OVERWORK FOR CHILDREN 193 



lungs " because " the bright eyes of these boys .must see any 

 defect in the lids of tomato cans and milk cans coming down 

 in a procession." She says " they were constantly cutting them- 

 selves, crippling their hands, and cutting off the tops of their 

 fingers in this work, because they had to seize these sharp- 

 edged things and take them out of the procession of cans if 

 there was any defect in the lid. At the end of the fourteen 

 hours of crouching on this wretched shelf the boys were so 

 tired that they often could not drag themselves home, but 

 slept in the fields near by and went back to their work the 

 next day without ever having gone home, because they were 

 too weary at the end of the work." 



Mr. Potter says that in another place he himself " has seen 

 children five, six, and seven years old working as laborers in 

 American canneries fourteen hours a day." His investigators 

 have also reported 45 children under twelve in one place, 50 

 in another ("including many small tots hardly able to walk"), 

 20 in another, working from eleven in the morning to half 

 past ten at night, etc. 



And child labor is not confined to the canneries. There are 

 thousands of child workers who spend twelve and more hours 

 a day in crowded city tenements making artificial flowers and 

 willow plumes and tips to shoe strings. Others work in glass 

 factories, coal mines, silk mills, cotton mills, cigarette factories, 

 and similar places "where each day's labor exhausts them. 1 



Just now, in the United States, there are about two million 

 of these workers under sixteen years of age. They work while 

 other children sleep and play. They do not know what it is 

 to feel well rested, well fed, and joyous. And what about the 

 children afterwards ? people are asking. Does overwork do 

 any real harm ? 



1 Even now laws are being made which will prevent all this. 



