In the manufacture of clothing the details, so far as they affect human life, are not so injurious. But one commercial result is always perceptible in a short time. Those operatives who can avail themselves of child labor are enabled to underbid their associates, who are also their competitors. Consequently it is a very short time before the income of the family is no larger than it already had been, while the number of persons occupied in earning it has doubled and perhaps trebled. Just think a moment what all this really implies. A number of people are excluded from all possibility of exercise or recreation and exciting themselves to the utmost to accomplish a given amount of work in a specified time. Children are quicker than grown people to respond to any exciting influence, and the most enthusiastic workers in tenement-house rooms will always be found to be the children. Sometimes this amuses the parents, occasionally it interests them, but more often it is extremely pathetic. To see a child at an early age absorbed in the details of the battle of life would horrify any one of us, yet 100,000 children of this kind can be found in the city of New York, and a large number of them can be found in any one of forty or fifty specified blocks. There is only one end to this sort of thing. Persistent stimulation and entire lack of recreation or exercise must have a debasing and dangerous effect upon any physique. Much more must this be the case regarding children. Boys and girls are not driven to work as they were in England forty or fifty years ago. They are not flogged if they do not accomplish a certain amount of work in a given time, as they used to be under the good old English customs. But they are just as thoroughly destroyed, physically and mentally, as if they were under taskmasters who were not their own parents.