slipper-beader—that is, she sews the beaded designs upon ladies’ fancy slippers. She works from morn till night, and all the while the child is seated by her side, straining her little eyes in the dim light, sorting the beads or stringing them on pieces of thread. In the “Help Wanted” columns of the morning papers, advertisements frequently appear such as the following, taken from one of the leading New York dailies:— WANTED.—Beaders on slippers; good pay; steady home work. M. B——, West —— Street. In the tenement districts women may be seen staggering along with sack loads of slippers to be trimmed with beadwork, and children of four years of age and upward are pressed into service to provide cheap, dainty slippers for dainty ladies. What can four-year-old babies do? A hundred things, when they are driven to it. “They are pulling basting threads so that you and I may wear cheap garments; they are arranging the petals of artificial flowers; they are sorting beads; they are pasting boxes. They do more than that. I know of a room where a dozen or more little children are seated on the floor, surrounded by barrels, and in those barrels is found human hair, matted, tangled, and blood-stained—you can imagine the condition, for it is not my hair or yours that is cut off in the hour of death.”[129] [Illustration: HOME “FINISHERS”: A CONSUMPTIVE MOTHER AND HER TWO CHILDREN Both of the children work and sleep with the mother. ] There are more than 23,000 licensed “home factories” in New York City alone, 23,000 groups of workers in the tenements licensed to manufacture goods. How difficult it is to protect children employed in these tenement factories can best be judged by the following incident: Two small Italian children, a boy of five and his sister aged four, left a West-side kindergarten and were promptly followed up by their kindergartner, who found that the children were working and could not, in the opinion of their mother, be spared to attend the kindergarten. They were both helping to make artificial flowers. The truant officer was first applied to and asked whether the compulsory education law could not be used to free them, part of the time at least, from their unnatural toil. But attendance at school is not compulsory before the eighth year, so that was a useless appeal. Then the factory inspector was applied to, and he showed that the work of the children was entirely legal; they received no wages and were, therefore, not “employed” in the technical sense of that term. They were working in their own family. The room was not dirty or excessively overcrowded. No law was broken, and there was no legal means whereby the enslavement of those little children might be prevented.[130]