of the children sat
on the floor stripping the leaves, and another on a small stool. A girl
of twenty sat near them, and all alike had sores on lips and cheeks and
on the hands. Children from five or six years up can be taught to strip
and thus add to the week's income, which is far less for the
tenement-house manufacture than for regular factory work, the latter
averaging from eight to twelve dollars a week. But the work if done at
home can be made to include the entire family, and some four thousand
women are engaged in it, an almost equal but unregistered number of
young children sharing it with them. As in sewing, a number of women
often club together, using one room, and in such case their babies crawl
about in the filth on the wet floors, playing with the damp tobacco and
breathing the poison with which the room is saturated.

Here, as in tobacco factories, women and girls of every age become
speedily the victims of nervous and hysterical complaints, the direct
result of nicotine poisoning; while succeeding these come consumption
and throat diseases resulting from the dust. Canker is one of the most
frequent difficulties, and sores of many orders, the trade involving
more dangers than any that can be chosen. Yet because an entire family
can find occupation in it, with no necessity for leaving home, it is
often preferred to easier employment. It is the children who suffer
most, growth being stunted, nervous disease developed and ending often
in St. Vitus's dance, and skin diseases of every order being the rule,
the causes being not only tobacco, but the filth in which they live.

It is doubtful if the most inveterate smoker would feel much relish for
the cigar manufactured under such conditions; yet hundreds of thousands
go out yearly from these houses, bearing in every leaf the poison of
their preparation. In this one house nearly thirty children of all ages
and sizes, babies predominating, rolled in the tobacco which covered the
floor and was piled in every direction; and of these children under ten
thirteen were strippers and did their day's work of ten hours and more.
Physical degeneration in its worst forms becomes inevitable. Even the
factory child-worker fares better, for in the factory there is exercise
and the going to and from work, while in the tenement-house cigar-making
the worn-out little creatures crawl to the bed, often only a pile of
rags in the corner, or lie down on a heap of the tobacco itself,