Although my friend was expected to help in the shop as much as possible, she was sent regularly to school and had already “graduated from the eighth grade,” when a law was passed in the Illinois legislature, popularly known as the Anti Sweat-shop Law, which, within a year, had ruined her aunts’ business. After they had been fined in court for violating the law, a case which obtained much publicity because smallpox was discovered in two of the tenement houses in which the home finishers were living, the aunts were convinced that they could not continue to give out work to the Italian and Russian Jewish women. Reluctantly foregoing their commissions they then tried crowding their own house and shop with workers, only to be again taken into court and fined when the inspector discovered their kitchen and bedrooms full of half-finished garments. They both flatly refused to go into a factory to work, and after a futile attempt to revive the tailoring business, never very genuine, they were finally reduced to the dimensions of the tiny shop itself, which, under the new regulations as to light and air could accommodate but three people. My friend was at once taken from school and made one of these ill-paid workers and the little household was held together on the pittance the three could earn. It was but natural, perhaps, that as these displaced proprietors became poorer they should ever grow more bitter against the reformers and the Trades Unionists who, between them, had secured the “high-brow” legislation which had destroyed their honest business.