conditions in all the match factories together. We found in this factory eleven hundred employees, mostly boys from nine to fifteen years of age, working from 4 A. M. to 8:30 P. M., with a short intermission for meals. They work an average of fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no Sunday of rest. The boys receive from six to twelve cents and the men about twenty-five cents gold a day. The poisonous fumes of the white or "yellow" phosphorus and the dust from the other chemicals burned our lungs within half an hour. Some seventy men and boys in this plant have to visit the hospital each day for treatment. Many suffer from "phossy jaw," where the bones of the face decay on account of the cheap grade of phosphorus used. Such chemicals have been outlawed in all countries having any regard for the welfare of labor. They constitute a menace and a challenge to China to remove these inhuman conditions.

We next visited a Chinese factory making the most beautiful rugs for use in the homes of millionaires in America and China. But who are making these rugs? Twelve hundred boys and young men, from nine to twenty-five years of age, are here employed. The foremen receive $8.00 while other men average $4.50 a month and their food. Men and boys are working on an average of nearly sixteen hours a day, from 5:30 A. M. to 10 P. M. The majority of the boys serve as apprentices for a period of three years and receive no pay whatever during this period but only their food. This "apprenticeship" is only a blind alley. After the boys serve three years they are then discharged and other boys are taken on to fill their places on the same terms. When they are "graduated" from their apprenticeship, they can become ricksha coolies and earn an average of fifteen to twenty-five cents a day. The fifty thousand ricksha pullers in Peking average less than this amount.

After five or six years of this work they are usually broken in health and are then useless. These conditions are not due to modern industry for they existed before its entrance into China.

The third plant visited was a Chinese tannery run by a Christian. The conditions here are said to be the best of all the smaller factories in the city. The usual sixteen hours of work a day is reduced by this Christian employer to ten. Men and boys earn from $5.50 to $8.50 a month. Apprentices sleep in a loft above the shop, and in addition to their food and clothes, receive thirty-five cents a month during the first year, a dollar a month the second and $4.00 a month, or thirteen cents a day, the third year. The industrial department of the Y. M. C. A. is permitted to put on a program of welfare work, athletics and games for the workers. It was most touching to see the faces of these boys light up with gratitude when they saw the industrial secretary of the Y. M. C. A. enter the shop. He knows them personally and is bringing a ray of light into the hearts of hundreds of these weary little toilers.

The fourth factory was a Chinese weaving establishment making cloth upon primitive hand looms. At present there are 15,000 boys in the city working on these looms. In normal times there are 25,000 employed but many are now out of work. The wages paid to the men average $4.50 a month, or about fifteen cents a day. One manager informed us that in most of the factories the workers average eighteen hours a day, from 5 A. M. to 11 P. M., with short intermissions for meals, working seven days a week. The majority of the boys are apprentices who receive no wage whatever, only their food. They are going without education and are among the 80 million in China who are out of school with no educational provision whatever for them.

All of the examples given above are of primitive cottage or home industries prevalent in China.

Apprentices are frequently hired out by their poor parents for no pay whatever, simply to relieve them of the burden of having to feed them at a cost of six cents a day. The grim struggle for existence among the silent millions in China is tragic. No other people on earth could stand it.

Let us now examine working conditions in Shanghai. We visited a modern cotton mill under Chinese management in the early hours of the morning. Here girls and boys from seven to twelve years of age are working twelve hours each on the day and night shifts and receiving eight cents a day. Women of all ages are earning about fifteen cents for twelve hours work. Common laborers are paid from fifteen to eighteen cents, while skilled workers receive from twenty to thirty cents a day. Down the long rows of machines we occasionally see a woman who has fallen asleep before daybreak over her work. Here and there babies are asleep on piles of waste or playing about the machines at which their mothers work during the long night.

It is now 5:30 A. M. and the night workers are just pouring out of the cotton mill. This motley mass of humanity comprise all ages from one to sixty years, the babies being carried in the arms of their mothers. Here is a woman who has earned fourteen cents for her long night's toil leading her child of twelve who has earned seven cents. The mother, who is hobbling along on her bound feet, is carrying a small baby that is forced to spend half of its life in the roaring factory where it will play about the machines until it is old enough to work. Here are wheelbarrows, each pushed by a man, carrying eight women with bound feet or feeble ankles a mile or so to their homes, at a cost of fifty-two cents a month from their slender wages. The chimneys are belching forth black clouds of smoke

over the teeming city on this dark winter morning, while the alleys and streets are pouring forth their streams of human life back into the ceaseless roar of the giant factories.

We note a casual line in the newspaper telling of a little girl under twelve years of age, dragged into the machinery by the feet while asleep after four o'clock in the morning. But why are little girls under twelve working in these factories at that time of night? Each morning before daylight we hear the hoarse note of the whistles throughout the city calling the weary toilers back to their work for the day, and relieving the fatigued men, women and children from the long night shift in these mills.

We noted the following in the China Press on November 29, 1922: "A Chinese woman employed in a cotton mill on Gordon Road was choked to death yesterday when her scarf caught and dragged her into the machinery. The scarf twisted and tightened about her neck until she dropped dead from strangulation." The modern factories of the industrial revolution are strangling the life out of thousands in Asia today physically, mentally and spiritually.

We visited a silk filature where a thousand employees toil from 5:30 A. M. to 6 P. M. Here we found little girls six years old earning ten cents a day. Here are mothers working with nursing babies lying on the floor beside them. The children learn to work as soon as they are able to walk. Here they toil in the hot steam, their hands deftly manipulating the cocoons in the boiling water. The employers say the agile hands of little children are best adapted to this rapid work.

We next visited the dwellings of these workers. Here is a carpenter who has courteously invited us into his "home." His neck is full of running sores from scrofula,

pouring out tubercular infection to the several families crowded in one small house. He is earning thirty-five cents a day, or about ten dollars a month, to support his family of three. Here in a two-story house that is subdivided into little rooms, dark holes and shelves, forty people, including four families and their relatives, try to live. We found one room ten feet square with ten people living in it, half sleeping during the day and half during the night shift. They have no stove in the room and no chimney to carry out the smoke from the fire under an iron pot in which all the cooking is done. There was no latrine or lavatory in the house, but simply a bucket in this room where day and night ten people, men, women and children, cook, eat, sleep and live. "Live!" No, rather exist!

The house opens on a filthy alley six feet wide which is little more than an open latrine. Several children were suffering from sore eyes while others in the alley had running sores on their heads and faces caused solely by filth and lack of care. There is, of course, no bath room nor place to wash in these crowded quarters. We climbed up broken stairs to a loft where we found several dark rooms divided into shelves. Each hole rented for a dollar a month. Some were so dark we could not at first see whether there were inmates or not.

The five other in

Here is one shelf serving as a home for six people with just room enough to lie side by side. One man is dying of tuberculosis, coughing day and night. mates are packed in with him on this shelf, which rents for $1.15 per month. For these masses, these human "personalities," there is no available park, no playground, church, Y. M. C. A., club or reading room. They cannot read or write. Life is bounded by the factory, one dark street, and the hole or hovel in which they exist. As we came out of this house a flock of crows was perched upon a neighbor