ysical,
remains.

In the nail and chain making districts of England, Sundays are often
abolished where these furnaces flame, and such rest as can be stolen
comes on the cinder-heaps. But these workers are few compared with the
myriads who must battle with the most insidious and most potent of
enemies,--the dust of modern manufacture. There is dust of heckling
flax, with an average of only fourteen years of work for the strongest;
dust of emery powder, that has been known to destroy in a month; dust of
pottery and sand and flint, so penetrating that the medical returns give
cases of "stone" for new-born babes; dust of rags foul with dirt and
breeding fever in the picker; dust of wools from diseased animals,
striking down the sorter. Wood, coal, flour, each has its own,
penetrating where it can never be dislodged; and a less tangible enemy
lurks in poisonous paints for flowers or wall-paper, and in white lead,
the foundation of other paints,--blotching the skin of children, and
ending for many in blindness, paralysis, and hideous sores.

This is one form; and side by side with it comes another, dealt with
here and there, but as a rule ignored,--vapors as deadly as dust; vapors
of muriatic acid from pickling tins; of choking chlorine from
bleaching-rooms; of gas and phosphorus, which even now, where strongest
preventives are used, still pull away both teeth and jaws from many a
worker in match-factories; while acids used in cleaning,
bleaching-powders, and many an industry where women and children chiefly
are employed, eat into hands and clothing, and make each hour a torture.

With the countless forms of machinery for stamping and rolling and
cutting and sawing, there is yet, in spite of all the safeguards the law
compels, the saying still heard in these shops: "It takes three fingers
to make a stamper." Carelessness often; but where two must work
together, as is necessary in tending many of these machines, the
partner's inattention is often responsible, and mutilation comes through
no fault of one's own. Add to all these the suffering of little
children taught lace-making at four, sewing on buttons or picking
threads far into the night, and driven through the long hours that they
may add sixpence to the week's wage, and we have a hint of the grewsome
catalogue of the human woe born of human need and human greed.

For the United States there is a steadily lessening proportion of these
evils, and we shall deal chiefly