brand of the thief is upon the offender. Every reduction in the number of children required for the performance of this work is, therefore, a gain for the morals of the working children.

The best measures yet enacted for the protection of girls in retail trade are wholly inadequate. The law above described as applying to boys in New York applies to girls also, except that girls are not required to attend night school. But this is not enough. In the interest of the public health and morals there is quite as good ground for prohibiting the employment of girls under the age of sixteen years in retail trade as in peddling in the streets. Girls cannot be kept in the close air of stores eight or more hours a day, without suffering a loss of that vitality which it is one of their most important functions during the years between ten and sixteen to store up for the uses of motherhood later on. The disadvantages arising from confinement in close air increase in proportion as growing girls are kept standing, or are subjected to crowd-, ing and excitement.

Girls are, of course, subjected to exactly the same temptations to pilfering as boys. Moreover, they are more at the mercy of the men under whose direction they work. An immoral floorwalker or head of a department possesses appalling power for evil over the lives of the girls who are subject to his direction. The public at large enjoys the freedom of every city store; and the position of little girls offering violets to all passers on the streets, is essentially not very different from that of the

young employees in retail trade. There is also enforced association with older employees who may or may not be of good character, and the readiness of girls at the most impressionable age to adopt the tone of the more striking among their older associates. Finally, there is for young girls none of the steadying influence that arises for boys out of the prospect of moving upward in the line of promotion. For girls the work which they perform before the sixteenth birthday is usually a makeshift for the sake of the immediate weekly wage which they earn at quite as great risk to their future as the messenger boys. On behalf of the girls under the age of sixteen years employed in retail trade only the most adverse reply can be given to the question, "What kind of citizens are being trained here?"

Meanwhile, pending the enactment of a measure which shall place retail trade in the same category as street peddling for girls under the age of sixteen years, the shortening of the hours of work by the statutes of 1903 in New York and Illinois marks a substantial gain.

So far as they are enforced, they will make an end of such spectacular cruelty as the writer witnessed, in December, 1902, à few weeks before their enactment. Returning late at night from the long rehearsal of the Musical Arts Society, at Carnegie Hall, some ten days before Christmas, and forced to wait for a car at Broadway and Grand street, she found there at eleven o'clock a dozen little girls, between ten and fourteen years of age. They proved to be neighbors and eagerly poured forth

the story of their day. They had reported for work at 7:30 in the morning, the stores opening at eight o'clock. They had had scant time for luncheon, and worked again until supper time. Then, in one store they were given ten cents each and in another store a meal ticket. Several meal tickets proved worthless because there was nothing left to eat at the late hour at which the children were allowed to stop working. After supper, all had worked again. until ten o'clock when they had been sent home. After waiting half an hour for a car, it was proposed to walk home together; but one little girl sat down on the curb stone, crying and saying that she could not walk, if she never reached home. The others stayed with her in the cold of December with midnight approaching, little victims of the cruelty that, year after year, travesties the Christmas sea

son.

A boy well known to the writer described as follows his experience of the shortened workinghours: "I fill a bin with packages, ready for the driver to put on his wagon. I begin at seven and work all day. A wagon goes out at eight in the evening. Then I fill my bin for the driver to put in his wagon, ready for the morning, the first trip. I stay by the bin until ten, waiting for the last parcels bought just before closing time to come down to me. When the store closes at six, the last of these come down by ten. Then I can go home. When the store used to be open until eight I went home at midnight. When it was open until ten, I went home at two in the morning. But when I

am ready to go home, the little gatherers come around, gathering up paper, string, broken toys, and all the rubbish that accumulates on the floor in the holiday rush. When the gatherers have finished, the scrubbers come along and clean the floors, and the gatherers generally go home about the same time as the scrubbers, two hours later than I go home."

Henceforth, no child under the age of sixteen years can be legally employed after ten o'clock at night in New York or after seven o'clock in Chicago. The change for the children employed in the retail stores in Chicago, to be derived from this new statute, is illustrated by another winter-night observation of the writer made some years ago when returning from the Auditorium after the usual Christmas rendering of the Messiah. The oratorio had been long, there had been delays, and it was nearly eleven o'clock when the cars turned the corner at Adams street to go west and then southward. There were the usual grip-car and two trailers of the cable-train then used on the streets of Chicago. All were quite empty when they stopped. When they started again, all were crowded with children and half-grown girls from the great department stores. Many of the children could not get inside the cars, but stood huddled on the platforms and the grip-car, exposed to the falling snow after their long day in the overheated air of the stores. Some of the little girls fell asleep, others clung to straps, laughing or crying hysterically. All had gone to work in the early morning;

all expected to return to work-some at seven o'clock the next morning, others at eight.

The writer and her companion were the only adult passengers, and when they left the car the weary children continued their journey with only the gripman and conductor. Some of them would go to the end of the car-route, and then stumble. wearily through deep snow in the winter midnight far across the prairie to their homes.

Children in Manufacture. The presence of children in mills began with the division of labor, and the development of machinery driven by steam. It was a feature of the civilization of the nineteenth century, but reached no large dimensions in the United States before 1870. Since then it has increased and continues to increase wherever no counter order is given by restraining laws rendered effective by alert and organized public opinion.

It has been shown that the end of childhood and the beginning of toil is an undetermined epoch. Even where, as in New York and Illinois, manufacture and commerce are closed to children under the age of fourteen years, street-life, tenement-work and the drudgery of the "little-mothers" may occupy the earlier years. In less enlightened states, manufacture and commerce are open to children at an earlier age, until in Georgia1 there is no statutory protection.

As to the age at which children may begin to work in manufacture, the evolution of the public conscience may be observed at every stage, from

1 See Appendix I.