Still the misery goes on. It increases. The tenement-house population grows larger and larger every year. The accommodations become smaller because the tendency of the rents of such property is steadily upward. There is no way of escape. Little by little the parents of the family of young children prevail upon themselves to allow children to help support the family. There is no cruelty about it in the intention of the parents. The children have little enough to interest them. Their parents are too busy to talk with them or answer any of their questions. During the day the children are in the way, and to the father and mother comes the suggestion that if the entire family were at work together there might be a closer family life. The children are quite willing to take part in whatever their parents are doing. Indeed, it is hard to keep them from doing so. So the transition for children from utter indolence to child labor is very short and easy. There are a great many businesses in a large city in which children may help their parents. Among these, the most prominent probably will be found among the clothing manufacturers and the makers of that much-abused article, the tenement-house cigar. It isn’t necessary for the reader to be frightened at the idea that cigars are made in tenement-houses, because a respectable man or woman with their children are less likely to have any habits or surroundings which will make the tobacco leaf deleterious than the workman in any famous factory in Havana. There are diseases among the operatives in Cuban cigar factories of which the less said the better. Whatever other ailments there may be in tenement-house life, these particular diseases are not to be found there. Nevertheless the idea of a man and woman and several children working ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day in a room ten feet square with a lot of decaying vegetable matter--which is exactly what leaf tobacco in the course of manufacture really is--to pollute the atmosphere about them, is not a pleasant thing. Tobacco has powerful medicinal qualities, most of which are of a poisonous nature. A small amount of nicotine, the essential principle of tobacco, has been powerfully effective either as a narcotic, or stimulant, or a germicide. The effect upon persons who handle it incessantly during a full half of every day can consequently be imagined. Every one in the room becomes irritable unless the food supply is abundant and carefully selected; every one finally becomes extremely nervous. Men and women do not well endure the life of tobacco manufacturers. To children the constant handling of the leaf is frequently poisonous. Nevertheless, a certain amount of money ought to be earned every day by the family; the father and mother are not able to do it; the children help; the family earnings are as much for the child’s sake as for the parents, and so the work goes on.