trade, however, is reciprocal. We cannot have free trade with Germany unless Germany will have free trade with us. In the present state of civilization protection in industry appears to be as inevitable as military force in society. We hope, in the evolution of society, that free trade will come as universal peace will come; but in the present stage the aim of statesmen should be to see that protection in industry is for the general welfare and not for special interests.

Second, the bosses. It is true that Governor Wilson's nomination was made in spite of and not at the behest of the bosses. But it could not have been made without their acquiescence. And the corrupt Democratic machines in those States which admittedly have such corrupt machines will be strengthened and not weakened by Governor Wilson's National success. Mr. Bryan will be a victor in the event of Mr. Wilson's election, but will not Mr. Ryan be equally a victor? It does not seem to us that the effective way to destroy what Mr. Beveridge has so well called the invisible government-that is to say, the partnership between corrupt politicians and corrupt special interests is to make it merely half visible. Governor Wilson cannot openly and persistently fight and antagonize Mr. Charles Murphy, of Tammany Hall, however much he may despise him. The Progressive party despises Mr. William Barnes, of Stanwix Hall, and does openly and persistently fight and antagonize him.

Third, the taxing power. Governor Wilson has said specifically in his speech of acceptance that the taxing power of the Government should be used only to raise revenue for public purposes, and that to employ taxation for any other purpose is unsafe and illegitimate. From this view of the taxing power we radically dissent. We believe it is not only Constitutional but highly desirable in many instances to use taxation as one of the instruments of the police power of the State and the Nation. If Governor Wilson and the Democratic party are correct, we cannot tax wildcat State bank notes out of existence; or impose licenses on liquor saloons for the purpose not only of raising revenue but of regulating those saloons; or lay a tax on corporations for the purpose of obtaining from them public and accurate statements regarding their capital, profits, and other financial matters; we cannot tax "phossyjaw" matches out of existence; or lay so high a tax on opium as to keep out of

the country all but the very limited quantities needed for medicinal purposes. The taxing power of the Government provides one of the essential instruments for effective welfare legislation. Governor Wilson condemns it; the Progressive party commends it and proposes to use it. We favor its

use.

Fourth, States' Rights. What shall be the powers of the National Government? What shall be the powers of the separate States ? What shall be the relation of the separate States to the Nation? These questions form one of the most important and far-reaching issues of the campaign. The inevitable, and in our judgment the desirable, tendency of the time in economics, politics, commerce, and social relations is towards Nationalism. The abolition of general social injustices, the regulation of all trusts and the throttling of corrupt trusts, the development of sound and useful business prosperity, can be obtained, not by spasmodic and often conflicting State acts, but by a consistent and well-framed policy of National acts for the public good. The States must more and more deal with matters of merely local self-government, the Nation more and more with questions affecting all the people of the country. The Democratic party and Governor Wilson lay special emphasis on so-called "States' Rights" at a time when the country ought to be concerning itself about National rights. The doctrine of States' Rights is obsolete and cannot be revived by even so able a historian and publicist as Governor Wilson. And we doubt whether the party which lays emphasis on this obsolete doctrine is the party to intrust with the work of effecting great National reforms. The Democratic party by its own platform and by the utterances of its chosen leader announces itself as the party of "little Federalists." The Progressive party, by its pronouncements, by the record, philosophy, and achievement of its chosen leader, and by its very name, announces itself as a party of Nationalists. Those who believe that the best way to avoid the evils of political corruption is to divide responsibility and make Government weak will logically believe in "little Federalism." Those who believe, as we do, that the way to destroy corrupt politics and promote social justice is to make governmental authority as strong as possible in executing laws for general social welfare will logically, in our opinion, support the Progressive party.-THE EDITORS.

shelter, and clothing, fully ninety per cent is spent by women. Isn't the science of consumption, then, worthy of special emphasis in the training for home efficiency?

Not many schools of home economics have grasped the fact that they should be per se trainers of consumers. They still tend to overemphasize home production; but the best of them are very generally swinging toward the first and most important work of training the consumer-they are beginning to establish standards.

