care, in his health, his schooling, his
vocational training, may find out what they need to know in order to
aid his progress or check his wrongdoing.

=Every Child Should Have Social Protection.=--In the next place, the
demand of every child must surely be for community protection against
those who for greed or evil purpose would exploit his life. The first
law passed for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which aimed even
at parents who did not act a parent's part, was the Magna Charta of
child rights. After that the door was opened for all manner of
protective legislation for the benefit of the young. Yet we still have
many men and some women whose business it is, and a very profitable
one, to debauch youth or despoil children.

Surely the time has come when all decent people should unite to
abolish such evils.

=Child-labor.=--In the field of child-labor we have model laws, not
always well enforced, laws that aim to keep inviolate for childhood at
least a few years of schooling.[10] We have health laws which aim more
and more at reducing the diseases of children and making it possible
for all to share in the power and joy of normal existence.

Yet, although something has been done for the child who would
otherwise be at work in factory, shop, or sweated trade at home, there
are, it is said, still "Two Million Overworked Farm Children." In the
South, in some sections, the little black children still pick cotton
for the little white children to weave in mills. In the North
undersized and mentally undeveloped youth still testify to industrial
exploitation even where laws against child-labor are on the statute
books. The agricultural workers, numbering more than any other class
and spread all over the United States, count too many little children
in their lists. It is estimated that in our country there are
38,000,000 living on farms, and of this number only 8,000,000 adult
men are listed as laborers; we hence can well believe that children
and youth are a disproportionate element in the working of those
farms. This makes the slogan proposed by Owen E. Lovejoy, the
Secretary of the National Child-labor Committee, "Keep the Farmer
Through His Children," a highly compelling one. In the tobacco fields
of Connecticut, boys and girls ten years of age and over; in the truck
gardens of Ohio among the onion beds; in the Michigan sugar-beet
fields; in the California asparagus beds; in the Southern cotton
fields, where