in full blast, unchallenged, from
Monday to Saturday. Laws may be evaded, and too often are; tags
betraying that goods are "tenement made" may be removed, and they make
no appeal anyhow to a community deaf to the arraignment of the bargain
counter. But an instructed public sentiment, such as that of which the
Consumers' League[29] is the most recent expression, makes laws and
enforces them too. By its aid we have forced the children out of the
factories, the sweat shops out of the tenements, and shut the door
against the stranger there. Only to families are licenses granted. By
its aid we shall yet drive work out of the home altogether; for goods
are made to sell, and none will be made which no one will buy.

[Footnote 29: The following is the declaration of principles of the
National Consumers' League:--

SEC. 1. That the interests of the community demand that all workers
shall receive fair living wages, and that goods shall be produced
under sanitary conditions.

SEC. 2. That the responsibility for some of the worst evils from
which producers suffer rests with the consumers who seek the
cheapest markets regardless how cheapness is brought about.

SEC. 3. That it is, therefore, the duty of consumers to find out
under what conditions the articles they purchase are produced and
distributed, and insist that these conditions shall be wholesome,
and consistent with a respectable existence on the part of the
workers.]

[Illustration: Josephine Shaw Lowell, Chairman of the Vagrancy
Committee, and one of the Strongest Forces in Charity Organization, the
Consumers' League, and every other Healthy Reform Effort.]

Organized labor makes its own appeal to the same end. From this year
(1892) on, the United Garment Workers of America resolved in national
convention to give their stamp to no manufacturer who does not have all
his work done on his own premises. If they faithfully live up to that
compact with the public, they will win. Two winters ago I took their
label, which was supposed to guarantee living wages and clean and
healthy conditions, from the hip pocket of a pair of trousers which I
found a man, sick with scarlet fever, using as a pillow in one of the
foulest sweater's tenements I had ever been in, and carried it to the
headquarters of the union to show them what a mockery they were making
of the mightiest engine that had come to their hand. I am glad to
believe