WHERE THE RESPONSIBILITY LIES.
If there is too much gin made in the world, too much good corn spoiled in the manufacture of whisky; if vast areas of fertile soil are impoverished, and great battalions of human life wasted in the cultivation, the manufacture, and the commercial handling of the tobacco plant in all its nasty forms, says Ad Sense, the responsibility rests with the drinkers, the smokers, the chewers, and the snuffers of these commodities of degradation. If there are absurd fashions in shoes, dress, or bonnets, ungracious torture of the “human form divine,” ill-fitting, mal-adjusting, life-wasting use of leather, cotton, wool, silk, or gold, the woman who wears these is responsible before God and man for the desecration and the torture. It may be right to slaughter by the millions the seals on our Alaskan coasts, that women may not only be warmly but elegantly dressed; it may be right that the mother sheep should be slaughtered in order that the unborn lamb may contribute to the lady’s toilet her “Persian lamb” cloak; it may be right that the business of denuding the world of its songsters should go on, and that the live birds on the tree should be sacrificed in order that there may be dead birds on the hat; it may be right for us men to wear clothes that have been stitched at starvation prices, in inhuman hours, in infectious and perhaps infected districts, by hectic men and women; if so, let those who consume these products, who wear these goods, for whom they were made, assume the responsibility, and not shirk it under the guise of ignorance, or shift it onto the shoulders of the dealers, who are at best but unwilling slaves to the whims of the tyrant purchaser.