instrument in the broadening of the sympathies of the working classes. Emigrants of each nationality had previously ignored not only the work, but the lives, of their neighbors. Now, through interest in the various methods of work, they advanced to a wider humanitarian outlook. In this, at least, we of America can without suspicion of self-aggrandizement, claim to stand in the forefront of the world movement of the future. Upon our shores the diverse nations of the past are being welded into one great people.

We grow to realize fully the necessity for more industrial education in our schools. Side by side with that we should teach the histories of the industries, and, through the crafts and arts, bring the descendants of the nations into closer touch with one another. Artists of all races mingle and find common ground for sympathy and congeniality; yet how often do we find that the people of one nation will not work at trade or at unskilled labor with people of another land, merely because through ignorance or prejudice they think there can be no sympathy, no mutual understanding.

Let us exalt constructive industry and make it take the place that destructive war has held for so many centuries. Instead of teaching the children in the schools all about the men who fought successful battles, who helped to lay waste and destroy villages and towns and who helped to wound and kill their fellow men, give them instead the history of the patient toil which has built up our towns and villages; give them the biographies of our givers and doers, our benefactors and builders, those who have planned model homes and garden cities, have founded colleges and libraries. Tell our scholars of the great physicians who have saved lives, often at the sacrifice of their own health, of the police and firemen who have protected homes and property and have met with death in the performance of their duty.

Jane Addams, in her address before the Peace Congress held in New York last year, pointed out that "when structural ironworkers build a bridge, almost exactly the same percentage of them are wounded and killed as of men who engage in battle, but as yet we utterly fail to regard them as an example of industrial heroism, and they fall not as heroes, but as victims." The great tunnel

under the Hudson River, which brings Philadelphia still nearer to New York than heretofore, was, in the course of its construction, the cause of many a workman's death. These men met their fate stoically, heroically, and the danger of the work did not deter others from continuing the toil. They died-not on a battlefield, because of some king's ambition, but in the performance of their duty, in order to provide bread and shelter for their families, and at the same time in order to help construct something which would be of great utility to generations to come and would help to advance the march of progress. Our education must teach us to know these heroes and to aid them in their heroism.

The Consumers' League may prove one of the best possible implements of this new illuminating education which will make for peace. The Consumers' League began in an humble way to try to understand the conditions surrounding the daily lives of the people who work for us-who serve us by providing for all our material wants. We learned slowly perhaps, but surely, that the shop girl who waits on us, the cash boy or girl who gets our change for us, the boy on the wagon who delivers our goods, all serve us; we are their indirect employers; their lives are dependent upon us, our exactions determine their labors, and we are largely responsible for the conditions under which they toil.

We begin to realize further that the large army of people who spend their lives making the things which we use are also brought (although more indirectly) into human relationship with us, and that the conditions surrounding their lives are also of moment

to us.

This is true partly from selfish reasons, because if the articles we use be made amid unsanitary conditions, in living rooms where there may be infectious disease, we suffer the consequences by having the germs of the disease infect our homes and perhaps ravage them. Our responsibility also arises from humane considerations. We refuse to encourage the manufacture of articles which from the very nature of the conditions surrounding the work crush down, instead of uplifting our fellow beings.

The Consumers' League idea has evolved. At first we took interest in conditions only in our own immediate neighborhood, for which we felt a personal responsibility. Then we felt the need

of arousing the consumers of other cities. And now at last we are getting to be sufficiently human and broad to seek good working conditions for the people of every land. The wants of the American consumer are supplied from every country upon the globe, and therefore his rights and his responsibilities as well extend to every country.

In primitive days men believed themselves justified in making slaves of all around them. Until quite recently we continued to feel justified in enslaving those whom we, with our assumption of superiority, considered inferior in race. But now our code of ethics teaches us that we must make slaves of none; that we are all one great human family, and, as Malachi, the prophet, said: God is the father of us all."

