This kind of child labor, be it remembered, is very different from that wholesome employment of children in the domestic industry which preceded the advent of the system of machine production. Then there was hope in the work and joy in the leisure which followed the work. Then competition was based on human qualities; man against man, hand against hand, eye against eye, brain against brain. To-day the competition is between man and the machine, the child and the man,—and even the child and the machine. Children are employed in the textile mills because their labor is cheaper than that of adults; boys are employed in the glass factories at night because their labor is cheaper to buy than machinery; children in the tenements paste the fancy boxes in which we get our candies and chocolate bonbons for the same reason. Such child labor has no other objective than the increase of employers’ profits; it has nothing to do with training the child for the work of life. On the contrary, it saps the constitution of the child, robs it of hope, and unfits it for life’s struggle. Such child labor is not educative or wholesome, but blighting to body, mind, and spirit. VIII There has been no extensive, systematic investigation in this country of the physical condition of working children. In 1893–1894 volunteer physicians examined and made measurements of some 200 children, taken from the factories and workshops of Chicago.[131] These records show a startling proportion of undersized, rachitic, and consumptive children, but they are too limited to be of more than suggestive value. So far as they go, however, they bear out the results obtained in more extensive investigations in European countries. It is the consensus of opinion among those having the best opportunities for careful observation that physical deterioration quickly follows a child’s employment in a factory or workshop.