Are not the conditions so hastily sketched a fairly satisfactory answer to the question with which we started out: Why should not Rhode Island have a stable, settled, home-owning body of American workmen? The hazards are so great, the wage so low, the work so uncertain, that the American workman or the foreigner, after a few years of experience here, will not remain if he can get out. He realizes that the chances are against the operative getting on in the world. What this means is that _it is not he who is getting the benefits of the protective duties which Mr. Aldrich says are laid for “our people in the United States.”_ He is barely getting a living, and getting it under conditions which make life to himself, his wife, and children a constant menace. The tax we pay on textiles never gets beyond the stockholders, who in Rhode Island are usually a family that for generations have run their mills and absorbed the profits—absorbed them so quietly, too, that one knows nothing of what they are save by the deceiving outward signs. Not only has the average factory owner absorbed the lion’s share of the profits, but he set his face like a flint against spending a cent of the protection he enjoys in humane efforts to make the industry more tolerable. This man, who periodically appears as a suppliant before Congress, praying for a continuation of benefits which cost this whole people dearly, will not, unless driven to it by law and outraged public opinion, protect even the children who work in his mills. It took the hard-fought labor wars of the ’80’s to force from the legislature of the state (then as now held in the hollow of the hands of men who live by the beneficence of this people) a ten-hour law for children, a twelve-year age limit, and proper truant laws. But, the laws passed, no authorities were ever found to enforce them, for the very sufficient reason that all authorities in Rhode Island lived by permission of the mill owners. A Bureau of Industrial Statistics for gathering information and a factory inspector to report on the observance of the laws which labor unions and social agencies had forced from the legislature were finally secured. The first set of inquiries sent out by the Industrial Bureau was treated with contempt by the manufacturers, the Slater Club deciding what questions it would and would not answer!