Part 5

The first condition of sympathy is knowledge. The housekeeper used to get acquainted with the one who made the articles in use in her home naturally and in the course of her ordinary daily occupations. Now she can get acquainted only by an effort independent of her regular work. This effort must usually take the form of reading and study. Here, of course, is where the advantage of her new-found leisure appears, but even the desire to learn and the time in which to learn would avail little if it were not for the fact that the means of securing information are continually improving. The student of social conditions has come out of his library and is living among men as well as among books. He is going down where the industrial war is being waged most fiercely, and is gaining at first hand knowledge concerning the toiling masses. The information thus secured he is giving to the public partly through his college class work. There was a time, even after colleges were opened to girls, when knowledge so given would have been unavailable for the housekeeper. Now no one is ever too old to go to school, and no one feels out of place in school. But the woman who cannot take systematic courses in economics and sociology still has a chance to learn. She can get information by residence in settlements, from books and periodicals, and through summer assemblies and university extension lectures. Thus the will which is manifested in a quickened social conscience is finding the way in improved methods of spreading information.

It is not, however, enough for the consumer to know the producer. The latter also must have opportunity to get acquainted with the world for which he labors. If he is to feel the usefulness of his work he must have a good general education and a broad outlook. These no boy or girl has at the age of ten or even fourteen, and few are able to obtain if taken from school at that early age. The years of childhood must, as Mrs. Kelley says, “be held sacred to the work of education and free from the burden of wage-earning.” A second hopeful sign of the times lies in the fact that women are uniting in the effort to extend and to enforce laws against child labor and in favor of compulsory education, and are striving to improve the public school system and to adapt it to the needs of the children of those whom we call “the working classes.”

But if children are to become intelligent and joyful workers they must have good physical and mental and moral inheritance and good home care. They must have healthy and wise mothers. Among the means of producing such mothers we may not include night work in factories for women and girls, nor long hours of day work, nor even short hours at certain harmful and dangerous occupations. The investigations which are being made in the United States at present into the conditions of women’s work are most significant. To encourage such investigations and the legislation for the protection of future mothers, which will inevitably follow, is as much the duty of the home-maker as to provide a comfortable room for her household helper. Her home profits by the work of women in factories quite as much as it does by that of domestic servants.

But second-hand information concerning the toilers can lead to nothing further than measures for the alleviation of their woes. If real fellow-feeling is to be restored, producer and consumer must get acquainted through actual contact. They must share the same life. This immediately suggests, of course, life for the consumer under the pall of factory smoke. But the conditions under which commodities are made ought not to be so hideous as they are. There is no place too beautiful to be the workshop of a human being. Our ideal for the future must be for every man to have a little plot of ground, and to live and to work where he can say:

“I’m glad the sky is painted blue, And the earth is painted green, With such a lot of nice, fresh air All sandwiched in between.”

When the producer finds a place like that, the consumer will be glad to live next door to him.

And is this an idle dream of a Utopia beyond all possibility of realization? Well, there is earth enough surely, and every day the electric cars and telephones are making it possible for us to spread out over the land without getting out of communication with the world. It may be possible for the producer of the future to live next door to the consumer without being very close to him.

Then half, at least, of the machinery which makes the worker an undesirable neighbor is unnecessary, whether we consider his needs or the consumer’s. From the point of view of the latter, this unnecessary machinery is being used in manufacturing abominable trash, or in making articles to take the place of others which were badly made and faded or fell to pieces, or wore out before their time. From the point of view of the worker, much of our modern machinery saves labor which it would be life and health and happiness for him to perform by hand. All the assistance he needs from machinery is a little power to take the place of his muscular energy and to save his strength and vitality for brain work. He wants a machine which shall be his slave as he works out his designs into useful and beautiful articles, not a tyrant which he must “tend” all day long. A small machine is a much better slave than a big one. If the workers should spread themselves out over the country with their small machines, this would not mean the sacrifice of any real good in the present system. Improved methods of transmitting power are making it possible for each community to have a central power plant from which energy may be sent to run the seamstress’s sewing machine, the carpenter’s lathe, the potter’s wheel, and the rug-maker’s loom. Thus the present desire to simplify life and the present dissatisfaction with the flimsiness of the average factory-made article, which create a demand for a smaller and better product, combine with improved means for transportation, for communication, and for transmission of power to make it practicable for small workshops to take the place, to a certain extent, of large factories, and to make it possible for the producer of household stuff to become a desirable neighbor.

