of the continuance of these conditions? Six months later, the one manager may have taken a better post, and the other have been dismissed. The new man at the workshop may be an enlightened organiser, who introduces improved machinery and methods, knows the value of contented and well fed workers, and raises wages; while the new man at the mourning department may have been trained in the ways of “a driving trade,” and may believe good management to consist in harrying his employees, in nibbling at their wages and in “cribbing” their leisure. If we multiply these facts by the number of shops or departments touched by the weekly purchases of any well-to-do customer, we shall begin to have some conception of the scale upon which a Consumers’ League would have to conduct its investigations. Moreover, all this is only on the uppermost plane. Few of these retailers manufacture the goods sold. In regard to every single article it becomes necessary to trace every step of production and transmission. A pair of shoes cannot be satisfactorily guaranteed until we have discovered the wages and conditions of employment not only of every person who has worked upon the actual shoe, but also of the tanner, the thread weaver and winder, the maker of eyelets, the spinner and weaver of the shoe-lace and the various operatives engaged upon the little metal tag at the shoe-lace’s end. Nor is the matter finished even then. At every stage of its evolution, a shoe requires the services of clerks, bookkeepers, office-boys, warehousemen, packers, boxmakers, carmen, railway servants &c., and each new service introduces other material and other service—paper, ink, ledgers, harness, stable fittings, cardboard, string, glue, iron, coal—the series is endless. Yet compared with a woman’s completed gown, or a man’s suit of clothes, how simple a product is a pair of shoes. The fact is that even the most apparently simple of commercial acts is but one link in a network that spreads over the whole field of life and labour; and the fabric of that network is not woven once and for ever, but is in continual process of change. At the present stage, then, of our commercial development it appears absolutely impossible for a Consumers’ League to fulfil its aims. If labour were thoroughly organised in every branch, so that a strong trade union existed in every trade, capable of giving information upon every point, then indeed a Consumers’ League might become truly efficient, but it would become proportionately superfluous.[76] The cure of underpayment needs to be applied at the point of payment; and the establishment of a legal minimum wage is the most direct method of application.