s 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
"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