O some natures there is a subtle, compelling potency in mere figures. Marshalled against every reform movement there are the doubters and unbelievers who must have figures; cold, dismal figures to supplement the poverty of their imaginations. Notwithstanding the health-wrecking conditions under which the boy and girl workers in mills, glassfactories and collieries are employed, there remain a few skeptics who declare that the youngsters are accustomed to the work and that it doesn't actually injure them. To these prosaic creatures the deadly air loaded with lint, or filled with flying glass and poisonous gases, or blackened with the gritty coal dust that pierces every tissue of the little workers' bodies, makes no appeal. Luckily, history in repeating itself has left startling evidence of the cumulative effect upon whole communities of undermining the

This is the second of two articles on Child Labor, the first of which appeared in the March issue.-Ed.

health of the people by working the little children in factories.

In America's fight for the freedom of her child slaves, she is a century behind England. It was one hundred years ago that Richard Oastler championed the cause of England's tiny industrial martyrs. He told of the ravaging effects upon little half-grown children, of the long hours, the weekly pittance which barely fed them, and the terrible conditions under which they labored. It has remained for figures secured during the Boer War to show how literally and pathetically true his statements were. When the Boer War broke out the children who were working at eight, nine and ten years of age in Oastler's time had grown up, their own children had gone through the mills, and still another generation had taken their places at the looms. Then the sad tragedy of three generations of factory workers was told in a single sentence. Out of eleven thousand men examined for the army in the great manufacturing town of Manchester, ten thou

sand could not measure up to the requirements of the service! Only one man in eleven of the merchants, laborers, clerks and mill hands was healthy enough to pass a fair medical examination!

What the factories and cotton mills have done for England, the factories and cotton mills are doing for the United States. They are creating a race dwarfed in mind and body. We, in America, are beginning to have our factory type-thin, wan, sallow-faced, spindle-legged children, an army of sickly bits of humanity vainly trying to shoulder their unnatural burdens. It is pitiful to see how quickly you can recognize that peculiar sickly pallor and blank, expressionless face. The mill and factory worker-child has become a distinct type in our American life.

There are eighty thousand of these blighted tots throwing their lives away in the textile mills of the United States. Mr. Felix Adler, chairman of the na

tional child labor committee, stated in Chicago recently that there are now 60,000 children under fourteen years of age working in the South, as compared with 24,000 a few years ago. The majority of them are employed in the textile mills. The North also supports a large cotton mill industry, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts being heavy manufacturers of cotton cloth.

In the cotton mills you can see the little girls tending the spinning frames or darting after broken threads in the weaving machines. There is such an endless succession of these simple motions, the work is so mechanical that the children appear to be automatons, little trip-hammers attached to the great machines. But it is a shadow pantomime. You can't hear them cough from the lint-the tragedy of their lives is lost in the loud rattle and jar of the looms. As in the case of the breaker boys, the same travesty of justice is enacted over the age certificates where the laws are strict. The mill owners do not even keep their agreements among themselves. Little children of ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen still work at the factories in states where the law places a fourteen-year limit. In Georgia where there was a manufacturers' agreement to employ absolutely no child under ten years of age, and children under twelve in case only of extreme poverty, investigators found in one factory but a single case where poverty justified the employment of the child, and in addition they found a child of seven who had been working for one year, one of thirteen who had been working for five years, one of nine who had been working for two years, one of eight for one year, one of ten for two years, and one little girl of eleven who had been working for five years. These facts were secured by the national child labor committee and are sworn to in affidavits.

These tiny children who should be in school have to struggle against a double evil. They keep up under the terrible working conditions at the cotton mills. and then at night must return home after a nine, ten, sometimes a twelve hour day, to the poor food and dingy tenement which their little wage will provide. The child, with its brothers and

sisters and parents, probably lives in one or two rooms. It is all they can afford, even with the aid of the child's meager earnings.

