Of course the merchants took prompt steps to defeat this obnoxious bill, and they were most complacent when their representatives in the Assembly succeeded in strangling it. But the bill appeared again and again, finally resulting in the appointment of a State Commission for the investigation of the conditions. As Reta Childe Dorr in her book “What Eight Million Women Want” graphically relates, “The findings of this Commission were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified to employing grown women at a salary of =thirty-three cents a day=. They confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they should not expect to sit down in business hours, anyhow. They defended, on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated overtime. They defended their system of fines, which sometimes took away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless girls would be thrown out of employment, and forced to appeal to charity.” The Senate heard the report of the Commission, and in spite of the merchants’ protests, the women’s bill was passed without a dissenting vote. Its most important provision was the ten-hour limit which it placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The bill also provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of seats, one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of children, except those holding working-certificates from the authorities. But soon it was found that the smart representatives of the merchants had succeeded in attaching to the bill a so-called “joker,” by which the inspection of the stores was entrusted to the local boards of health. As the officials of these boards, supposedly experts, proved, in fact, ignorant of industrial conditions and their relation to health and sanitation, the true objects of the bill could not be enforced. So the Consumers’ League was compelled to wage another tedious war, until it finally succeeded in convincing the Legislature that the inspection of all department and retail stores should be turned over to the State Factory Department. When this was done, there were reported in the first three months of the enforcement of the Mercantile Law over 1200 violations in Greater New York. At the same time 923 under-age children were taken out of their positions as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and sent back to school. It was natural that the good results and the purely benevolent motives of the Consumers’ League attracted wide attention. Similar Associations were formed in many other cities and states. The movement spread so rapidly, that in 1899 it was possible to organize “=The National Consumers’ League=,” with branches in twenty-two states.