Mr. CLARK. Well, because people have a prejudice against cotton being used in woolens, and the name given to it sometimes is "bush wool."

Mr. SIMS. I understood you to say that the presence of cotton in the fabric could easily be detected.

Mr. CLARK. When I said that it could easily be detected, I meant that it is easily detected by the buyer of goods when they submit the goods to a test. Sometimes it can be distinguished by feeling it, or by the appearance of the fabric, by anybody that is familiar with it; but there is a chemical test that can be applied that can determine exactly the amount of cotton.

Mr. SIMS. Well, the layman is not prepared to make such a test. And he may not be able to determine by feeling it. Therefore, he is imposed upon in thinking he is buying wool when he is buying cotton. Mr. CLARK. No, sir; I do not think so. Wool fabrics with cotton in them are never sold as all-wool fabrics. They are sold as mixed cotton fabrics.

Mr. DEWALT. As long as the prejudice remains, of course, they will not buy it, as a rule. I think that is the point in your statement. Mr. CLARK. That is the idea.

Mr. DEWALT. And the prejudice may be ill founded or well founded, but as long as it remains there they will not buy it.

Mr. CLARK. That is the idea.

Mr. BARKLEY. I thought you said that as long as they have some cotton in them they are not sold as all-wool goods.

Mr. BARKLEY. Of course, those who buy from the manufacturer know that, but a man who goes into the store for a suit of clothes may not be able to tell whether there is any cotton in it or not, and he does not know, as a rule.

Mr. CLARK. Not unless the seller of the goods lets him know. Mr. BARKLEY. The ordinary man can not tell anything about the quantity of wool in fabrics.

Mr. CLARK. Of course, those with cotton in them are sold at considerably lower prices.

Mr. BARKLEY. Is the price of a mixture containing cotton lower on the average than all-wool fabrics containing part shoddy?

Mr. CLARK. I should say so.

The CHAIRMAN. Are there any further questions?

(There being no further questions the witness was excused.)

STATEMENT OF MR. ALFRED A. WHITMAN, CHAIRMAN OF THE COMMITTEE ON LABELING LEGISLATION OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF WOOLEN AND WORSTED MANUFACTURERS.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Whitman, please state your full name and address to the reporter.

Mr. WHITMAN. Alfred A. Whitman, chairman of the committee on labeling legislation of the American Association of Woolen and Worsted Manufacturers, 25 Madison Avenue, New York. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, the legislation which this conference is called to consider falls naturally into two classes. One proposed method of reaching the desired result is by compulsory marking of all fabrics containing wool, so as to show the nature of the raw

material from which it is made. The second plan does not require the seller to mark or otherwise describe his goods but imposes heavy penalties for any misstatement he may make regarding them in the nature of trade description or otherwise. As the French bill is typical of the first idea, this discussion will be confined more directly to that bill, while applying, of course, to that plan in general. Owing to the vast variety of cloths which have been developed by years of ingenious devotion to this complicated industry, it is utterly impossible to form any idea whatsoever of the quality or even of the appearance of the goods from a statement of the raw material entering into them.

Wool and cotton, the chief materials used in textiles, if used separately or in combination, may be made up into high-grade, heavy or light, serviceable or flimsy goods, according to the quality of stock, method of construction and skill in manufacture, all of which details are governed by the result which it is desired to obtain. A light summer fabric with no quality of wear or durability may require the finest grades of fiber and the highest skill in manufacture, while a cloth made of coarse wool with a large percentage of noils or shoddy may wear almost indefinitely. Cotton is used in combination with wool for a great variety of reasons. Most of them have to do with the particular use to which the cloth is to be put. A shirting made with good cotton warp and Australian wool filling will have great strength and durability combined with warmth and a soft feel. It has frequently been told how the Canadian soldiers gladly seized any opportunity to discard their all-wool shirts for the soft cotton and wool shirts of our Army. Cotton is also useful in combination with wool in the yarn for many kinds of woven and knitted fabrics sometimes to produce stronger cloths at low prices or for many other purposes. In this form the combination is known as unions, which have their definite place in society. For many purposes, however, the combination of cotton and wool are not satisfactory. They do not take dye evenly; they shrink differently; they are naturally not as warm as all wool would be, and so forth, and as the presence of cotton is not always easily detected by the consumer, the term "all wool" has come to be used throughout the trade and to be universally understood by the laymen to indicate absence of cotton or other vegetable fiber.

