668 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



aided, handicapped, and sometimes intimidated by unprogressive 

 employers. When measures come before our Legislatures to bet- 

 ter the conditions under which females toil in shops and mills, 

 and to raise the age limit after which the child may be con- 

 demned to labor, women, with noble exceptions like Mrs. Jose- 

 phine Shaw Lowell, are conspicuously absent, while even many 

 clergymen enroll themselves on the side of laissez faire. True, 

 our sex is conservative, frightened by prophecies of socialist rule? 

 inclined to regard factory legislation as anarchistic instead of 

 remedial and preventive. Another feminine inconsistency is that 

 women busy themselves and beset the Solons about paupers and 

 the degraded, about institutions and charities, though refusing to 

 lift a hand or lend their indorsement to obtain protective legisla- 

 tion for respectable, self-sustaining working women and helpless 

 children, who from dependence for employment on the favor of 

 merchants and manufacturers are unable to speak in their own 

 behalf. Yet these patient wage-earners, if properly safe-guarded 

 from insanitary surroundings, dangerous and poisonous pursuits, 

 long hours, and excessive strain ivhile at work, would so seldom 

 be found in hospitals, institutions, poorhouses, and prisons that 

 the occupation of the board of lady managers would be gone. 



Throughout the Union child labor is surely diminishing, as a 

 result of growing public disapproval and of factory laws in half 

 the States ; but in large cities and in States that have inadequate 

 factory inspection — practically all except Massachusetts — and no 

 age limit for employment, the mill child and the "cash" child 

 alike are victims of the same evils — low vitality, premature 

 breakdown, dense ignorance, transient employment from shop to 

 shop, and unthrifty habits. Some callings are positively fatal 

 to children ; other vocations cause them to be stunted, crooked, 

 or atrophied — a race apart, haggard, wizened, old. The ignorance 

 of working children is often appalling. They do not know their 

 age or birthplace, or the name of the country they live in. They 

 can read and write no language. To say that these little toilers 

 are learning trades is the cruelest falsehood. Whether engaged 

 only in what seem easy and harmless pursuits, standing in stores 

 till eleven o'clock at night in holiday season, in a candy factory 

 one week, in a box shop the next ; whether trotting after the 

 mule spinners thirty miles a day, or running forty miles a day 

 fetching and carrying for the glass-blowers ; whether tending 

 cutting presses that chop off their fingers, or gilding frames whose 

 metal poison paralyzes their hands, or roasting slowly before 

 cracker ovens, the working children under fourteen years old are 

 nearly everywhere the same — dwarfed, physically defective, men- 

 tally benighted, demoralized, unstable, migratory. " Little won- 

 der," says Mrs. Stevens, Assistant Factory Inspector of Illinois, 



