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36 work,—the child's mind has changed from an impressionable, plastic mass, to a set, changeless thing for which education is no longer probable or even possible. The universal testimony of those who teach in night school is that children who perform monotonous labor for ten hours each day are not capable of learning when night comes. The nervous strain and the reaction from it are too great. The child under sixteen can seldom be counted upon to do intellectual work after a ten-hour day of factory monotony.

Said a boy of twenty-one who had worked for two years in a woolen mill, starting when he was thirteen: "If I had stayed in that mill, I should be dead now, or, at any rate, dead to the world. We had a good boss, but the work was awful,—not hard, but so unvarying, day after day, that it ground out your soul."

This is generally true of child labor, but all child labor is not drudgery, particularly in the small establishments where the owner can and does take a personal interest in his employees. The great evil comes with the