There is, however, another reason for want, the responsibility for which comes nearer home. This is the tremendous waste involved in our present method of making and distributing commodities. As a people we seem to have little idea of measuring our resources, our natural wealth, and the productive power that lies in our hands and brains up against our needs, and of using them wisely and economically for the general good. Although we understand the relation between good food and physical efficiency, we spend time and energy in coloring, adulterating, and otherwise sophisticating wholesome, natural food materials. We make numberless articles of the same general character and of approximately the same merit or demerit, and then we spend enough energy exploiting them to feed all the hungry in the land. We know the relation of clothing to health and to the development of taste, and yet we multiply many fold the amount of labor necessary to clothe ourselves by making textile fabrics which fade, shrink, and wear out prematurely. We need strong, skillful, intelligent workers in every line of activity, and we know that these can be produced only by careful training and education; and yet, in some states, West Virginia, for example, we send little boys as young as twelve into the mines to work all day underground, and we allow girls of the same age to work in ill-ventilated shops, leaving them oftentimes to find their way home after nightfall through the worst districts of our great cities. But some one says: “I am not responsible. I am the buyer and user, not the maker nor the seller. I determine neither what shall be made nor the conditions under which it shall be made.” To which the answer comes in no uncertain accents from two sources: from the shopkeeper, on the one hand, who says in the words so familiar to us all, “There is no demand for it, so I do not keep it in stock”; and from the social economist, on the other, who says, “The producing man is essentially the servant of the consuming man, and the final direction of industry lies with the consumers.” If the consumers of wealth, by their demands, determine what shall be made and under what conditions it shall be made and sold, what shall we say of the housewife and her responsibility? She holds a unique position among consumers. She buys not only that which she herself uses, but much of that which the adult members of her family, and all of that which her young children consume. Thus she assumes vicariously their responsibility and holds their consciences. This is one of the great social burdens which a woman takes upon herself when she makes a home.