hile he was shining away, I suddenly asked him how old
he was. "Fourteen, sir!" he replied promptly, without looking up.

In a Hester Street house we found two little girls pulling basting-thread.
They were both Italians and said that they were nine. In the room in which
one of them worked thirteen men and two women were sewing. The child could
speak English. She said that she was earning a dollar a week and worked
every day from seven in the morning till eight in the evening. This
sweat-shop was one of the kind that comes under the ban of the new law,
passed last winter--that is, if the factory inspector ever finds it. Where
the crowds are greatest and the pay poorest, the Italian laborer's wife
and child have found their way in since the strikes among the sweater's
Jewish slaves, outbidding even these in the fierce strife for bread.

Even the crowding, the feverish haste of the half-naked men and women, and
the litter and filth in which they worked, were preferable to the silence
and desolation we encountered in one shop up under the roof of a Broome
Street tenement. The work there had given out--there had been none these
two months, said the gaunt, hard-faced woman who sat eating a crust of dry
bread and drinking water from a tin pail at the empty bench. The man sat
silent and moody in a corner; he was sick. The room was bare. The only
machine left was not worth taking to the pawnshop. Two dirty children,
naked but for a torn undershirt apiece, were fishing over the stair-rail
with a bent pin on an idle thread. An old rag was their bait.

From among a hundred and forty hands on two big lofts in a Suffolk Street
factory we picked seventeen boys and ten girls who were patently under
fourteen years of age, but who all had certificates, sworn to by their
parents, to the effect that they were sixteen. One of them whom we judged
to be between nine and ten, and whose teeth confirmed our diagnosis--the
second bicuspids in the lower jaw were just coming out--said that he had
worked there "by the year." The boss, deeming his case hopeless, explained
that he only "made sleeves and went for beer." Two of the smallest girls
represented themselves as sisters, respectively sixteen and seventeen, but
when we came to inquire which was the oldest, it turned out that she was
the sixteen-year one. Several boys scooted as we came up the stairs. When
stopped they claimed to be visitors. I was told that this sweater had been
arrested once