breathing this poison day and night uninterruptedly. Vices of every
order flourish in such air, and morality in this trade is at lowest ebb.
Nervous excitement is so intense that necessarily nothing but immorality
can result, and the child of eight or ten is as gross and confirmed an
offender as the full-grown man or woman. Diligent search discovers few
exceptions to this rule, and the whole matter has reached a stage where
legislative interference is absolutely indispensable. Only in forbidding
tenement-house manufacture absolutely can there be any safety for either
consumer or producer.

Following in the same line of inquiry I take here the facts furnished to
Professor Adler by a lady physician whose work has long lain among the
poor. During the eighteen months prior to February 1, 1886, she found
among the people with whom she came in contact five hundred and
thirty-five children under twelve years old,--most of them between ten
and twelve,--who either worked in shops or stores or helped their
mothers in some kind of work at home. Of these five hundred and
thirty-five children but sixty were healthy. In one family a child at
three years old had infantile paralysis, easily curable. The mother had
no time to attend to it. At five years old the child was taught to sew
buttons on trousers. She is now at thirteen a hopeless cripple; but she
finishes a dozen pair of trousers a day, and her family are thus twenty
cents the richer. In another family she found twin girls four and a half
years old sewing on buttons from six in the morning till ten at night;
and near them was a family of three,--a woman who did the same work and
whose old father of eighty and little girl of six were her co-workers.

There is a compulsory education law, but it demands only fourteen weeks
of the year, and the poorer class work from early morning till eight
A. M. and after school hours from four till late in the night. With such
energy as is left they take their fourteen weeks of education, but even
in these many methods of evasion are practised. It is easy to swear that
the child is over fourteen, but small of its age, and this is constantly
done. It is sometimes done deliberately by thinking workmen, who deny
that the common school as it at present exists can give any training
that they desire for their children, or that it will ever do so till
manual training forms part of the course. But for most it is not
intelligent dissatisfaction, but the