The history of child labor in the English factories in the nineteenth
century throws a suggestive light on this situation. These child-workers
were really called into being by the industrial situation. The
population grew, as Dean Inge has described it, like crops in a newly
irrigated desert. During the nineteenth century, the numbers were nearly
quadrupled. "Let those who think that the population of a country can
be increased at will, consider whether it is likely that any physical,
moral, or psychological change came over the nation co-incidentally with
the inventions of the spinning jenny and the steam engine. It is too
obvious for dispute that it was the possession of capital wanting
employment, and of natural advantages for using it, that called those
multitudes of human beings into existence, to eat the food which they
paid for by their labor."(5)

But when child labor in the factories became such a scandal and such a
disgrace that child-labor was finally forbidden by laws that possessed
the advantage over our own that they were enforced, the proletariat
ceased to supply children. Almost by magic the birth rate among the
workers declined. Since children were no longer of economic value to
the factories, they were evidently a drug in the home. This movement, it
should not be forgotten however, was coincident with the agitation and
education in Birth Control stimulated by the Besant-Bradlaugh trial.

Large families among migratory agricultural laborers in our own country
are likewise brought into existence in response to an industrial demand.
The enforcement of the child labor laws and the extension of their
restrictions are therefore an urgent necessity, not so much, as some of
our child-labor authorities believe, to enable these children to go to
school, as to prevent the recruiting of our next generation from the