y. Her concern
is with retail prices. If she does her work intelligently, she
follows and studies every fluctuation of price in standards. She also
knows whether she is receiving the proper quality and quantity; and
yet so poorly have women discharged these obligations that dealers for
years have been able to manipulate prices practically to please
themselves, and as for quality and quantity we have the scandal of
American woolen goods, of food adulteration, of false weights and
measures. No one of these things could have come about in this country
if woman had taken her business as a consumer with anything like the
seriousness with which man takes his as a producer.

Her ignorance in handling the products of industry has helped the
monopolistically inclined trust enormously. I can remember the day
when the Beef Trust invaded a certain Middle Western town. The war on
the old-time butchers of the village was open. "Buy of us," was the
order, "or we'll fill the storage house so full that the legs of the
steers will hang out of the windows, and we'll give away the meat."
The women of the town had a prosperous club which might have resisted
the tyranny which the members all deplored, but the club was busy that
winter with the study of the Greek drama! They deplored the tyranny,
but they bought the cut-rate meat--the old butchers fought to a
finish, and the housekeepers are now paying higher prices for poorer
meat and railing at the impotency of man in breaking up the Beef
Trust!

If two years ago when the question of a higher duty on hosiery was
before Congress any woman or club of women had come forward with
carefully tabulated experiments, showing exactly the changes which
have gone on of late years in the shape, color, and wearing quality of
the 15-, 25-, and 50-cent stockings, the stockings of the poor, she
would have rendered a genuine economic service. The women held mass
meetings and prepared petitions instead, using on the one side the
information the shopkeepers furnished, on the other that which the
stocking manufacturers furnished. Agitation based upon anything but
personal knowlledge is not a public service. It may be easily a grave
public danger. The facts needed for fixing the hosiery duty the women
should have furnished, for they buy the stockings.

If the Uneasy American Woman were really fulfilling her economic
functions to-day, she would never allow a short pound of butter, a
yard of adulterated woolen