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.

APPENDIX I

CANTON COTTON MILLS vs. EDWARDS (Supreme Court of Georgia. June 10, 1904.) INFANTS CAPACITY-INJURY TO EMPLOYEE-PE

TITION

Wylie Edwards, by his next friend, brought suit against the Canton Cotton Mills for personal injuries, alleging that on February 10, 1902, the plaintiff, being a child ten years old, was employed to sweep floors and make bands for the spinning-room. That, in order to get water to drink, it was necessary for him to pass the entire length of defendant's factory, filled with swiftly moving machinery, and that after obtaining a drink of water, and while returning, it was necessary to pass a machine called a "finisher." That he stopped to observe the lap of cotton as it came out of the machine onto the roll. Boylike, and with no knowledge of the danger, he laid his hand on the roll, as he had seen the man in charge of the machine do, when, in some way unknown to the plaintiff, his hand was caught and drawn between the rolls, to his great damage. That plaintiff was not aware of the dangerous character of the machine, nor had he been warned of its danger. That he was so young as not to be aware of the dangerous character of defendant's machinery; nor was he