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Thus the essentially immoral effort to place upon the children the burden of self-maintenance not only fails at the moment,-it reacts injuriously upon the community, preparing for the next generation an undue share of incapacitated members, bequeathing to the future a large proportion of unfit and incapable citizens, and finally generating, among the people at large, indifference to the causes of death or disability of the breadwinner.

On the other hand, with the growing recognition of the right of the child to maintenance and education throughout a prolonged period, goes a lively interest in the health and welfare and probity of the normal breadwinner, who is theoretically responsible for its support.

In other words, while the demand for child labor is an economic one, the causes of its persistence are moral and social and are rooted in the false ideals of parents, employers, taxpayers, and all those indifferent people who care nothing what citizens are being trained for the future life of the Republic.

Consequences of Recognition of the Child's Right to Exemption from Work.-Wherever the community recognizes the right of the children to freedom from labor, the question of maintenance comes to the front and the widows and dependent orphans loom large in the imagination of the kindly. On the other hand, where the effort is made to place the burden of maintenance upon young children, the loss of the breadwinner appears of less vital importance to the community. Tuberculosis, carrying off heads of families, burdens the manufacturing

communities of the United States annually with thousands of widows and orphans. Preventable deaths of breadwinners in the railway service burden in the same way the communities in which their families live. If now, these communities face the task of cherishing the children and educating them throughout childhood to full fitness for citizenship, the problem of orphanage relates itself, in a new and vital way, to the question of the prevention of needless deaths of men in the prime of life. Orphanage becomes recognized, not as an accident or an inevitable misfortune for the individual family, to be borne with what fortitude can be summoned; but as a social and industrial phenomenon, a burden to be minimized by preventive and precautionary meas

ures.

It is not accidental that Massachusetts, the state which has longest guarded the right to childhood, is also the state in which the safety of life and limb of the adult worker is best safeguarded by statutory provision.

The enforcement by the Interstate Commerce Commission of statutes providing for life-saving devices to be used upon railways, has undoubtedly diminished the preventable deaths of breadwinners, reduced the number of orphans, limited the temptation to exploit young children, and thus reacted in an important way to the ethical gain of the nation, quite aside from its direct value to the railway employees.

When young children are made ineligible as breadwinners, the responsibility is placed where it belongs, upon their parents or upon the community. And

there is nothing more moralizing going on at present in the United States than this shifting of responsibility from the weaker to the stronger.

Hand in hand with restriction upon the work of little children goes increased care to prevent the importation into the state of dependent and delinquent boys and girls. Thus, for instance, Illinois and Michigan have now rigid statutes prohibiting bringing into those states any child whose future maintenance is not provided for either by the presence of an accompanying parent or guardian, or by a bond furnished by an incorporated society for the care and guardianship of the child. Recent revelations of the importation of boys from one state into another, for the use of glass manufacturers, show an urgent need for similar care on the part of all states in which this industry flourishes. Just as the textile mills, in the days of Sir Robert Peel's act, sought apprentices among the little children in the workhouses of England, so the glass manufacturers, to-day, seek orphans and other detached boys from poorhouses and voluntary charitable bodies; and the traffic in such boys goes forward where it is not checked by legislation and by the coöperation of labor organizations and child labor committees working together.

When the orphans are scrutinized and provided for, it becomes clear that the problem of child labor is really not the problem of the orphan. It is the problem of cheap hands for the employer of cheap labor; the problem of permitting to selfish parents the luxury of absorbing the premature earnings of young children. But it is the pride of the enlight