that they should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow.  They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated overtime.  They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary.  They threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were passed, to employ older women.  Thus thousands of young and helpless girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.

The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of the merchants’ protests the women’s bill was passed without a dissenting vote.

The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it placed on the work of women under twenty-one.  The overwhelming majority of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one.  The bill also provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats,—­one to every three clerks.  It forbade the employment of children, except those holding working certificates from the authorities.  These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail stores, as far as the law was obeyed.

As a matter of fact the Consumers’ League’s bill carried a “joker” which made its full enforcement practically impossible.  The matter of inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health, supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it proved, ignorant of industrial conditions.  In New York City, after a year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to bear, and then there were no store inspectors.

Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers’ League tried to persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed inspection by the State Factory Department.  A little more than a year ago they succeeded.  After the bill placing all retail stores under factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants’ Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure.  Governor Hughes, however, signed the bill.

In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York.  No less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were sent back to their homes or to school.  The contention of the Con sumers’ League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been justified.

To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions.  To women capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition, a thing of flesh and blood.  The department-store owners who so bitterly fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty.  They were simply business men, with the business man’s contracted vision.  They could think only in terms of money profit and money loss.