The recent effort to read into this standard trade term "all wool" some reference to shoddy or reworked wool can not be too strongly condemned. "All wool" has always meant animal fiber in contradistinction to vegetable fiber, and the attempt to mislead the public in this and other ways into the belief that wool has changed its nature by being spun or woven and afterwards reclaimed for further usefulness is very questionable business. Silk is used in wool goods chiefly as decoration and has little effect, as a rule, upon the strength or warmth of the fabric.

It is perfectly evident from the comments which have appeared in the press, and particularly from the statements made by the chief advocates of the so-called truth in fabrics law, that there is a very widespread misunderstanding of the fundamental facts of cloth weaving and a surprisingly general ignorance of many of the simplest details of that trade.

I might say that the remarks of Mr. Bonynge in reply to Mr. Winslow at the last hearing illustrated this very plainly. I think he practically voiced the general thought that shoddy may make its appearance in all woolen goods. His statement that only the very rich man could probably purchase an all-wool or virgin-wool suit today is possibly a pretty general feeling, whereas it has just been stated that 60 per cent of the woolen clothes made in the country are worsteds and can not by any possibility contain shoddy, while of the balance of 40 per cent probably fully half contain no shoddy and are not made with shoddy.

Mr. BARKLEY. Would you mind explaining to me the difference between woolen and worsted?

Mr. WHITMAN. The two classes are woolen goods and worsted goods. Worsted yarn is made by a very different process from that by which woolen yarn is made. Worsted yarn is combed in such a way as to lay the fibers all parallel and they go through repeated processes, all tending to this end, each process combing out more and more the immature, short, and dead fibers known as noils.

Mr. BARKLEY. So it is a difference in the manufacture and not a difference in the raw material?

Mr. WHITMAN. Not at all, except that they can only use the longstaple fiber in worsted clothes, all the rest of it being combed out, and that combing, as a rule, goes into the manufacture of woolens. Mr. SIMS. Would you say that it is impossible to use shoddy in worsted?

Mr. WHITMAN. Yes, sir; it is impossible. Now, then, to continue with my remarks where I left off.

Curious as this may seem, it is no doubt easily accounted for by the fact that the textile industry, while a very old one, is highly technical, and the general consuming public has had little interest to inquire into its intricacies. The manufacturer, on the other hand, content in his own familiarity with all the little terms and technicalities, is very apt to assume a like acquaintance with these details of his trade on the part of the layman and to use terms and words in discussing his work which, if they convey a meaning at all, are likely to be misunderstood in some popular sense which they have assumed quite unwittingly.

The very word around which so much of the present agitation centers is perhaps the best illustration of this. "Shoddy" as the word is used in popular language is a term of reproach, this definition having been fastened upon it at the time of the Civil War, when unscrupulous war profiteers palmed off upon the Government for the use of our soldiers, cloths of very poor quality, poorly made and of low grade fibers both of virgin wool or mill waste and of recovered wool or shoddy. To the mill man, however, shoddy takes its place as one of the very important raw materials available, according to its grading of fine or coarse, strong or weak, soft or harsh, and so on, for working into cloth in order to produce some desired result of finish, strength, warmth, cost, etc., in just the same way that the various grades of virgin wool are used to produce the results for which they are available. To the manufacturer or merchant such statements as these seem elementary in the extreme, but unless these terms are clearly understood it is evident that manufacturer and

laymen are apt to discover that they are speaking different languages, and misunderstandings are inevitable.

The proposed bill undoubtedly makes its appeal for support on the claim by its authors that shoddy, an inferior thing to virgin wool, is used at all times by manufacturers of wool textiles as a substitute for virgin wool in order to cheapen its cost while enabling him to deceive his customer into the belief that the fabric is made entirely of new wool, and so fraudulently obtain a higher price for it than the customer would pay if he knew that it contained shoddy.

In making this play for popular support of their bill, the National Sheep and Wool Bureau have undoubtedly very cleverly counted on the ignorance of the public, and to strengthen this support have not hesitated to still further fasten on the public's mind this fallacy, that because of its virginity wool is necessarily good and cloth made from it is good, and because the fiber has been previously spun or woven, cloth in which it is used is necessarily of low quality. To at once see how false this statement is it is only necessary to know the barest facts about new wool. Certainly any one who knows anything about the subject knows that various breeds of sheep yield wool varying in quality to extremes of fineness, strength, length of staple, etc., and even from individual sheep, wool is obtained running all the way from the best fibers taken from the sides and shoulders to the poorer qualities from belly, throat, and head, and even the short coarse product of the legs and the knotted and dung-filled tags, known as locks. All these qualities are virgin wool under the French bill and every grade retains its specific quality characteristic when it is spun and woven into cloth. The greatest skill and ingenuity have been brought to the problem of recovering these fibers from the woven and knitted fabrics, and except for the fact that they are broken into short lengths and, if the cloth has been subjected to wear, have lost some of their strength, they still have the same characteristic of fineness that they originally had.

