the cloth do you not require the most accurate application of the science of chemistry in your bleaching, your dyeing and your printing? Do you not devote the utmost care to the maintenance of your machinery and to sustaining your works in the most effective condition?

Let me ask you a plain question. How much science is applied to the maintenance of the men and women without whose careful and assiduous attention all your fine mechanism would be of no avail? Of course I do not mean to charge you with any admitted neglect. You may put the question nearer home. How much science is applied to the conversion of crude food material into appetizing food in your own houses? Do you know as much about the food and feeding of your own families as you know about the food and feeding of your horses and your cows? The true art of nutrition has hardly begun to be known, and what you do not practice, of course you cannot promote.

Let us consider this matter a little by way of comparison. As I have said to you already, you call to your aid the masters of every science in order to enable you to provide each inhabitant of this country with about five dollars' worth of cotton fabrics every year. I think our population numbered nearly sixty-five million last year. In any event it reaches that number now. At five dollars per capita the value of all our cotton fabrics - brown, bleached and printed - would come to about three hundred and twenty-five million dollars. I doubt if the census of 1890 will show quite as much.

If I were to say to you that fifty dollars a year expended for food material, might be so converted by the right application of heat into nutritious food as to give the great majority of the people of this country better and more adequate nutrition than they now get; if I were to put the standard of adequate nutrition of the men and women who work in your factories at a necessary cost for the material of only a dollar a week, cooked and ready for consumption, you would say, Well, I wonder what absurd theory Atkin

son will give us next. You have already said that in your inner consciousness, if you have not said it out loud, a good many times. Who has come out ahead, the theorist or the practical man? I tell you that complete and adequate nutrition can be supplied to the average man and woman working in your factories at a cost of not exceeding one dollar a week for the food material and the fuel to cook it with. But perhaps it may not pay to try to work at so very low a cost it may require too much time.

Now by comparison, you furnish the people of the United States five dollars' worth of cotton goods a year, and that suffices for them. At only a dollar a week per capita or a little less, or fifty dollars a year, the food bill of the people costs them ten times as much as the supply of cotton fabrics that you furnish them, out of which about half of their clothing is made. Sixty-five million of population consuming fifty dollars' worth of food material each, in a year would spend three billion two hundred and fifty million dollars ($3,250,000,000). The cost of food and fuel is in fact nearer double that amount than any other figure, especially if you add the liquor bill to the food bill; and the waste of food, for lack of any sort of scientific treatment of this art of human nutrition, and for the lack of any sort of popular knowledge in respect to the right application of fuel to food and feeding, I say the waste only comes to more than the entire value of all the textile fabrics made in all your factories, cotton, woollen, worsted and shoddy combined.

What can you do about it, some of you ask. Presently I will show you. Let us begin with the waste of fuel, although that is the least important matter. The man who can save you a quarter of a pound of coal per horse-power per hour on the present consumption of fuel under your boilers would have his big fortune well assured, and yet I feel very certain that our ignorance of the right method of converting coal into power or work may be measured by the height of your chimneys and the strength of your drafts. The next pestilent inventor who comes along and shows you the right

way to convert your coal and water combined into fuel gas, which may be completely consumed without any draft, may leave your big chimneys useless except as monuments of the ignorance of the present generation. You may put that in your pipe and smoke it, but you will not smoke your chimneys any more after five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, more or less. Yet we think we know something about the saving of fuel in making steam as compared to what we knew a few years ago.

So we do, but now go into your kitchen. You will find that we consume a pound of coal, more rather than less, to every pound of food material that we subject to its malignant influence in an over-heated iron stove or range, in the processes which are now miscalled cooking. It is not true. that it was "the Lord who sent the food and the devil who sent the cook;" it is the Lord who sent the food and the devil who sent you the stove. Is it not so? What more infernal place of dwelling can you find than a small kitchen containing a big stove working away under a strong draft in midsummer? I won't use any swear words, but I think they might be well applied to such a place.

Now I can cook fifty pounds of bread, meat and vegetables in the most perfect and nutritious manner with two pints or two pounds, or a little less, of kerosene oil, burned in the ordinary Rochester lamp under my Aladdin oven of the standard size.

One of my customers, a leading patent lawyer in Pittsburg, does substantially all the cooking for a family of five persons in one of these ovens, under which he burns the natural gas. He pays fifteen cents per thousand feet for the natural gas, and he burns one-third of a thousand feet per month. He estimates the cost of fuel for cooking for his family of five at sixty cents a year. The next thing on the cards will be fuel gas distributed among our dwellings, perhaps not at fifteen cents a thousand, but suppose it is fifty, then what? At fifty cents a thousand, one-third of a thou

sand per month for five persons would make the cost of fuel for cooking just two dollars a year.

Now see what a waste of energy there is in burning even two pounds or two pints of oil to fifty pounds of food. I only catch that part of the heat which comes out of the top of the chimney. I shut that up in a paper box and make it do some work, but I lose all the rest. But compare

even what I have accomplished, one pound of oil to twentyfive pounds of food, with the consumption of coal in your stoves at the rate of a pound of coal or more to every pound of food.

Now, gentlemen, if you require light, air, ventilation, uniform humidity, regular and continuous speed, and the most perfect conditions in all the mechanism of your factories, do you not also require health, strength, clear heads, ready wits and prompt work in the men and women who operate the machines? Can you expect such qualities from cold victuals and pale pie bolted hastily in the noon hour, as I have seen it when I have passed through some of your works? Do not these several factors of health, aptitude and ready observation, which are necessary to the production of first-class fabrics from the sale of which both the wages of the workmen and the profit of the owner are alike derived, depend wholly upon the suitable shelter, the adequate nutrition and the wholesome conditions of living on the part of those who tend the machinery?

The first lesson in the insurance business which must be learned by those who inspect factories is to hold their tongues on everything that does not concern the safety of the factory, but we keep our eyes open. I have more than once been puzzled by the varying results of different factories, which were apparently fitted with the same kinds of machinery and which were operated in the same way. Not until I had made an inspection in my insurance work could I explain the profit of one and the loss of another. In some cases which I might name, I am the open secret of non-success.

very sure that I discovered It was in the poor quality,

the bad position and the bad condition of the dwellinghouses which were occupied by the operatives.

You are all familiar with the rule that the highest rates of wages that can be derived from the market price of any given product are secured by those who make that kind of goods at the lowest cost per pound or per yard of cloth for the labor, other things being equal. The most skilful workmen, the weavers who have the greatest aptitude for their work, and others in corresponding departments, gravitate almost in spite of themselves to the best equipped factories, because in such factories they can turn off the greatest quantity of work by the piece with the least amount of effort. They earn the highest wages for themselves, while the cost of labor is diminished through their skill and aptitude. Now, will capable men and women who have a clear conception of the merit of the factory in which they desire to work be willing to live in badly situated, badly constructed and very crowded dwelling-houses? Surely not.

If ever the conditions of shelter may thus affect the profit and loss account of the factory, how much more may the conditions of the food supply, the fuel of the human boiler, affect the capacity of man or woman to do the best work. The great contractor, Brassey, long since found out and published the fact that the well-fed and highly paid British navvy was a less costly man to employ in building railroads on the continent of Europe or anywhere else than the under-fed working people of the country through which the railroad passed.

Professor Atwater has lately given great attention to the science of nutrition. I shall presently refer to his work. In dealing with the dietaries of different classes of people he struck two bodies of workmen who appeared to be consuming about double the standard ration of a German soldier when on a forced march. He thought there must have been an error; but in each case he traced that dietary to a brick yard, one in Massachusetts and one in Connecticut, - of which the owners had found out that the right way to make