that surround this highly-important industry, particularly relating to the supply, demand, and price conditions.

We feel that public opinion is back of this legislation and the public should know what the facts are. We are therefore anxious for

a strong publicity department.

I have come this morning particularly to bring the latest indorsement of the National League of Women Voters. In the annual convention which met in Cleveland from April 11 to April 16, the food supply and demand committee presented recommendations which were overwhelmingly adopted by the whole convention representing the women from all the States in the Union. These recommendations, as adopted, are as follows:

The food supply and demand committee, as a result of its investigations, is convinced

That the high cost of living is in large measure caused by unorganized and wasteful methods in the distribution and use of food;

That unfair manipulation and private control by large food organizations and combinations of markets and the facilities for trade and distribution are discouraging production and increasing prices to consumers; and

That our Nation is morally obligated to make it possible for nourishing food to be brought and kept within reach of every home and especially all growing children. Therefore the committee recommends: The continued indorsement of prompt and effective legislation by Congress providing Federal regulation for the meat-packing industry.

Mr. Chairman, I have come to assure this committee of the support of many, many thousands of women of effective legislation to regulate the meat-packing industry, and to express the hope that this committee will very speedily report out some such bill to Congress. I thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. We thank you very much, Mrs. Costigan. We will hear Mrs. Kelley next.

STATEMENT OF MRS. FLORENCE KELLEY, GENERAL SECRETARY NATIONAL CONSUMERS' LEAGUE, NEW YORK CITY.

Mrs. KELLEY. Mr. Chairman, my name is Mrs. Florence Kelley, and I come here from New York City. I am the general secretary and have been for more than 20 years, of the National Consumers' League, of which the former Secretary of War, Mr. Newton D. Baker, has for five years been president.

At our annual meeting in 1919 we adopted a 10-year program. Before that we had worked for 10 years with growing success to obtain in the States commissions known as minimum-wage commissions or as divisions under the industrial welfare commissions of the different States which should establish rates of wages such that women and minors who worked for their living could be assured a wage that would "maintain them in health." That is the wording of the bill which Congress passed and which is in force here in the District of Columbia at the present time.

There are now 10 of those commissions at work, and we have found, as one after another of them has set up one wage rate after another intended to enable the people who work in the humblest occupations to live while they worked without having recourse to charity while they worked, that the cost of living arose so that apparently the

gains which were nominally made for the workers really accrued to the distributors of food and to the sellers of shoddy clothing and to the housing profiteers. It was rather in the nature of kitty chasing her tail for the Consumers' League to spend so large a part of its time getting minimum wage rates established, only to have this unforeseen result.

Therefore, in 1919, we adopted, as a part of our 10-year program, the effort to get goods, textiles, etc., branded, so that the people might know what they were paying for out of their wages, and to promote and cooperate with all those who were striving to promote regulation of the great organized producers and distributors of foods, and also to cooperate with the people who were promoting cooperation in the distribution of foods by wholesale and retail.

A year and a half of that 10-year period has now passed and we have undergone some experiences and have made some observations which can not fail, I think, to be of interest to the members of this committee. The principle we adopted underlying our 10 years' activity was this, that the banks have by no means been put out of business by the creation of the Federal Reserve Board. On the contrary, both the public and the banks have profited by having that valuable, new organization within the Government at work in this crucial time of reorganization. Very few people, we believe, seriously would consider it desirable that the Interstate Commerce Commission should be done away with, although, as Mr. Anderson showed yesterday, owing to the legislation under which it has had to function, it has not given entire satisfaction, perhaps, to any great part of the public. Still, we all recognize that so long as railroads are administered as they are in this country by private capital, there has to be regulation and there has to be a responsible organization within the Federal Government charged with the duty of regulation under the laws of Congress.

When any large industry is so great and so firmly organized that it can produce such results as we constantly see produced within the meat industry, we can not see why that great industry should continue to play the rôle of Robin Hood and be without the law.

We do not want to put the food industry out of business. That is too preposterous even to suggest, but we do believe that the present situation is an entirely untenable one.

