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 292 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

of purchasers of ready-made goods, he is safe, because he gets his garments only of the merchant tailor and pays a high price for the assurance that they are made up under conditions which guard him against disease, and enable the merchant to pay the working tailor a fair price for his labor. But this customer is really no better off than the Italian colony or the well-instructed but ineffectual club woman making her search for righteously made ready-made wares. For example : When I was factory inspector of Illinois, I was one day in search of a cigarmaker who was said to have smallpox in his family, during the terrible epidemic of 1894. Quite by accident I happened upon a tailor newly moved into the suspected house, and not yet registered either with the local board of health or with my department. In this tailor's shop, which was his dwelling, there was a case of smallpox. In the same shop there was, also, a very good over- coat, such as gentlemen were paying from S60 to ^75 for in that year. In the collar of the coat was a hang-up strap bearing the name of the leading merchant tailor of Helena, Mont. Now, that merchant tailor had had, in his plate-glass window, samples of excellent cloth, from which the customer had ordered his coat. The tailor had taken the measurements and telegraphed them, together with the sample number of the cloth, to the great wholesale house in Chicago of which he was the agent. The wholesaler had had the coat cut, and had sent it to the tailor in whose sickroom in an infectious tenement house it was subse- quently found. But for the happy accident of our finding that tailor while looking for an entirely different person, the hapless customer in Helena, Mont., would surely have bought small- pox germs with his expensive garment. Essentially, the posi- tion of this purchaser did not differ materially from that of the Italian immigrants ; like them he was paying a price which entitled him to get clean goods; like them he had neither tech- nical knowledge nor organization to make his demand effective. Besides his fatuous belief that his custom work, because it is costly, is made under clean conditions, the purchaser of costly garments usually comforts his soul with the assumption that the working tailor who makes them receives some substantial share