I am conscious of a standard," writes a pupil of a correspondence school from south ern Illinois. "I see it in the way I manage my household, in my expenditure, my work. I think a change in my standards is now going on under the influence of my household studies. The change will, I suspect, consist largely in a shifting of emphasis in delivering me from certain traditional ideas."

The standards of this lady were the inherited housekeeping, standards, the standards which our ancestors established through the long ages when they were building up the home as a factory.

Take the matter of food. It is undoubtedly for the advantage of the community that every individual stomach should have enough, and not too much, inside of it. The old standard was to distend its walls by mere bulk; the new school-set standard is to furnish it some two thousand to three thousand food units daily. The schools have worked out this standard of consumption through the study of protein and starches and fats, of calories and muscle-builders and heat-producers, till they have found the amount and kind of fuel the human machine needs for the various kinds of work it must do. To build these standards is a question of laboratories and applied mathematics not within the command of any middle-class home. If all of us are to have the benefit of them, they must be brought to us by the universities and the public school.

I met a Pratt Institute graduate on the Chicago train and led her gently to tell me how much of her domestic science she found useful in her housekeeping.

"Well," she confessed, "when the baby is teething, and the cook has left, and there is company to dinner, I don't think much about

calories or a balanced ration, but somehow I've got the theory so well digested that I put the right things together without thinking about it."

Her food standard has become a part of her unconscious mental furniture, like the gauge by which we measure the length of our steps and the focus of our eyes.

I looked over some papers on Housing written by pupils of the American School of Home Economics. Says one of the students who lives in the country: "In the matter of house sanitation the important point is to know exactly what you have to deal with. There is no use in taking country plumbing for granted. You have got to get away not only from the traditional ideas of the man who built the house, but from your own old ideas as well."

These old ideas from which she is being freed by new school-set standards taught that a country house did not need an indoor bathroom, that the parlor was a jewel-casket to be opened only on rare occasions, that the children should be "bunched " in one room, that running water on the second floor was a luxury, that sanitary garbage disposal was optional with the individual. Under the influence of her new standards she has found out where every one of the pipes in her house is located, what they are for, and how they attend to their job. She has worked out for herself a system of out-of-the-house drainage, a new water system, and a method of scientific ventilation. As a consumer of housing she has put her training in practice.

Now, the basis of all these standards must be the ability to recognize quality when we see it. This is so important and so difficult that the Government tries to make it unnecessary. To establish standards-minimum standards, to be sure-has come to be the work of sanitary inspectors, tenement-house inspectors, clean milk commissioners, pure food and drug experts, departments of streetcleaning, and a hundred more. Theoretically, it would be well for the Government to establish standards for all things used by the consumers, and so save the schools from the onerous duty of inculcating them, and the pupils from the travail of assimilation. But how shall a Government that can reasonably say, "Potatoes below a certain grade shall not be used for human food," regulate the number of up-to-date potatoes a man shall eat? How shall a Government that can, and does, keep printed matter below a certain grade out of the mails say to the voracious

consumer of storiettes, "Thus far and no farther ?"

Besides, an efficient Government without efficient citizens is not a democracy. We don't want to revert to a benevolent despotism, or even to an apron-string bureaucracy. The setting and maintenance of standards is a two-handed business-the establishment of standards by the Government, and the testing and use of these standards by an enlightened citizenship. And in matters where the Government has not yet established standards of quality the initiative must come from the

consumer.

Consider the consumption of textiles-a job we have been at ever since we progressed beyond the wearing of raw skins. But the quality of textiles is still one of the unguarded frontiers of knowledge. In fact,

the general knowledge of quality in textiles is decreasing; for though the specialists have grown wiser, the consumers, who used to know a good deal about cloth they themselves spun and wove, have grown more ignorant. Have we not, all of us, seen our mothers place a wet finger under the tablecloths they were buying, to see if they were pure linen?

That is a perfectly good test

with hand-spun linen; but it is a dull manufacturer who can't circumvent a wet finger. We need both the training of the schools and the Government guarantee to buy cloth wisely.

to

The University of Wisconsin is giving a course for consumers of textiles at the same time that members of its faculty are working to get through a law on the standardization of cloth. The students study wool from sheep to broadcloth, silk from worm ribbon, and are required to do one piece of weaving on the hand-loom, not for manual skill, but to make them understand the tests of quality. They are not expected to become weavers, but consumers of clothes. With this same end in view, they are taught the processes of dyeing and the durability of colors, and they study especially the adulteration of fabrics. I was shown card after card of cloth sold for " all wool" which, when tested by the students, proved to be practically all cotton.

