young and thus cripple their chances for individual
development and usefulness, and with the avaricious parent also leads to
exploitation. "I have fed her for fourteen years, now she can help me
pay my mortgage" is not an unusual reply when a hardworking father is
expostulated with because he would take his bright daughter out of
school and put her into a factory.

It has long been a common error for the charity visitor, who is strongly
urging her "family" toward self-support, to suggest, or at least
connive, that the children be put to work early, although she has not
the excuse that the parents have. It is so easy, after one has been
taking the industrial view for a long time, to forget the larger and
more social claim; to urge that the boy go to work and support his
parents, who are receiving charitable aid. She does not realize what a
cruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she gives
advice.

The manager in a huge mercantile establishment employing many children
was able to show during a child-labor investigation, that the only
children under fourteen years of age in his employ were proteges who had
been urged upon him by philanthropic ladies, not only acquaintances of
his, but valued patrons of the establishment. It is not that the charity
visitor is less wise than other people, but she has fixed her mind so
long upon the industrial lameness of her family that she is eager to
seize any crutch, however weak, which may enable them to get on.

She has failed to see that the boy who attempts to prematurely support
his widowed mother may lower wages, add an illiterate member to the
community, and arrest the development of a capable workingman. As she
has failed to see that the rules which obtain in regard to the age of
marriage in her own family may not apply to the workingman, so also she
fails to understand that the present conditions of employment
surrounding a factory child are totally unlike those which obtained
during the energetic youth of her father.

The child who is prematurely put to work is constantly oppressed by this
never ending question of the means of subsistence, and even little
children are sometimes almost crushed with the cares of life through
their affectionate sympathy. The writer knows a little Italian lad of
six to whom the problems of food, clothing, and shelter have become so
immediate and pressing that, although an imaginative child, he is unable
to see life from any