It is not, however, enough for the consumer to know the producer. The latter also must have opportunity to get acquainted with the world for which he labors. If he is to feel the usefulness of his work he must have a good general education and a broad outlook. These no boy or girl has at the age of ten or even fourteen, and few are able to obtain if taken from school at that early age. The years of childhood must, as Mrs. Kelley says, “be held sacred to the work of education and free from the burden of wage-earning.” A second hopeful sign of the times lies in the fact that women are uniting in the effort to extend and to enforce laws against child labor and in favor of compulsory education, and are striving to improve the public school system and to adapt it to the needs of the children of those whom we call “the working classes.” But if children are to become intelligent and joyful workers they must have good physical and mental and moral inheritance and good home care. They must have healthy and wise mothers. Among the means of producing such mothers we may not include night work in factories for women and girls, nor long hours of day work, nor even short hours at certain harmful and dangerous occupations. The investigations which are being made in the United States at present into the conditions of women’s work are most significant. To encourage such investigations and the legislation for the protection of future mothers, which will inevitably follow, is as much the duty of the home-maker as to provide a comfortable room for her household helper. Her home profits by the work of women in factories quite as much as it does by that of domestic servants. But second-hand information concerning the toilers can lead to nothing further than measures for the alleviation of their woes. If real fellow-feeling is to be restored, producer and consumer must get acquainted through actual contact. They must share the same life. This immediately suggests, of course, life for the consumer under the pall of factory smoke. But the conditions under which commodities are made ought not to be so hideous as they are. There is no place too beautiful to be the workshop of a human being. Our ideal for the future must be for every man to have a little plot of ground, and to live and to work where he can say: “I’m glad the sky is painted blue, And the earth is painted green, With such a lot of nice, fresh air All sandwiched in between.” When the producer finds a place like that, the consumer will be glad to live next door to him. And is this an idle dream of a Utopia beyond all possibility of realization? Well, there is earth enough surely, and every day the electric cars and telephones are making it possible for us to spread out over the land without getting out of communication with the world. It may be possible for the producer of the future to live next door to the consumer without being very close to him.