Here and there, even in the great cities, an exceptional woman may be found who has endured to middle life, or even longer, this double strain, and has brought up children creditable in every way. Such rare women are usually immigrants of peasant stock, fresh from rural life in the old country, and merely serve, exceptions as they are, to prove the rule. Whether the wage-earning mother leaves home, or brings her work into the home, her children pay the penalty. If she is away, they are upon the street or locked into their rooms. From the street to the court is but a short step. From the locked room to the grave has been for unknown thousands of children a step almost as short, many having been burned and others reduced by the long intervals between feedings to that exhaustion in which any disease is fatal. Most dangerous of all to the young victims of their mothers’ absence, are the unskilled ministrations of older sisters, those hapless little girls ironically known as “little mothers.” These keep neither the babies nor the nursing bottles clean; nor do they keep the milk cool and shielded from flies. They have no regular hours for feeding or naps. They let the baby fall, or tumble down stairs with it. And in all the cruel process their own backs grow crooked and they are robbed of school life and of the care-free hours of play. Even where the mother does her industrial work at home, the older girl suffers from the delegated care of the younger children, and there is a strong tendency for the dwelling to be dirty and neglected, and for all the children to be pressed into service at the earliest possible moment, at cost of school attendance and of play. Homework, which is peculiarly the domain of married women, forces rents up, because the worker must be near the factory. This promotes congestion of population, to the advantage of no one but the landowner. Even the employer is injured by the presence in the market of a body of homeworking women. By their cheapness he is tempted to defer installing the newest machines and most up-to-date methods. Enlightened employers who do make such provision have competing against them the parasite employers who drag out an incompetent existence because they can extort from their homeworking employes the contribution to their running expenses of rent, heat, light and cleaning.