self, appears most widely responsible for the
fatigue described by the operatives whose trade histories have been
narrated. Further, speeding and long hours were responsible for the most
drastic experience of exhaustion related among all the factory workers
encountered--the experience of Elena and Gerda Nikov, who were employed
not at machines, but in handiwork so delicate it might with more accuracy
be called a handicraft.

The exhaustion of these workers was partly attributable to their custom
of pursuing their trade not only in factory hours, but outside the
factory, at home. Within the last year, the most widely constructive
effort to abolish sweated home labor from the needle trades ever
undertaken in this country has been initiated by the New York cloak
makers, to whom we next turned for an account of their industrial
fortunes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: These testimonies are cited from the brief for the Illinois
Ten-Hour Law, prepared by Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark.

_Investigations into the Conditions of Health of the Swiss Factory
Workers._ Dr. Fridlion Schuler, Swiss Factory Inspector, and Dr. A. E.
Burckhardt, Professor of Hygiene.

"Instead of becoming wearied by personal labor, as in earlier stages of
industry, it is to-day the unremitting, tense concentration of watching
the machine, the necessary rapidity of motion, that fatigues the worker."

_Dangerous Trades._ Thomas Oliver, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P. London. 1902.

"The introduction of steam has revolutionized industry.... While
machinery has, in some senses, lightened the burden of human toil it has
not diminished fatigue in man. While the machinery pursues its relentless
course, and insensitive to fatigue, human beings are conscious,
especially towards the end of the day, that the competition is unequal,
for their muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded. Present-day
factory labor is too much a competition of sensitive human nerve and
muscle against insensitive iron."

_Fourteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography_, Berlin,
September, 1907. Fatigue Resulting from Occupation. Dr. Emil Roth,
Regierungsrat, Potsdam.

"With the progressive division of labor, work has become more and more
mechanical. A definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially
neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony--to the absence of
spontaneity or joy in work."

_Proceedings of the First International Convention on Indu