their individual skill as buyers. The old rule caveat emptor is here carried out to its utmost application.

The most promising step forward in the effort to educate the purchasing public has been taken whenever a state has required the manufacturer of an article of food or medicine to state clearly and truthfully the ingredients composing each package offered for sale. This is a direct appeal to the intelligence of the purchasing public. Such measures become effective just in proportion as the purchasers coöperate with the officials who are charged with the duty of testing and analyzing samples bought in the ordinary course of trade. A community in which this coöperation is well sustained protects the life and health of its citizens, stimulates their intelligence in a direction of ever-increasing industrial importance, and enforces honesty upon producers who are under the heaviest moral strain when left unsustained under the pressure of competition.

The same principle underlies a bill entitled "An Act for Preventing the Adulteration or Misbranding of Foods or Drugs, and for Regulating Traffic Therein," which has twice passed the House of Representatives only to fail each time of passage by the Senate. This is the attempted application of the principle that the purchaser is of right entitled to trustworthy information furnished by the producer and guaranteed by the ceaseless activity of officials created for the purpose of examining the products

and testing the veracity of the labels attached to them.

By providing for a continuous appeal to the intelligence of the individual purchaser, and an ever present warning to the producer to tell the truth as to his product, this bill1 promises an important ethical gain through legislation.

1 For the text of this bill see Appendix V.

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 adul

terated 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 meas

ure 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.1

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

1 See Appendix IV.