I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the children under age into the stores, where they find employment as "cash" girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are as rare as angels' visits. I do not believe this is true to any great extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the Working Women's Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger. Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour spent in going through such a store tires many grown persons more than a whole day's work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their strength. An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be wanting to smooth the way for them.