So to-day members of our American Consumers' Leagues, when they go abroad, are endeavoring to help French working people through La Ligue Sociale d'Acheteurs by patronizing those dressmakers, tailors and milliners on their white list who have. agreed not to keep their employees at work after daylight hours, nor to ask them to work on their Sabbath and holy days, nor to take work at home. And when our members find themselves in Switzerland, they are glad to avail themselves of the Swiss white list of chocolate manufacturers, in order to encourage those who have agreed to maintain a high standard of competition. In Germany, too, has been established a Kauferbund, similar to our Consumers' League, and next September the first international conference of all these Leagues is to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, in order that the delegates from the different countries may endeavor to determine upon an international standard of working conditions for those who supply our wants the world over.

Another international conference of those interested in labor legislation is to be held also next September, earlier in the month, at Budapesth, and at that conference measures will be adopted to bring about fair conditions in all countries represented, so that no one nation can undersell another by reason of the exploitation of its working people. Treaties have already been drawn up between the representatives of many of the leading European nations binding themselves and each other to the abolition of night work for women and pledging themselves to a high standard of

industrial ethics, by agreeing to eliminate by prohibitive measures the death dealing phosporous from the manufacture of matches.

So we find to-day that international treaties deal rather with industrial matters than military ones, and this suggests the hope that we may indeed be entering upon a new era: the era of the triumph of industrialism over militarism.

In industrial warfare, the consumer is commander-in-chief of the two armies-the army of working people and the army of employers. The consumers, when organized, are masters of the situation and are absolutely in control. An instance of the power of consumers to bring about a peaceful solution to a revolution, or at least a revolt, can be cited by relating briefly the facts in regard to a strike of drivers in a certain mountain resort in Switzerland, patronized largely by American tourists. The drivers demanded fairer conditions and better pay in order to provide for their families. The hotel proprietors, who had heretofore claimed a large proportion of the drivers' profits, refused to meet their demands, and sent for unemployed men from other cantons-men who did not know how to drive well and who knew nothing of the dangers of the rough, precipitous mountain roads. After the drivers had been locked out for some time and had endured much hardship, the Swiss Consumers' League endeavored to bring about arbitration. The committee, after investigation, concluded that the Drivers' Union had made only just demands. The Executive Committee of our National Consumers' League wrote to the Swiss League to learn the facts, whereupon the hotel proprietors, fearing that they might lose their much-valued American clientêle, at once yielded to the demands of the Drivers' Association and agreed not to employ inexperienced men.

Our interests are becoming more and more international in character. We have become inhabitants of the entire globe, not of a small tract of land in one corner of it. Whereas our grandmothers used to supply the wants of the entire household by utilizing the materials found within the four walls of their own estates, -by raising and butchering their own live stock, by growing and preparing and canning their own garden vegetables and fruits, and by raising their own flax, hemp and cotton and spinning, weaving and stitching it,-to-day we gather our lares and penates,

our food supplies and our garments from the far East, the golden West, the distant North, the sunny South. Every nation contributes its quota to our world famous markets, and we must be alive to our great opportunities and their corresponding responsibilities.

Every increased opportunity or privilege means an increased responsibility. The Consumers' League is doing a work far more important than is at present realized, in arousing and quickening this sense of personal responsibility and in awakening in the peoples of the different countries a sentiment of brotherly interest and sympathy. When we all unite in this way to uplift industrial conditions in all the lands, we are indeed helping forward the movement for universal peace.

THE NEXT STEPS FORWARD.

MRS. LUCIA AMES MEAD.

"Where there is no vision the people perish." The patriot who has no vision of his nation's mission, but only blind loyalty to whatever of wisdom or folly it achieves, often as in a mirage sees destiny writ large where only the desert lures to death and desolation.

We are of the few nations upon earth privileged to teach solution of a world problem. Palestine revealed the oneness and the righteousness of the Eternal. Greece taught man philosophy and art. Rome gave anarchic tribes a system of jurisprudence. Britain invented representative government, the only guarantee of liberty in large areas. To our nation the Almighty has reserved the noblest mission yet vouchsafed a people-to show how a united world may be founded on the principles which achieved a United States.

Our responsibility is first to understand and then to promote world organization. What this implies, stated in bald outline, is on the leaflet placed in your hand. Read and reread it, I beg you, until you can refute the statement that "pacifistes are sentimentalists who ignore human nature and expect the millennium to-morrow. Let no woman say that she opposes war who will not take the trouble to learn its remedy.