Paper-box factories, embracing all sorts and sizes, from a match to a work box, employ at least 10,000 children. These become very expert, and often invent new patterns. The material being cheap, the children are permitted to take home enough to do extra work, and are thus, in fact, excluded from night school.

In regard to factories for making artificial flowers it is extremely difficult to obtain trustworthy information, as access to the shops is rigidly refused. After considerable investigation, it seems to us that from 10,000 to 12,000 children are engaged in them, of whom nearly 8000 are under twelve years of age. Many are only five and seven years old. The latter are employed preparing and cutting feathers for coloring. Employers claim this to be a healthy business, but, judging from the pale and sickly countenances of the girls, we doubt the assertion.

Another important industry employing children in the city is the manufacture of tobacco. The tobacco factories contain fully 10,000 children, of whom 5000 at least are under fifteen years. The youngest child we saw employed in them was four years of age. He was engaged in stripping tobacco, and his average earnings were about one dollar per week. Many laborers work all their lives in these factories. We saw persons as old as eighty years in them. A man seventy years of age told ns he had spent thirty years in one factory. His two boys had entered the factory with him at the age of ten and twelve years, and were now at work as men in the same shop. Another, the foreman, and general workshop manager, had entered that factory thirty-five years ago, when a boy ten years of age. In some of these factories boys under fifteen years are employed in dusky cellars and basements, preparing, brining, and sweetening the weed preliminary to "stemming." The under-ground life in these damp, cavernous places tends to keep the little workers stunted in body and mind. Other boys from ten to twelve years were squatting on the floors, whetting the knives of the cutting machines with a mixture of rum and water applied with a sponge. The rapidity with which the girls work is wonderful. A girl of sixteen years can put up thirteen gross of packages of chewing tobacco in tin-foil, and twenty-two gross in paper, in one day. Girls and boys from twelve to fourteen years earn in this business from four to five dollars per week. Some little girls only eight years of age earn $3 per week. The fact is that these children are often able to perform the same amount of this light labor as adults, while they only receive a portion of the pay given to older laborers. Thus the children who ought to be in school are made to deprive older laborers of their employment and remuneration.