To women capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition, a thing of flesh and blood.

The department-store owners who so bitterly fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty.

They were simply business men, with the business man's contracted vision.

They could think only in terms of money profit and money loss.
In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the stores supported by their patronage.
The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one.
The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the stores.

Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the custom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled every holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of uncompensated labor_.
No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to five months of every winter.