THE FACTORY GIRLS What becomes of all the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital--children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become large male and female fish?
Disease wields a broad broom in the earliest age.

The harbour takes them into its embrace; the streets with their stray livelihoods, or a wandering vagabond life, takes them; refuges, police-stations, prisons and the house of correction take them.

In later years, labour also, on a great scale, has taken them into its embrace--the factory doors stand wide open.
People who now and then have an attack of conscientious scruples about existences to which they may possibly stand in original relationship, can draw a sigh of relief.

The responsibility is at any rate diminished, as the chances now are that they will be drawn into Labour's educating wheel; and then, too, the matter is in certain respects carried over into moral territory.
There they sat, the more ripely-developed youth of the town, in rows up in the rooms of the Veyergang firm's great factory, and minded the whirring shuttles, balls and rollers--Swedish Lena, and Stina, and Kristofa, and Kalla, and Josefa and Gunda, and all the rest of them.

Had any one asked them about their parents, they would now and then have been hard put to it for an answer.
The conversation went on very busily at the top of the room; it was even continued with nods and glances whenever one or other of the controlling authorities turned his steps in that direction.