The shops that are springing up all over the country in connection with technical schools show the advantages of labor under good conditions. In addition to the students’ workrooms there is usually, in connection with these schools, a shop where men are employed to make furniture and other articles for the institution. The demands of instruction make it possible to equip these shops with apparatus which would otherwise be too costly. Such places offer a man pleasant conditions for work, a stimulus to mental activity, and an opportunity to see the direct results of his labor. I have in mind such a school and shop. There, one day, the girls of the cooking class served orange ice and rolled wafers to the engineer and the carpenter. I felt sure that, good as the ice and wafers were, they tasted better to the carpenter because they were passed on a tray he had made, and to the engineer because he had made the tins on which the wafers were baked. There is a satisfaction in seeing the products of one’s labor in actual use.

Another hopeful sign lies in the fact that illustrated magazines which are published in the interests of the Arts and Crafts movement and of household decoration are spreading knowledge of design and are making it desirable to hire work done by local cabinet makers. In the Northwestern University Settlement, in Chicago, there is good furniture, including a beautiful round table for the reading room, which was made in a small shop after designs furnished by one of the residents.

It is not even enough, however, for the producer and consumer to come into contact. They must have the same interests. These common interests the manual training schools are supplying. Such schools are training the children of the rich to work with their hands. At the same time they are offering an education of more immediate practical value than was the purely cultural education of old, and are for this reason attracting the children of the poor, who used to be put early to work. The young people who are to be the manual laborers of the future are getting their apprenticeship under conditions which give culture and general information. Thus the technical school tends to destroy the class distinction between brain workers and hand workers.

There is, however, a suspicion that some manufacturers, under the cloak of interest in technical education, are advocating the extension of manual training courses for their own selfish purposes, rather than for the general good; that they are seeking to increase the number of skilled workers among whom they may choose, and to make themselves independent of labor organizations. It is fair to the labor organizations to hear both sides in this, as in other matters where there seems to be a conflict of interests between employer and employed. Through the Woman’s Trade Union League, which has branches in most of our large cities, housekeepers may learn the women workers’ side as it is presented by themselves.

There is encouragement also in the revival of the handicrafts. A few people are making articles of household utility because they like the work. These people are living examples of joy in labor. The movement is important, also, because it tends to the establishment of democratic relations. Experience has shown that when a woman whose connections have been entirely with those who shared her ability to buy and to spend becomes seriously interested in some form of handiwork her whole manner of life changes. She is no longer free to participate in purposeless social functions. To her studio teas she is likely to welcome those who are working at her own or at similar crafts without reference to their social position. Thus gradually and naturally and without any sudden severing of relationships she passes from the aristocracy of those who _have_ to the aristocracy of those who _do_. It may be that in this way real sympathy between classes is to be restored.

In spite of hopeful signs, the great mass of those who produce our household stuff still work under conditions which arrest bodily and mental development, shorten life, and crush out happiness. There is not enough encouragement in the present situation to lull to inactivity any one who is interested in the improvement of the producer’s conditions, but just enough to prevent complete discouragement and to suggest promising fields for future work in the interest of those who make what others use.

MORE CONSCIENCE FOR THE CONSUMER

The consumer is he who uses wealth. Each of us, therefore, is a consumer. The wealth which we use is of two classes. The first includes natural products; the second, those commodities which have been made from natural products through human agency. To the first class belongs the wild berry which one picks for his own use, and for which he is beholden to no one. To the second belongs the cultivated berry, which is served to one at his own table without labor or forethought on his part. The second berry may be considered to be the first one plus the thought and ingenuity and manual labor that were expended in cultivating, transporting, and serving it. Of the first kind of wealth, the average consumer uses ever less, of the second ever more, and thus his dependence upon his fellows increases.

