Two names signed to a child's working papers is a pretty good thing sometimes, for it often happens that selfish and lazy fathers are anxious to put their children to work, when the mothers know they are far too young.

A woman in Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me, with tears filling her eyes, that her children had been taken by their father to the silk mills as soon as they were tall enough to suit a not too exacting foreman.

"What could I say about it, when he went and got the papers ?" she sighed.
The father--not the mother--controls the services of his children.

He can collect their wages, and he does.

Very, very often he squanders the money they earn, and no one may interfere.
A family of girls in Fall River, Massachusetts, were met every pay day at the doors of the mill by their father, who exacted of each one her pay envelope, unopened.