the boys and girls present are in the same business.
Another said he worked at coloring maps. Another blows an organ for a
music-teacher.

"At the Lord School, No. 207 Greenwich Street, the occupations of the
girls were working in hair, striping tobacco, crochet, folding paper
collars, house-work, tending baby, putting up papers in drug-store, etc,
etc."

In making but a brief survey of the employment of children outside of
our schools, we discover that there are from one thousand five hundred
to two thousand children, under fifteen years of age, employed in a
single branch--the manufacture of paper collars--while of those between
fifteen and twenty years, the number reaches some eight thousand. In
tobacco-factories in New York, Brooklyn, and the neighborhood, our
agents found children _only four years of age_--sometimes half a dozen
in a single room. Others were eight years of age, and ranged from that
age up to fifteen years. Girls and boys of twelve to fourteen years earn
from four dollars to five dollars a week. One little girl they saw,
tending a machine, so small that she had to stand upon a box eighteen
inches high to enable her to reach her work. In one room they found
fifty children; some little girls, only eight years of age, earning
three dollars per week. In another, there were children of eight and old
women of sixty, working together. In the "unbinding cellar" they found
fifteen boys under fifteen years. Twine-factories, ink-factories,
feather, pocket-book, and artificial-flower manufacture, and hundreds of
other occupations, reveal the same state of things.

It will be remembered that when Mr. Mundella, the English member of
Parliament, who has accomplished so much in educational and other
reforms in Great Britain, was here, he stated in a public address that
the evils of children's overwork seemed as great here as in England. Our
investigations confirm this opinion. The evil is already vast in New
York, and must be checked. It can only be restrained by legislation.
What have other States done in the matter?

MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATION.

The great manufacturing State of New England has long felt the evil from
children's overwork, but has only in recent years attempted to check it
by strict legislation. In 1866, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed
an act restraining "the employment of children of tender years in
manufacturing establishments," which was subsequently repealed a