AIMS OF THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE 295
run foot-power machines in tenement kitchens in competition with the electrical installation. It seeks, therefore, to afford information whereby the intending purchaser may test the accu- racy of the producer's claim that he is aiming to meet the wishes of the public.
To the producer the league offers that which he needs more than any other one condition of success — a somewhat stable body of customers. In Great Britain, where the cooperative movement has grown slowly to gigantic proportions, the purchasers by pooling their interests have been enabled to employ expert buyers who can stipulate in advance as to conditions of manu- facture as well as prices and qualities ; and obtain in return for the stable demand which they represent goods produced by manufacturers aware, in advance, of the wishes of this part of their purchasing public. In this country, in the absence of such an organization, supply and demand are left to regulate them- selves automatically, ruining in the process large numbers of merchants and manufacturers who guess unsuccessfully as to the wishes of the public, or fail to appeal to it by their offers addressed to its supposed cupidity and credulity, involving us all in the consumption of immense quantities of adulterated goods made in the attempt to approximate the wishes of an unenlightened and unorganized body of purchasers ; and driving down below the living point the wages of the weaker portion of the employes who produce and distribute the goods.
The Consumers' League recognizes the fact that this blind guessing, inferring, deducing the wishes of the consumer from his action in the past, while now almost universal in this country, is not inevitable in consequence of any natural or social law. All factory legislation is enacted in recognition of the fact that the human relations of supply and demand are susceptible of beneficent modifications ; the cooperative movement is a further witness to the same fact ; the Consumers' League, latest comer in this field, aims at still another demonstration of this truth.
As to the second part of the query, whether the consumer is not substantially protected by the laws, and enlightened by the official information afforded under them, in spite of the
