working people during a part of the year in a series of important trades; insanity due to overwork followed by the anxiety of a prolonged period of unemployment; and suicide, the self-inflicted death of a garment-worker being of almost daily occurrence in New York and Chicago.

The extent of these evils cannot, of course, be itemized in detail. They are so great at the present time that unremitting effort is needed to abolish the system of which they are the consequences and the accompaniments.

For this purpose it is necessary to enact a statute so drawn as to meet the opinion of the Court of Appeals that a measure prohibiting only tobacco manufacture in the tenements was insufficient. The new prohibition must include all manufacture in tenements.

The principle that the health of the employees is not a part of the public health and, therefore, not a reason for prohibiting a given mode of manufacture is no longer tenable in the presence of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the cases of Holden vs. Hardy and Lochner vs. New York. To assure the abandonment of this obsolete position, however, public opinion, including the courts, must be effectively enlightened upon every aspect of tenement-house manufacture.

In the case in re Jacobs, the Court of Appeals of New York fell into the same error which has been elsewhere pointed out in the Illinois case, Ritchie vs. the People. The court has no apparatus for investigating the conditions of industry. But the legislature, through its investigating committees, possesses all the needful apparatus for investigation. When the court sets up its non-acquaintance with the existing conditions as a reason for over-riding the action of the legislature, the purchasing public is left with no redress and no clear line of action marked out for the future.

How can the courts be enlightened and instructed concerning conditions as they exist? This is the burning question which confronts both the purchasers and the wage-earners in all those cases in which the health of the whole community is affected in ways less conspicuous than epidemic smallpox. How can the gradual, cumulative effect of working conditions, and of living conditions, upon the public health, be made obvious to the minds of the judges composing the courts of last resort?

The decisions in the cases in re Jacobs, Ritchie vs. the People, and Lochner vs. New York indicate that a satisfactory reply to this question is a prerequisite to farther ethical gains in wide industrial fields by means of legislation.

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