least intelligent and most unskilled classes in the community. As long
as we officially encourage and countenance the production of large
families, the evils of child labor will confront us. On the other hand,
the prohibition of child labor may help, as in the case of English
factories, in the decline of the birth rate.

UNCONTROLLED BREEDING AND CHILD LABOR GO HAND IN HAND. And to-day
when we are confronted with the evils of the latter, in the form of
widespread illiteracy and defect, we should seek causes more deeply
rooted than the enslavement of children. The cost to society is
incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out. "It
is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral
degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through
the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature
employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by
charitable organizations."

To-day we are paying for the folly of the over-production--and its
consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood--of yesterday.
To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our
surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades
ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed,
illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable. "He is the last
person to be hired and the first to be fired." Boys and girls under
fourteen years of age are no longer permitted to work in factories,
mills, canneries and establishments whose products are to be shipped out
of the particular state, and children under sixteen can no longer work
in mines and quarries. But this affects only one quarter of our army of
child labor--work in local industries, stores, and farms, homework
in dark and unsanitary tenements is still permitted. Children work in