ndard
are rejected, but in each case the physical condition is explained to
the applicant. Where defects are removable or correctable, the
applicant is told what to do and invited to take another test after
treatment. Moreover, accepted employees are periodically reexamined.
While designed to increase company profits and to reduce company
losses, this examination obviously decreases the employees' losses
also, and increases the certainty of work and prospect of promotion.

Our states, and many of our industries, still have the attitude of a
certain manufacturer who employs several hundred boys and girls. I
asked him what tests he employed. "I look over a long line of the
applicants and say," pointing his finger, "I want you, and you, and
you; the rest may go." I asked him if he made a point of picking out
those who looked strong. "No. The work is easy, sitting down all day
long and picking over things. I select those whose faces I like. Yes,
there is one question we now ask of all the girls. One day a girl in
the workroom had an epileptic fit and it frightened everybody and upset
the work so that the foreman always asks, 'Do you have fits? Because if
you do, you can't work here.'" He makes no attempt to determine the
physical fitness and endurance of the children employed, because when
the strength of one is spent there is always another to step into her
place.

Because the apprentice's future is of no value to the manufacturer, the
state must restrict the manufacturer's freedom to spend like water
society's capital,--the health of the coming generation. Could there be
a grosser mis-management of society's business than to permit trade to
waste children on whose education society spends so many millions
yearly? The most effective and most timely remedy is physical
examination as a condition of the work certificate. A simple, easily
applied, inexpensive measure that imposes only a legitimate restriction
upon individual freedom, it is absolutely necessary in order to get to
the bottom of the child labor problem. If thoroughly applied, children
of the nation will no longer be exploited by unscrupulous or
indifferent employers, nor will their health be hazarded by lack of
discriminating examination that rejects the obviously sick and favors
the apparently robust. Furthermore, knowledge that this test will be
applied when work certificates are required, will be an incentive to
the school boy and girl to keep well. Tell a b