children as young as three years of age have been
found--in all these and on lonely farmsteads doing general work we
find these children. Cut off from regular schooling, herded often in
the poorest substitutes for homes, moving about from place to place
with fathers and mothers unskilled or handicapped by weak character,
these children are defrauded of every right of a child at every turn.
It is not true, as some complacently assert, that all is done that
should be to prevent the sacrifice of young life to the industrial
demands for large returns for investment. It is not true that such
organizations as the Child-labor Committee can rest content with
accomplished tasks and disband.

The exemption of agricultural labor from the legal protection of
children given in many states in the field of manufacture, and the
total lack of realization by the general public of the newer
conditions which specialized and scientific farming make for the
tenant hands, make this particular form of child-protection in farming
a question of supreme importance.

As this book goes to press the Supreme Court decision which declares
the Federal Child-labor Law unconstitutional places upon those working
through state channels a still heavier burden of effort at
child-protection. This decision of the Supreme Court may well be
understood as indicating no indifference to child-welfare but rather
as a call to clear the method of child-labor reform from any
entanglements of taxation or doubtful alliance with Federal
officialism. The principle of child-protection, whether by national or
state laws, holds the moral devotion of our citizenship more firmly
than ever before.

=Children Must be Protected in Recreation.=--The need for the
protection of children from commercialized recreation with its centres
set near all manner of vicious influences has aroused the conscience
of the nation. The investigations of social conditions near the Camps
of Training for our army in the Great War and many forms of social
service carried on by men and women in connection with the Red Cross
have given impetus to the general movement to "clean up the cities" to
make the rural communities and village centres more helpful to moral
living, and to make the streets safer for "the spirit of youth."

Yet the rural schoolhouses are so many of them lacking in provisions
of decency and of playground supervision, and the village
lounging-places are so often the scenes of viciou