CONSUMERS AND
WAGE-EARNERS
 

CONSUMERS
AND WAGE-EARNERS

THE ETHICS OF BUYING
CHEAP

BY
J. ELLIOT ROSS, Ph.D.

NEW YORK
THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
The Devin-Adair Company

NOTE

J. Elliot Ross is a member of an old and prominent Southern family. He has long been an ardent student of economics, of sociology, and of the enslaved condition of the Wage-Earner,—and who, save the idle rich and the social drone, is not a wage-earner? Dr. Ross is a graduate of George Washington University. The Catholic University of America conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for this, his excellent work in behalf of the Consumer, the Wage-Earner, and the Oppressed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

THE POINT AT ISSUE

Have you ever stood in a country store and from the superior heights of mature wisdom watched a chubby-faced, bright-eyed boy invest a penny in a prize-bag? To you it is simply a paper enclosing a few nuts, a piece of candy, and a variable quantity in the shape of a tin flag, an imitation ring, etc. But to the child there is an excitement in getting one knows not what. All the gambling instincts of the race that squanders thousands upon the turf, all the love of adventure that peopled our continent, are summed up in that one act. The child has, perhaps, contentedly endured the routine of the farm for weeks in the anticipation of this one moment of blissful joy when his anxious fingers nervously reveal the delight or the disappointment.

Years have brought wisdom (or is it disillusionment?) and imitation rings no longer have the same importance in our eyes. No matter how wistfully we may look back, those days will never return. Yet prize-bags may once again loom large in our intellectual horizon, though with a difference. This time we look beyond the rosy-cheeked, healthy country lad, bred amid the beauties of God's fields and nourished with unadulterated home products, to the pale, nervous, over-worked girls who spend their days filling these bags. In an ill-lighted, ill-ventilated room, in a great dusty, dirty city they work feverishly for ten hours at the rate of four cents a hundred bags. "They stand at a table with boxes before them, from which they take peanuts, candy and prizes with quick automatic motion. They turn down the corners of each bag, and string the bags when full in long bulky curls of seventy-two."[1]

Speeding to the utmost they cannot make enough to live on. A room in a cheap boarding-house, morally and physically dirty, insufficient food, and no chance for legitimate pleasures—this is the prize-bag life holds for them. What wonder if the temptation to supplement these wages in the way always possible for women prove too strong? Who is to blame?

Is the little chap hundreds of miles away in the country, happily unconscious of their existence, in any way responsible? This is the question with which we are going to busy ourselves.

Our little boy and over-worked girl are not, probably, typical Consumers and Producers. Still they represent large numbers of the economic world, and the solidarity of industry is such that one could not exist without the other. In a way, the country lad is a shadow of President Taft pressing a button to start the machinery of a world's fair. The child, with wonderful effect on others, furnishes a portion of the nation's industrial mechanism. In the satisfaction of his own desires, he is all unconscious of this, and unconscious, too of the responsibilities of power that modern social workers would thrust upon him.

It was once, indeed, the object of reformers to excite a sense of wrong in the oppressed. The fashion found expression in Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man." Now their purpose is also to arouse a sense of obligation in the powerful, and the change