A person uses wealth for the purpose of satisfying his desires. But other people as well as he have desires, which must be satisfied, if at all, by natural wealth or by natural wealth adapted to human use by human agency. Of unsatisfied desires the world is full. Some, to be sure, are unworthy, but after we have stricken these out, the number is still appalling. We want food, and good food. Some of us go hungry, and some get sick because we are forced to eat bad food. We want safe water, and thousands of us die every year because we cannot get it. We want parks or large open spaces, with good roads and paths and plenty of comfortable seats, with green grass, flowers, trees, playgrounds, gymnasiums, and lunch rooms. We want beautiful factories and public buildings, good schools, and libraries. We want beautiful houses, furniture, clothes. Of these good things some of us have all, more of us have only part, and many of us have none.

When we try to explain the fact that so many legitimate desires are unfulfilled, the first reason that occurs to us is the fact that wealth is not fairly distributed. This no one can gainsay. No one pretends that incomes are proportioned to desert, to need, or even to men’s capacity for using them for the public good. This, however, is a fact over which the average person has little control. The most he can do is to give moral support to the specialist who is trying to think out a fairer means of distribution.

There is, however, another reason for want, the responsibility for which comes nearer home. This is the tremendous waste involved in our present method of making and distributing commodities. As a people we seem to have little idea of measuring our resources, our natural wealth, and the productive power that lies in our hands and brains up against our needs, and of using them wisely and economically for the general good. Although we understand the relation between good food and physical efficiency, we spend time and energy in coloring, adulterating, and otherwise sophisticating wholesome, natural food materials. We make numberless articles of the same general character and of approximately the same merit or demerit, and then we spend enough energy exploiting them to feed all the hungry in the land. We know the relation of clothing to health and to the development of taste, and yet we multiply many fold the amount of labor necessary to clothe ourselves by making textile fabrics which fade, shrink, and wear out prematurely. We need strong, skillful, intelligent workers in every line of activity, and we know that these can be produced only by careful training and education; and yet, in some states, West Virginia, for example, we send little boys as young as twelve into the mines to work all day underground, and we allow girls of the same age to work in ill-ventilated shops, leaving them oftentimes to find their way home after nightfall through the worst districts of our great cities.

But some one says: “I am not responsible. I am the buyer and user, not the maker nor the seller. I determine neither what shall be made nor the conditions under which it shall be made.” To which the answer comes in no uncertain accents from two sources: from the shopkeeper, on the one hand, who says in the words so familiar to us all, “There is no demand for it, so I do not keep it in stock”; and from the social economist, on the other, who says, “The producing man is essentially the servant of the consuming man, and the final direction of industry lies with the consumers.”

If the consumers of wealth, by their demands, determine what shall be made and under what conditions it shall be made and sold, what shall we say of the housewife and her responsibility? She holds a unique position among consumers. She buys not only that which she herself uses, but much of that which the adult members of her family, and all of that which her young children consume. Thus she assumes vicariously their responsibility and holds their consciences. This is one of the great social burdens which a woman takes upon herself when she makes a home.

To understand the problem of the home-maker, in her capacity as consumer and buyer, we must remember that there are “two distinct responsibilities. One is the responsibility for the conditions under which things are made, the other is the responsibility for their being made at all.” The first is for waste of life and productive power through child labor, underpay, and unsanitary places for work. This can be met only by organized methods. The second, the responsibility for the fact that one article is made instead of another which would have satisfied a larger number of real wants, each home-maker must meet individually by careful and conscientious regulation of her own expenditures.

That some women have accepted the first form of responsibility, the existence and growth of the National Consumers’ League, with its various state and local branches, testify. The object of this league is to investigate, as the individual can not, the conditions under which articles are made. Wishing to do thoroughly what it undertakes, it is at present confining its attention to one branch of industry, and that a branch in which the waste of human life is conspicuous--“the manufacture of women’s and children’s stitched white cotton underwear.” This industry lends itself readily to sweatshop methods, with all the attendant danger to the consumer from contagious diseases, to the worker from the lowering of wages and of the standard of living.

The way in which the league works may be briefly described. Upon request of a manufacturer it investigates his shop. If it finds that the state factory law is obeyed, that all goods are made on the premises, that overtime is not worked, that no children under sixteen are employed, and that the surroundings of the workers are clean and healthful, it grants the use of its label. This label can, if the manufacturer so desires, be stamped on all goods that leave his factory.

