by the Factory Inspector, but had successfully barricaded
himself behind his pile of certificates. I caught the children laughing
and making faces at us behind our backs as often as these were brought out
anywhere. In an Attorney Street "pants" factory we counted thirteen boys
and girls who could not have been of age, and on a top floor in Ludlow
Street, among others, two brothers, sewing coats, who said that they were
thirteen and fourteen, but, when told to stand up, looked so ridiculously
small as to make even their employer laugh. Neither could read, but the
oldest could sign his name and did it thus, from right to left:

[Illustration: (signature)]

It was the full extent of his learning, and all he would probably ever
receive.

He was one of many Jewish children we came across who could neither read
nor write. Most of them answered that they had never gone to school. They
were mostly those of larger growth, bordering on fourteen, whom the
charity school managers find it next to impossible to reach, the children
of the poorest and most ignorant immigrants, whose work is imperatively
needed to make both ends meet at home, the "thousand" the school census
failed to account for. To banish them from the shop serves no useful
purpose. They are back the next day, if not sooner. One of the Factory
Inspectors told me of how recently he found a little boy in a sweat-shop
and sent him home. He went up through the house after that and stayed up
there quite an hour. On his return it occurred to him to look in to see
if the boy was gone. He was back and hard at work, and with him were two
other boys of his age who, though they claimed to have come in with dinner
for some of the hands, were evidently workers there.

So much for the sweat-shops. Jewish, Italian, and Bohemian, the story is
the same always. In the children that are growing up, to "vote as would
their master's dogs if allowed the right of suffrage," the community reaps
its reward in due season for allowing such things to exist. It is a kind
of interest in the payment of which there is never default. The physician
gets another view of it. "Not long ago," says Dr. Annie S. Daniel, in the
last report of the out-practice of the Infirmary for Women and Children,
"we found in such an apartment five persons making cigars, including the
mother. Two children were ill with diphtheria. Both parents attended to
the children; they would syringe the nose of each child and,