The two main divisions of the wool textile industry are worsteds and woolens. In worsted cloth which as stated constitutes by far the largest part of the square yardage of this country, only long staple wool can be used, the immature, short and broken fibers being combed out. This so-called comb waste is known as noils, and contains all the dirt, dung, burrs and other vegetable matter which have clung to the wool and must be cleaned by carbonizing or other process in the same way that recovered wool must be cleaned and purified, and though they are virgin wool as defined by the French bill, they serve much the same purpose in the woolen industry that shoddy does. If the knowledge that a cloth contains shoddy will be of any value to the purchaser of a garment, the information as to whether it contains noils will be equally valuable. It must now be clear that in order to judge of the value of a piece of cloth the mere statement as to whether it is 100 per cent virgin wool or contains more or less shoddy is not the slightest guide.

The object of the French bill as stated in its title and by the arguments of its backers is to prevent fraud, this fraud being described minutely and with verbose reiteration to be the manufacture of shoddy into wool cloth and the sale of such cloth without stating that it contains shoddy, and thus obtaining for it the same price. that it should bring if it contained no shoddy. This claim must

be met by the statement that it is utterly false in its implication and suggestion. It can not be denied and no one will attempt to deny that dishonest merchants may offer inferior cloths for unwarranted prices. A tailor of so-called popular priced clothes may make up from cheap and unworthy cloth suits of snappy and stylish appearance, making them look by fine tailoring and workmanship, like the proverbial million dollars.

Exactly the same thing is possible for the tailor whether the cloth is 100 per cent virgin wool or contains 60 per cent of shoddy and not because of the presence or not of shoddy but because he has bought cheap cloth to begin with. It is not the shoddy necessarily that has made the cloth cheap but because it is made of poor fiber, whether virgin or not, and is poorly woven and badly constructed. The manufacturer may be and in fact is in practically every case blameless of the slightest part in the fraud or deception. Certain manufacturers make a specialty of low grade cloths and in many cases enjoy enviable reputations for their ability to turn out good fabrics to meet the demand for low-priced clothing. In these cloths he uses both virgin wool and shoddy in such proportions as he needs to secure the desired result of finish, strength, warmth, and so forth, but if anyone believes that under present day conditions of marketing he can obtain from the clothing manufacturer any more than the intrinsic value of the material he is completely mistaken. Methods of inspection and the ability of the buyers of the manufacturing tailors are such as to adequately protect him from being fooled as to quality and as quality means strength, appearance, serviceability, warmth, and so on, he examines for these points and expects to get just what he is willing to pay for. I have not been able to find any statistics showing the yardage of wool cloth sold in this country direct to the consumer but the best estimates seem to show that certainly not more than 10 per cent of the production is sold at retail including that sold through custom tailors, 90 per cent being bought by the manufacturers of garments whose trained buyers can readily detect the presence of cotton or vegetable fiber.

The mother who buys a pair of pants for her boy for $2 and discovers in a month that they are worn out has not necessarily been cheated. If the merchant told her they were fine wool and worth $5 he has certainly lied to her, but she has got her money's worth just the same. If he has sold her the trousers for $5 while they were worth but $2, he has swindled her, but he could certainly persuade her more easily to pay the higher price if the trousers bore the label 100 per cent virgin wool than he could if they were marked 60 per cent shoddy, while they might just as easily be made of one as of the other. If they bore no label, the woman would use what judg ment she had to gauge the quality of the cloth and without tempting and misleading sign would judge more correctly. The intimation that manufacturers of woolen textiles use shoddy as a substitute for virgin wool in order to produce a cloth of low value which may be sold to the public at a price above its real worth is as absurd as it is false. Shoddy is used in most cases because by its use it is possible to produce a cloth of a required grade which may be sold and actually is sold at a lower price than a cloth of equal grade could be sold for if made of all new wool. In other cases shoddy is used because only in this way can a desired result be obtained regardless of the