The investigations of the league naturally lead to activities of other kinds. It is often found that the only objection to granting the use of the label is the fact that children under sixteen are employed. If this is in accordance with the state factory law, the next thing to do is to get the law changed. This is usually the task which the state leagues take upon themselves. The work of these state leagues has recently been summarized by the national league and published in the form of a handbook, which may be obtained from the headquarters in New York City.

After the label has been granted, there must be a market for the goods. The creation of a demand for label goods is one of the duties of the local branches that are springing up in many cities and towns. Besides this, these branches prepare, in some cities, for the convenience of purchasers, “white lists” of shops which reach certain standards with reference to wages and to treatment of their employees. They urge the granting of half holidays during the summer months, and seek to save clerks and delivery men from the horrors of the Christmas trade by inducing people to do their shopping early in the season and to refuse to receive any goods delivered late at night.

The members of the league recognize the fact that their power to protect themselves and to clear their consciences with reference to that which they use lies in their ability to organize. They recognize also that below them is a class of buyers too weak and too ignorant to band together for the protection either of themselves or of those who make and sell the grade of goods which they use. A large part of its work, therefore, is educational, and aims to bring the public up to a point where it will demand protection for all consumers and all workers. To this end it distributes annually large quantities of valuable literature.

The league has been obliged lately to turn much of its attention to the establishment of the constitutionality of many of the laws passed for the protection of women and children. That great victory by which the Oregon law limiting the hours of women’s labor was declared constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States was won chiefly through its efforts. Encouraged by this decision, it is renewing its efforts in other states.

But in connection with the distribution of household commodities, as well as in connection with their production, there are shameful wastes. In order to advertise their wares, some manufacturers disfigure towns and routes of travel with hideous billboards, and injure or destroy natural beauties. I stood on the platform of the station at Harper’s Ferry, one beautiful September day, and looked across the river to a magnificent bluff crowned with autumn foliage. There on the rocky face of the bluff had been painted an enormous round advertisement, with white letters nine feet high on a background of black. It read, “Use Blank’s Talcum Powder.” Blank’s talcum had up to that time been a household commodity with me. Since then, of course, I have used other brands. But of what use in combating an evil of this sort is my individual protest except as a source of satisfaction to myself, a revenge for the disfigurement of a favorite view? I am much more effective as a member of the American Civic Association, which is making organized warfare against the advertising evil, than I am as a private protester and complainer, even if I take no further part in its work than to contribute my yearly dues. In some such organized movement against the evils connected with distribution housekeepers must join, if they are to meet their full responsibility.

The home-maker, in her capacity as buyer for a family, is largely responsible for that which is made as well as for the conditions under which it is made and the methods employed in its distribution. Here she must act single-handed, and decide for herself what it is worth while to buy. In one section of his “Studies in Economics,” William Smart draws a lesson from the record of his personal expenses. The items of the account he has grouped under various heads--food, dress, shelter, etc. With reference to the various heads, he says that if he spends more for food than he needs for health he gives himself a form of pleasure which he cannot share with others, and which is of the most fleeting character. If, on the other hand, he spends more for dress than he actually needs for comfort, he stands a chance of pleasing the eyes of others as well as his own, and besides, an article of dress discarded before it is worn out may keep some one else warm for a long time. Thus extravagance in dress is likely to give pleasure to more people and for a longer time than extravagance in food. The third head is “shelter.” If he puts more into a house than he needs, he may be building not only for the present, but for future generations. Here he stops, leaving us to go on in imagination through the other heads, “books,” “travel,” etc. By this simple illustration he shows to us poor laymen what he means by the rather appalling title of his article, “The Socializing of Consumption.” For what is society but other people, and what is it to socialize consumption but to spend one’s income for the greatest good of the greatest number? The choice between various forms of expenditure comes when we spend more than is absolutely necessary. Then we have a chance to choose between that, which we, by consuming, will destroy (ice cream, let us say) and that which we can consume and yet pass on to others (a book or periodical, which we can read and lend to the neighbors). And what we demand and use will determine the form which wealth will take in the future.