mills for their living, and helping to support their families.

"The child is the embodied future. We can never have good
citizenship without protected childhood. Child labor is a process
of squandering future wealth to satisfy present need." [Footnote:
See report of Eleventh Conference of Child Labor held at Washington,
January, 1915.]

Defrauded childhood! Children, loaded with heavy tasks beyond
their strength, robbed of the light and joy of life, plead for
childhood's rights and that spiritual development that should make
known to them the companionship of the Saviour and the love of the
Heavenly Father.

The testimony printed in the fall of 1912, concerning child labor
in the canning factories of the Empire State, shows that more than
a thousand children were employed in the canning industry that
summer; one hundred and forty-one were less than ten years old.

An experienced manufacturer has said, "You can protect a machine,
you can guide the buzz-saw, but no law that you can enact can, in
a large industry, protect the heart and soul of the child."

A marked improvement has been made in the last five years in combating
the evils of child labor. Many states forbid the employment of children
under fourteen years of age in factories and mills--but in North and
South Carolina, in Georgia and Alabama, children under fourteen are
still permitted to labor in factories ten or twelve hours a day.

To reach this evil from the Federal standpoint, the powers of the