But it is no longer enough that cloth should be all wool and a yard wide-that means little. These Wisconsin consumers must learn that even pure wool, when it is short and stiff, or soft and weak, is a poor purchase; that there are qualities of cloth in which the warp and weft are so uneven in

But even this is only a small part of the study of woolen fabrics, only a preliminary to establishing the standards of quality and price for the benefit of the consumer. Into these standards enter conditions of cloth production in the factory, wages paid operatives; taxes paid the Government, "Schedule,K," freight rates, and the costs of selling the finished product. Nor is this training in textiles limited to general principles. It applies It applies itself to such definite things as blue serge and black broadcloth, and other standard products. These students of the science of consumption have determined that, under existing conditions of wool production, price of labor and tariff, the lowest cost for blue serge fifty-four inches wide and of efficient quality is a dollar and a half a yard, and that the lowest cost of a similar quality of black broadcloth is nearly three dollars. Will not the trained consumer who has thoroughly assimilated these facts realize that when either blue serge or black broadcloth is offered for a less price it is not all wool, or is wool of poor quality, or damaged, or "mill ends," or remnants? Of course we recognize that both good and inferior cloths have their legitimate uses if the consumer is neither deceived as to their quality nor overcharged. There is no reason why the law should prohibit their manufacture as it may well prohibit the manufacture of adulterated foods and drugs. All that the consumer needs is to be protected by an honest label. How could the world get along without "shoddy," for instance, a cloth made from odds and ends of wool fiber, usually fiber that has been used before, when the present production of new wool is not nearly equal to the demand?

But the student has got to be taught that even these standards of quality are not absolute things. The perfect buttonhole may be produced at such a cost of time and labor that it is for the general advantage to use the commonplace hook and eye. It is not a question whether we can individually afford to pay in money for hand-made lingerie, but whether the community can afford the expenditure of so much eyesight and time and thought to make what is perhaps a superior product, but for which there is an approximate substitute; for are not things expensive

to the community even when we make them ourselves?

Besides knowing what is for the advantage of the community and being able to recognize quality when one sees it, it is the work of the consumer to see that what the community needs is produced. Can one eat eggs, however wholesome, in a land where no hens are? I listened to one domestic science teacher who seemed to set me right between the covers of " Our Mutual Friend," where Dickens tells how "Mrs. John Rokesmith, who had never been wont to do too much as Miss Bella Wilfer, was under the constant necessity of referring for advice and support to a sage volume entitled 'The Complete British Family Housewife.' But there was a coolness on the part of the British Housewife that Mrs. J. R. found highly exasperating. She would say 'take a salamander,' or casually issue the order 'throw in a handful of❜-something entirely unattainable. In these, the Housewife's glaring moments of unreason, Bella would shut her up and knock her on the table, apostrophizing her with the compliment, 'Oh, you are a stupid old donkey! Where am I to get it, do you think?'"

A good many instructors-far be it from me to call them what Bella did-entirely ignore the difficulties of getting the "salamander." That is one place where Teachers College in New York City is strong-it teaches the prospective consumer how to get the "salamander."

We

Now we know that it is to the advantage of society that we should all have clean clothes and house linen, and we are fairly able to recognize cleanliness when we see it. But to produce this cleanliness under modern conditions is quite another matter. have, thank Heaven, passed, mentally at least, beyond the stage of mother-at-thewashtub. We are passing rapidly beyond the stage of anybody at the washtub anywhere, and at Teachers College the consumers of clean clothes, prospective and actual, are being taught how under actual conditions clean clothes can be produced.

"How people can accept clothes blued with the old liquid indigo I don't see !" exclaimed an instructor at the College.

"Why not?" I inquired, all bluing being more or less alike to me.

Why not? Don't you know that it makes rust spots?"

And then and there she took me into a