es many grown persons more than a
whole day's work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their
whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their
strength.

An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law
to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it
is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave
things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in
defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get
their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road
is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be
wanting to smooth the way for them.

There is still another kind of employment that absorbs many of the boys
and ought to be prohibited with the utmost rigor of the law. I refer to
the messenger service of the District Telegraph Companies especially.
Anyone can see for himself how old some of these boys are who carry
messages about the streets every day; but everybody cannot see the kind of
houses they have to go to, the kind of people they meet, or the sort of
influences that beset them hourly at an age when they are most easily
impressed for good or bad. If that were possible, the line would be drawn
against their employment rather at eighteen than at sixteen or fourteen.
At present there is none except the fanciful line drawn against truancy,
which, to a boy who has learned the tricks of the telegraph messenger, is
very elastic indeed.

[Illustration: MINDING THE BABY.]

To send the boys to school and see that they stay there until they have
learned enough to at least vote intelligently when they grow up, is the
bounden duty of the State--celebrated in theory but neglected in practice.
If it did its duty much would have been gained, but even then the real
kernel of this question of child labor would remain untouched. The trouble
is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of
work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown
to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more, and
therefore less, than when they began, and with the years that should have
prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery.
How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the
senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor, in deny