quirements of our industrial life with courage
and success simply because we do not realize that unless we establish
that humane legislation which has its roots in a consideration for
human life, our industrialism itself will suffer from inbreeding,
growing ever more unrestrained and ruthless. It would seem obvious
that in order to secure relief in a community dominated by industrial
ideals, an appeal must be made to the old spiritual sanctions for
human conduct, that we must reach motives more substantial and
enduring than the mere fleeting experiences of one phase of modern
industry which vainly imagines that its growth would be curtailed if
the welfare of its employees were guarded by the state. It would be an
interesting attempt to turn that youthful enthusiasm to the aid of one
of the most conservative of the present social efforts, the almost
world-wide movement to secure protective legislation for women and
children in industry, in which America is so behind the other nations.
Fourteen of the great European powers protect women from all night
work, from excessive labor by day, because paternalistic governments
prize the strength of women for the bearing and rearing of healthy
children to the state. And yet in a republic it is the citizens
themselves who must be convinced of the need of this protection unless
they would permit industry to maim the very mothers of the future.

In one year in the German Empire one hundred thousand children were
cared for through money paid from the State Insurance fund to their
widowed mothers or to their invalided fathers. And yet in the American
states it seems impossible to pass a most rudimentary employers'
liability act, which would be but the first step towards that code of
beneficent legislation which protects "the widow and fatherless" in
Germany and England. Certainly we shall have to bestir ourselves if we
would care for the victims of the industrial order as well as do other
nations. We shall be obliged speedily to realize that in order to
secure protective legislation from a governmental body in which the
most powerful interests represented are those of the producers and
transporters of manufactured goods, it will be necessary to exhort to
a care for the defenseless from the religious point of view. To take
even the non-commercial point of view would be to assert that
evolutionary progress assumes that a sound physique is the only secure
basis of life, and to guard the m