President Roosevelt in one of his messages to Congress speaks very decisively about these living conditions of the factory workers. He says:

"The poorest families in tenement houses live in one room and it appears that in these oneroom tenements the average death rate for a number of cities at home and abroad is about twice what it is in a two-room tenement, four times what it is in a three-room tenement, and eight times what it is in a tenement consisting of four rooms or more.

then go to the consumer laden with disease germs. After the baby gets a little older, if a girl, she hasn't time to be sick. At three years of age she ceases to be a burden on the family and starts to earn her own living. She pulls out the basting threads in the garments after her mother has finished them. As soon as she is old enough to handle a needle she

This question of living conditions affects the childlabor problem most vitally in the sweat-shop practices. There has been so much agitation about the sweatshop evil that the factory. inspectors in the larger cities at least have done something toward bettering the conditions of the workers. Their pay, however, remains incredibly meager and home work is still as unhealthy as ever. In the sweatshops there are found few violations of the child labor laws, but the contract system of home finishing allows work to be done at home by the piece. The conditions are the most unhealthy that can be imagined. The family all work, sleep and eat in the same room. If the baby is sick it is placed on a heap of unfinished garments. These clothes

begins to sew on buttons. Button-holes are the next step in the work and soon the child becomes a fullfledged finisher.

"But how much work can a child three years old do?" we asked a factory inspector.

"Oh, she can get in about two hours' work a day. Why, when a girl gets to be ten, eleven and twelve years old she works as many hours a day as she is years old."

"Do they actually have. to work like that? How much money do they make ?" "The smaller children make from fifty cents to a dollar a week. The older workers make from five to ten cents an hour. If they work hard enough they may make as high as nine or ten dollars a week. But you see they work on the piecesystem, and they cannot always get the work to do."

"Not long ago," continued the inspector, "we came across a mother and three little children, the oldest twelve years of age. The two younger children were not working, but the girl twelve years old and her mother, by working until one o'clock in the morning, could make sixty-three cents a day. They were not very highly skilled finishers. We had the mother examined by a physician, who said she was aenemic from insufficient food. The case was referred to a charity organization which provided funds so that the children could go to school."

Life is certainly real and earnest to

A NINE-YEAR-OLD CYNIC, WHO LOOKS ON ALL THE WORLD WITH SUSPICION.

these little ones. They are neglected until their baby fingers are strong enough to pick up a thread and pull it and then they are guarded with care-from outside interference-so that the greatest amount of work may be gotten out of them.

The ways in which children under age are employed are legion. And the astonishing thing is the amount and quality of the work they do. The buttonholes which these baby fingers sew are neat and perfect. The children early become skilled at their dreary task, One social worker found a little girl eleven years old who turned in the edges of 9,000 paper box-covers in a day of twelve and a half hours. Some of the work is extremely dangerous. Boys working in dyeing rooms get their skins saturated with the dye. In case they get cut or the skin becomes broken in any way they are poisoned, perhaps fatally. Children working in basement cigar factories where the cheap stogies are manufactured soon fall prey to consumption. The life of the messenger boy is as bad

for his morals as glass working would be for his health. The boy's great champion and friend, Judge Ben. J. Lindsey, of Denver, declared recently:

"I am told that there are 2,500 boys who go through the messenger service in this city; and if that is the case, you have got 2,500 boys most of whom have started on the road to hell, in this town."

But child labor is not only ruining our children physically and morally, but it is undermining our most sacred institutions. It has crept into every branch of business life. From the shipyards to the railway train, from the mine to the mill, the factory to the business office. If you walk down the street you see little boys under fourteen carrying bundles for great mercantile houses. You step into the shops and see them wrapping bundles, and perhaps working after seven o'clock at night. You go to the theater and listen to the performance of a boy prodigy only six or seven years old. The newsboys are a large class of boy workers, but the law holds that they are merchants, they buy and sell. Therefore, they may go to work as soon as they are old enough to keep the bigger fellows from stealing their papers.

When large coal mining interests or manufacturers are affected by a movement to enforce even the meager child

Two LITTLE GIRLS WHOSE DAYLIGHT WORLD IS BOUNDED BY THE LIMITS OF THE AISLE BETWEEN MACHINES.