g the poor in their homes without realizing the
need of compulsory education laws. There are still people here and
there who talk about the danger of educating the poor "above their
station," but those who know the poor in our large cities from actual
contact feel that over-education is the very least of the dangers that
beset them. The lack of adequate school accommodations, making it
impossible to punish truancy, is a much greater danger, and, in some
States, the absence of any compulsory education law {81} makes the
child the easy victim of trade conditions and of parental greed. The
visitor should never permit the desire to increase the family income to
blind him to the fact that the physical, mental, and moral welfare of
the child is seriously endangered by wage-earning. Where there is a
compulsory education law, he should cooperate with the truant officers
in securing its enforcement; where there is no such law, every
influence should be brought to bear upon parents to keep children in
school. The Hebrew Benevolent Society of Detroit refuses aid to
families in which the children are kept from school, and all our relief
agencies, churches included, would do well to adopt this rule.

Some of the most intelligent and devoted workers in child-saving
agencies have sounded the note of warning on the subject of children
wage-earners. "The fact," says Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, "that the
world of industry has found out and established methods of labor which
can utilize the work of children to profit, gives to that world of
industry, as an upper and a nether millstone, the greed {82} of
employers and the cupidity and poverty of parents, between which the
life of the child is often ground to powder." [3] And Mrs. Florence
Kelley, writing from her experience as a factory inspector in Illinois,
says: "I do not mean that every boy is usually ruined by his work, but
I do mean that, the earlier the child goes to work, the greater the
probability of ruin. I mean, too, that there is to be gained, from a
scientific study of the working child, an irradiating side-light upon
the tramp question, the unemployed question, and the whole ramifying
question of the juvenile offender. . . . One reason that immigrants
cling so closely to the great cities is that they find there far more
opportunity to get money for their children's work. There is probably
no one means of dispersing the disastrously growing colonies of our
great citie