In Maine the age limit for employment is twelve years. Children of that age may be employed by day or night, provided that girls under eighteen and boys under sixteen are not permitted to work more than ten hours in the twenty-four or sixty hours in a week. In 1900 there were 117 establishments engaged in the preservation and canning of fish. Small herrings are canned and placed upon the market as “sardines.”[128] This industry is principally confined to the Atlantic coast towns,—Lubec and Eastport, in Washington County, being the main centres. I cannot speak of this industry from personal investigation, but information received from competent and trustworthy sources gives me the impression that child slavery nowhere assumes a worse form than in the “sardine” canneries of Maine. Says one of my correspondents in a private letter: “In the rush season, fathers, mothers, older children, and babies work from early morn till night—from dawn till dark, in fact. You will scarcely believe me, perhaps, when I say ‘and babies,’ but it is literally true. I’ve seen them in the present season, no more than four or five years old, working hard and beaten when they lagged. As you may suppose, being out here, far away from the centre of the state, we are not much troubled by factory inspection. I have read about the conditions in the Southern mills, but nothing I have read equals for sheer brutality what I see right here in Washington County.” In the sweatshops and, more particularly, the poorly paid home industries, the kindergartens are robbed to provide baby slaves. I am perfectly well aware that many persons will smile incredulously at the thought of infants from three to five years old working. “What can such little babies do?” they ask. Well, take the case of little Anetta Fachini, for example. The work she was doing when I saw her, wrapping paper around pieces of wire, was very similar to the play of better-favored children. As play, to be put aside whenever her childish fancy wandered to something else, it would have been a very good thing for little Anetta to do. She was compelled, however, to do it from early morning till late at night and even denied the right to sleep. For her, therefore, what might be play for some other child became the most awful bondage and cruelty. What can four-year-old babies do? Go into the nursery and watch the rich man’s four-year-old child, seated upon the rug, sorting many-colored beads and fascinated by the occupation for half an hour or so. That is play—good and wholesome for the child. In the public kindergarten, other four-year-old children are doing the same thing with zest and laughing delight. But go into the dim tenement yonder; another four-year-old child is sorting beads, but not in play. Her eyes do not sparkle with childish glee; she does not shout with delight at finding a prize among the beads. With tragic seriousness she picks out the beads and lays them before her mother, who is a