ere is always a child old enough to boil
the kettle and run for a loaf of bread; and all share the tea, which
gives a fictitious strength, laying thus the foundation for the fragile,
anaemic faces and figures to be found among the workers in the
bag-factories, paper-box manufactories, etc.

"Why don't they go into the country?" is often asked. "Why do they
starve in the city when good homes and ample pay are waiting for them?"

It is not with the class to whom this question is applicable that we
deal to-day. Of the army of two hundred thousand who battle for bread,
nearly a third have no resource but the needle, and of this third many
thousands are widows with children, to whom they cling with a devotion
as strong as wiser mothers feel, and who labor night and day to prevent
the scattering into asylums, and consequent destruction of the family as
a family. They are widows through many causes that can hardly be said to
come under the head of "natural." Drunkenness leads, and the thousand
accidents that are born of drunkenness, but there are other methods
arising from the same greed that underlies most modern civilization. The
enormous proportion of accidents, which, if not killing instantly, imply
long disability and often death as the final result, come nine tenths of
the time from criminal disregard of any ordinary means of protecting
machinery. One great corporation, owning thousands of miles of railroad,
saw eight hundred men disabled in greater or less degree in one year,
and still refused to adopt a method of coupling cars which would have
saved the lives of the sixty-eight brakemen who were sacrificed to the
instinct of economy dominating the superintendent. The same man refused
to roof over a spot where a number of freight-handlers were employed
during a stormy season, rheumatism and asthma being the consequences for
many, and his reason had at least the merit of frankness,--a merit often
lacking in explanations that, even when most plausible, cover as
essential a brutality of nature.

"Men are cheaper than shingles," he said. "There's a dozen waiting to
fill the place of one that drops out."

In another case, in a great saw-mill, the owner had been urged to
protect a lath-saw, swearing at the persistent request, even after the
day when one of his best men was led out to the ambulance, his right
hand hanging by a bit of skin, his death from lockjaw presently leaving
one more widow to swell the number. It is of