I have lived for about 30 years among very poor, working people, first on the west side of Chicago, and now for more than 20 years, on the lower east side in New York. Last year, for the first time, the greatest and richest city in the Western Hemisphere created, by vote of its city government, a fund to pay for nourishing foods, of which meat should be a considerable element, to be given to the public-school children, in order that they might be enabled to do the work which the city compels them to do in the schools which it compels them to attend.

It was found that very large numbers of school children in New York and in Chicago, and in other cities, were compelled to go to school, compelled to complete a curriculum, and they can not leave school until they do complete that curriculum, and yet they were found by the city physicians to be incompetent from lack of proper nourishment to do the work that the law requires them to do. So

New York City, for the first time, since white people occupied Manhattan Island, voted money to be spent in the five boroughs for the nourishment of the school children in the schools.

We have had volunteer societies doing that work increasingly ever since Robert Hunter's book appeared 15 years or more ago, a book that was almost laughed off the publisher's shelves because of his statements about the insufficient feeding of public-school children increasing at such a rate as largely to frustrate the intent of Americanizing the foreign children and feeding our own native-born children, and training them to be intelligent and adequate citizens of this country. This, of course, is peculiarly true of the children of the unskilled workers.

It has been a very long time it seems to me it must have been 40 years since the English people, recognizing that the poor were always with them and that pauperism was always with them in London, arranged first for charity luncheons, and then, perhaps 20 years ago, arranged for an expenditure of the public funds for feeding English-born children in the public schools in order that they might do the school work which the law required them to do.

We, however, regarded that as a kind of hereditary curse of pauperism since the days, perhaps, of Elizabeth in England, and no one was willing, 15 years ago, to consider for a moment, in New York, Robert Hunter's proposal that a regular part of the expenditure of the educational funds of the city of New York should go for the nourishment of the children.

Now, at the end of about 15 years, I think it is, we are doing just that. We are appropriating sums of money from the public treasury in order that our children shall not continue to faint in the classrooms; in order that they shall not fall out of school ill, suffering from a disease which is now regularly recognized by the medical profession as the forerunner of tuberculosis, and, of course, the forerunner of failure in school, a disease which is regularly recognized by symptoms of anemia and other symptoms, such as a predisposition to fainting when making the slightest exertion-the disease of malnutrition.

We now have nutrition classes in the schools, and, moreover, we have an entirely new expenditure of public funds, a thing undreamed of in the past.

The city of New York, the city of Boston, the city of Chicago, and I do not know how many other cities, because every day the list lengthens, pay salaries out of the public funds to city dietitians. The funds may be administered by the county poor authorities; they may be administered by the juvenile courts, as sometimes they are; they may be administered by the educational authorities or by the health authorities, but whatever the organ through which they are paid, they are always paid out of the public funds and are paid to teach mothers how to feed the children in the homes sufficiently, with decreasing supplies of meat; and how to use substitutes for meats, to enable their children to go to school, which they must do, and learn lessons, which they must learn, and which they can not learn on the present rations, unless their mothers are taught to cook differently, to arrange the diets differently, so that they can get other things to take the place of meat, which the mothers in the families of unskilled workers can not afford to buy at the present prices.

Occasionally, a packer says to me-I see a good deal of the agents of the packers in the course of my travels. They come to see me and I meet them at the meetings of the League of Women Voters which they regularly frequent, and they come to our meetings and they all say, "Is not this failure to feed the children due to the lack of skill of the mothers?" Of course, we have had mothers in this country ever since we have had any population in this country, and it is a perfectly new failure of the mothers that they send children to school fed on bread and tea or on bread and coffee. Until the prohibition act came in, the Italians used to send the children, if the father kept a little saloon, in quite considerable numbers from my own neighborhood so stupid that they would hardly reach their desks before they would put their heads down on them and go unshakably asleep, because their breakfast had been a crust of hard, Italian bread, dipped in whatever remnants were left in the glasses the night before.

