It is sometimes urged by the advocates of the congressional measure that the method of securing the adoption of legislation by the action of the separate states is injuriously slow; that evils attending the present variety of legislation are such that haste is required. To this it may, however, be replied that the machinery of legislation in the states responds more quickly and sensitively to the will of the people than does the machinery of federal legislation. If, therefore, the people of the various states are slow to alter their laws governing marriage and divorce, this may arise from the fact that the existing laws are more or less adapted to the life of the people in the states. If they are not so adapted, the first preliminary change should logically be the extension of the electorate to include the non-voting elements of the population now silently affected by the laws. That being done, a just basis would have been formed upon which to proceed with farther changes in legislation in the individual states. If it be true that the evils arising from the existing chaos of legislation affecting marriage and divorce in the different states have become, or are becoming intolerable, surely it is fair to infer that these evils may be due to the enforced silence in matters of legislation of half the people affected by them.

The need of haste is a strange reason to assign for the transfer of the power to legislate upon the most intimate relation of human life, from those governments which are most easily controlled by the people affected, to that which is farthest removed from them.

Four states are now in a position to deal with this or any other question on a basis of entire justice, namely those states in which men and women alike vote; many other states possess all the needed machinery for submitting important measures to the vote of the people; and it is perfectly easy to provide, in any given case, that women may vote on the question submitted. There is obviously more need for such submission in the case of a bill dealing with marriage and divorce than in the case of any other subject. Not until the responsibility for the change can be shared by the whole adult population should so grave a change be undertaken as the transfer of the power of legislation upon this most vital of all subjects from the states to the federal govern

ment.

CHAPTER VI

THE RIGHTS OF PURCHASERS

In any given community every person is directly or indirectly a purchaser. From birth to death choice is made for us or we ourselves choose objects of purchase daily, even hourly. As we do so, we help to decide, however unconsciously, how our fellow men shall spend their time in making what we buy. Few persons can give much in charity; giving a tithe is, perhaps, beyond the usual custom. But whatever our gifts may be, they are less decisive for the weal or woe of our fellow beings than are our habitual expenditures. For a man is largely what his work makes him-an artist, an artisan, a handicraftsman, a drudge, a sweater's victim or, scarcely less to be pitied, a sweater. All these and many more classes of workers exist to supply the demand that is incarnate in their friends and fellow citizens, acting as the purchasing public. All of us, all the time, are deciding what industries shall survive, and under what conditions.

Obviously the purchaser ultimately decides all production, since any article must cease to be produced if consumers cease to purchase it. The horsehair furniture of the early part of the nineteenth century has now virtually ceased to be manu

factured. On the other hand, any article, however injurious to human life and health the conditions of its production may be, or with whatsoever risk they may be attended, continues to be placed on the market so long as there is an effective demand for it; e. g., nitro-glycerine, phosphorous matches, and mine products of all kinds.

This great purchasing public, embracing the whole people, which ultimately decides everything, does so, on the whole, blindly, and in a manner injurious to itself, and particularly to that portion of itself which is engaged in production and distribution.

It would seem an obvious right of the purchaser that the food which he buys at the price asked should be pure and clean; that the garment purchased of an entirely reputable dealer should be free from poisonous dyes, vermin, and the germs of disease; and that both food and garments should leave his conscience free from participation in the employment of young children or of sweaters' victims.

Yet these seemingly obvious rights were, perhaps, never farther from attainment than to-day, in the opening years of the twentieth century. Adulteration of foods has never, in the history of the human race, been carried on upon a scale so vast as at present. The sweating system with its inevitable accompaniment of filth and disease conveyed in the product, persists and increases in spite of sixty years of effort of the philanthropists and the needleworkers to check it.

The oldest recognized legal right of the purchaser

is to have his goods as they are represented. To sell goods under false pretenses has long been an offense punishable with more or less severity. But of late this right, if it was ever widely enforceable, has become largely illusory. In the vast complications of modern production and distribution, conditions have arisen such that the individual purchaser at the moment of buying, cannot possibly ascertain for himself whether the representation of the seller is accurate or not. The rule caveat emptor fails when the purchaser is prevented by the nature of the case from exercising enlightened care. Thus in the case of adulterated foods, or of foods exposed to filth or disease in the course of preparation, and in the case of garments sewed in tenements, the purchaser is at the mercy of the producer and the distributer, and is debarred from exercising care in these respects at the moment of purchasing.

Not only may a department store advertise with. impunity in a dozen daily newspapers that "all our goods are made in our own factory," when it neither owns nor controls a factory, but the sales-clerks may safely reiterate the assurance over the counter in regard to an individual garment which, in truth, was finished in a tenement house by a bedridden consumptive. The machinery for identification is so imperfect, the difficulties in the way of tracing a garment are so many and so subtle, that the law has no more terrors for a mendacious sales-clerk than for the reckless advertising agent, or for the business office of those daily papers which thrive upon the wholesale mendacity of retail commerce.