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.