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It is quite a new thing for American mothers to be so incompetent in the management of food that they have to have dietit ans sent to them to enable their children to keep up in school. The fault is not with the mothers. It would not matter what a genius you were, you had the falling wage of last year and this year, and the prices to pay for meat that they have to pay in the poor little shops in the districts where the great masses of unskilled workers live, no genius would enable you adequately to feed your children on the stuff you could buy; and for that reason, we have the supplementary meals growing and spreading all over the country. Instead of having such discussions laughed at as the folly of a light-headed man, as they were 15 years ago, this is now an established part of the work of the municipalities to eke out the insufficient food of the oncoming generation.

I talk whereof I know, because I have lived among the unskilled workers since 1892, and I have seen the falling standard of food in the families, and I have seen the means that the cities have taken to cope with that.

The Consumers League began the effort to get regulation of the food industry, meaning thereby primarily the meat industry, and we did it, animated first by the delay in getting minimum wage legislation really to assure the health and modest comfort of the people for whom it is provided by the legislatures of the different States and by the Congress; but also animated by this quite intolerable spectacle of the falling standard of vitality of the children of the unskilled workers in the industrial centers.

Now, that is our position. If the American people are agreed, and they seem to be agreed, that it is a good thing to have a Federal Reserve Board to stabilize the banking industry, and if we agree with Mr. Anderson in what he said yesterday, that although not the whole American people have been at all times satisfied with the functioning of the Interstate Commerce Commission, still no one wishes to abandon the attempt to get rational and adequate regulation of transportation facilities and transportation rates, we believe, and we are a part of that rapidly growing national organization of women who believe that there must be in the very near future adequate regulation provided by Congress through some one or some combination

of these bills which are before you to stop this tendency toward the deterioration of the American children, and, of course, the wives and husbands themselves, with their falling wages and with the high cost of living which is still developing.

That is the situation and that is the campaign on which we have enlisted. We shall appear before you just as many times and just as many years as may be necessary, and we shall not only appear before you here but we are appearing all over the United States.

The American women are a great deal more intelligent than industry gives them credit for being. We are a great deal more disciplined in working together. From the days when women began to have missionary societies back in the twenties and thirties, through all the 70 years of struggle to get the amendment to the Constitution giving us votes, we have been learning to work together, as probably the women of no other nation on the globe ever were disciplined in working together, and until last fall an enormous part of the organized energy of women, far more than Congress ever realized, had been given to a campaign, educational and political, for getting votes for

women.

Now, all that energy is released. We have the votes and we are now organized with a thousand ramifications. We have more interlocking directorates than business has.

Mrs. Costigan, who represents the League of Women Voters, is vice president of the National Consumers League. I represent the National Consumers League and am an officer, perhaps only in a rather detached or honorary way, but still an officer in a considerable number of organizations, and if you should institute an investigation of the activities of women, I think you would be surprised to find the thoroughness with which it is possible now, when we no longer have to struggle for votes, to deal with any subject which presents itself.

This subject presents itself to the mothers of the United States. It is not only the unskilled worker in the city who feels this pinch but also the wives of the high-school teachers, the wives of the professors in the fresh-water colleges, the wives of the ill-paid clerks, and the tempted bank cashiers, and all of the people who value respectability so that they take small salaries for the sake of having occupations to which respectability attaches. None of them like the basis on which they have to keep house now, and their intelligence is available and is enlisted for keeps in this campaign for the control of food

sources.

So much for the people who are our new backers.

My father was for 30 years in the House of Representatives. He died in 1890. During a large part of the time he was in the House, from 1870 to 1890, the question of the incipient trusts was before Congress. It was a source of great excitement to the Congress for those 20 years, from 1870 to 1890. My father was here from 1860 to 1890. I heard a great deal in those days about what would happen when the things which were then just beginning came to full growth and fruition. This subject has never been wholly absent from my mind; but there are aspects of the present relation of this particular industry to the life of the country, aside from the matter specifically of food, which can, I think, not fail of interest to this committee.