in Miss Agnes de Lima’s report of conditions in Passaic, New Jersey, we find the same tale of penalized, prostrate motherhood, bearing the crushing burden of economic injustice and cruelty; the same blind but overpowering instincts of love and hunger driving young women into the factories to work, night in and night out, to support their procession of uncared for and undernourished babies.  It is the married women with young children who work on the inferno-like shifts.  They are driven to it by the low wages of their husbands.  They choose night work in order to be with their children in the daytime.  They are afraid of the neglect and ill-treatment the children might receive at the hands of paid caretakers.  Thus they condemn themselves to eighteen or twenty hours of daily toil.  Surely no mother with three, four, five or six children can secure much rest by day.

“Take almost any house”—­we read in the report of conditions in New Jersey—­“knock at almost any door and you will find a weary, tousled woman, half-dressed, doing her housework, or trying to snatch an hour or two of sleep after her long night of work in the mill. ...  The facts are there for any one to see; the hopeless and exhausted woman, her cluttered three or four rooms, the swarm of sickly and neglected children.”

These women claimed that night work was unavoidable, as their husbands received so little pay.  This in spite of all our vaunted “high wages.”  Only three women were found who went into the drudgery of night work without being obliged to do so.  Two had no children, and their husbands’ earnings were sufficient for their needs.  One of these was saving for a trip to Europe, and chose the night shift because she found it less strenuous than the day.  Only four of the hundred women reported upon were unmarried, and ninety-two of the married women had children.  Of the four childless married women, one had lost two children, and another was recovering from a recent miscarriage.  There were five widows.  The average number of children was three in a family.  Thirty-nine of the mothers had four or more.  Three of them had six children, and six of them had seven children apiece.  These women ranged between the ages of twenty-five and forty, and more than half the children were less than seven years of age.  Most of them had babies of one, two and three years of age.

At the risk of repetition, we quote one of the typical cases reported by Miss De Lima with features practically identical with the individual cases reported from Rhode Island.  It is of a mother who comes home from work at 5:30 every morning, falls on the bed from exhaustion, arises again at eight or nine o’clock to see that the older children are sent off to school.  A son of five, like the rest of the children, is on a diet of coffee,—­milk costs too much.  After the children have left for school, the overworked mother again tries to sleep, though the small son bothers her a great deal.  Besides, she must clean