Now for fifty-eight hours of labor a week under these conditions what do they earn? How well equipped are their pockets to fight the exhaustion, the threatening diseases which are incident to their labor? To avoid exaggeration accept the figures for 1907, one of the occasional boom years which cotton and woollen manufacturers have enjoyed in this country. The average weekly earnings for 58 hours in cotton factories in that year were: For the carding room $7.80, for mule spinners $12.92, for speeders $10.62, for weavers $10.38. In the woollen industry the picker received $8.00, the woman spinner $7.25, the man spinner $12.91, the weavers $15.34. If a man could make these wages for fifty-two weeks a year throughout his working life, if he had a thrifty wife and healthy children, his lot, if not altogether rosy, would be far from hopeless; he might even be able to realize the dream of a little home and garden of his own which lurks in the mind of every normal man, and which in the case of the textile operative is almost imperative if he is to have a decent and independent old age. For this man, however husky he may be at the start, however skilful a laborer, has always a short working life. There are few old men and women in textile factories. By 55 they are unfit for the labor. The terrible strain on brain and nerve and muscle has so destroyed the agility and power of attention necessary that they must give up the factory, where, indeed, for several years their output has probably been gradually decreasing. As almost all textile operatives are paid by the piece the wage will gradually fall off as dexterity declines. By 55, then, if not earlier, he drops out, picking up thereafter any odd job he may. It is this short working life of the father, with the declining wage for years before it actually ends, that makes child labor an essential factor in the solving of the problem of the textile family. Without the help of the child the father cannot support the family and lay aside enough to insure his own and his wife’s future. His wage, and the wear and tear he suffers, make it impossible. The child must help.