"homes" on artificial flowers, finishing shoddy garments, sewing their
very life's blood and that of the race into tawdry clothes and gewgaws
that are the most unanswerable comments upon our vaunted "civilization."
And to-day, we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday is
becoming the father or the mother of the child laborer of to-morrow.

"Any nation that works its women is damned," once wrote Woods
Hutchinson. The nation that works its children, one is tempted to add,
is committing suicide. Loud-mouthed defenders of American democracy pay
no attention to the strange fact that, although "the average education
among all American adults is only the sixth grade," every one of these
adults has an equal power at the polls. The American nation, with all
its worship of efficiency and thrift, complacently forgets that "every
child defective in body, education or character is a charge upon the
community," as Herbert Hoover declared in an address before the American
Child Hygiene Association (October, 1920): "The nation as a whole," he
added, "has the obligation of such measures toward its children... as
will yield to them an equal opportunity at their start in life. If we
could grapple with the whole child situation for one generation, our
public health, our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and
stability of our people would advance three generations in one."

The great irrefutable fact that is ignored or neglected is that the
American nation officially places a low value upon the lives of
its children. The brutal truth is that CHILDREN ARE CHEAP. When
over-production in this field is curtailed by voluntary restriction,
when the birth rate among the working classes takes a sharp decline, the
value of children will rise. Then only will the infant mortality rate
decline, and child labor vanish.