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The resentment of it was deeply psychological and also economic because whenever competition between manufacturers of a certain class of goods was so keen that their attention was called to what it was costing them to do business they saw the “labor costs” and their inclination was to press down the labor costs. It could be done because they would starve and then they would accept the dictum that wages would be cut from seven to six dollars a week because there was nothing else to do. Labor wasn't too mobile before the days of rapid transportation and the telephone. They couldn't go too great distances to get a job, those were the wages being paid at the steel plant, so what could you do? That's all there is, there isn't anymore.

I went up to Albany as a lobbyist for some of the Consumers' League's bills. The bill that we had in the works for several years was the bill to limit the hours of labor of women to fifty-four hours a week. We had also had some child labor amendments to increase the age at which young persons could be employed. The Consumers' League was very attached to a bill which the New York education people were also ardent for. It was a bill to increase the age at which children could go to work and also to require the corresponding, compulsory education by law and to provide, through city welfare funds, for some kind of scholarships