Whatever the nature of the Illinois investigation, I am certain that in my own experience the proportion of cases in which there is actual dependence upon what the children earn is very much larger. It must not be forgotten in discussing this question that although a child may earn only $1.50 a week, that sum may mean a great deal to the family. It may mean the difference between living in a comparatively good house on a decent street and going to a foul tenement in a bad neighborhood. It may mean the difference between coal and no coal in winter, or ice and no ice in summer. As a poor woman said to me quite recently, “Joe only earns thirty cents a day, but that thirty cents means supper for all five in the family.” The investigations of Mr. Nichols in the coal-mining and textile-manufacturing towns,[150] of Mr. Kellogg Durland,[151] and, particularly, the inquiries made in New Jersey concerning the immediate effects of the Child Labor Law of 1904,[152] all tend to show that the dependence of families upon children’s earnings is much greater than the Illinois figures would indicate. I venture the opinion that there is not a Settlement worker in America who has studied this problem whose experience would confirm the optimism of the Illinois investigators. I am certain that within a radius of three blocks from the little Settlement in which this is written, and with which I am at present most familiar, there are more families known to be absolutely dependent upon the earnings of young children than were found in the whole State of Illinois, according to the report quoted. I know of at least twice as many such families as were found in Illinois living in this little city with its population of about sixty thousand as against the nearly 5,000,000 in Illinois. Settlement workers in various parts of the country have, without exception, declared the Illinois report to be absolutely at variance with their experience. In the hope that I might be able to gather sufficient accurate data to warrant some fairly definite conclusions upon this point, I spent several weeks making careful personal investigations into the matter in four states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. I made inquiries into 213 cases, first getting the children’s stories and then carefully investigating them. The results are clearly set forth in the accompanying schedule, but explanation of a few points may be helpful to the reader.