ven until eleven o'clock at night,
while blacksmiths and carpenters and wheelwrights would be working
away as if it were morning. Many of the factories recently started
keep very long hours. Indeed most of the cotton mills run day and
night, having two sets of workers, who shift their times of labor
every week. Those who work during the night hours one week take the
day hours the following week. In at least one such factory, with which
I am acquainted, the fifteen hundred girls who work from six o'clock
Saturday evening until six o'clock Sunday morning, are then supposed
to have twenty-four hours of rest before they begin their day's work
Monday morning; but, as a matter of fact, they must spend three or
four and sometimes five hours on Sunday morning cleaning up the
factory.

In a small silk-weaving factory that I know the customary hours for
work were from five in the morning until nine at night, seven days in
the week. The wife, however, of the owner became a Christian. Through
her intervention time for rest was secured on Sunday long enough for a
Bible class, which the evangelist of the place was invited to teach.
After several months of instruction a number of the hands became
Christian, and all were sufficiently interested to ask that the whole
of the Sabbath be granted to them for rest; but in order that the
master might not lose thereby, they agreed to begin work at four each
morning and to work on until ten at night. With such hours one would
have expected them to fall at once into their beds when the work of
the day was over. But for many months, at ten o'clock in the evening,
my wife and I heard them singing a hymn or two in their family
worship before retiring for the night.

In certain weaving factories I have been told that the girls are
required to work sixteen hours a day; and that on Sundays they are
allowed to have some rest, being then required to work but ten hours!
The diligence of mail deliverers, who always run when on duty, the
hours of consecutive running frequently performed by jin-irikisha men
(several have told me that they have made over sixty miles in a single
day), the long hours of persistent study by students in the higher
schools, and many kindred facts, certainly indicate a surprising
capacity for work.

But there are equally striking illustrations of an opposite nature.
The farmers and mechanics and carpenters, among regular laborers, and
the entire life of the common people in th