ous efforts made in Chicago to obtain
adequate legislation for the protection of street-trading children have
not succeeded, incidents like the following have not only occurred once,
but are constantly repeated: a pretty little girl, the only child of a
widowed mother, sold newspapers after school hours from the time she was
seven years old. Because her home was near a vicious neighborhood and
because the people in the disreputable hotels seldom asked for change
when they bought a paper and good-naturedly gave her many little
presents, her mother permitted her to gain a clientele within the
district on the ground that she was too young to understand what she
might see. This continued familiarity, in spite of her mother's
admonitions, not to talk to her customers, inevitably resulted in so
vitiating the standard of the growing girl, that at the age of fourteen
she became an inmate of one of the houses. A similar instance concerns
three little girls who habitually sold gum in one of the segregated
districts. Because they had repeatedly been turned away by kind-hearted
policemen who felt that they ought not to be in such a neighborhood,
each one of these children had obtained a special permit from the mayor
of the city in order to protect herself from "police interference."
While the mayor had no actual authority to issue such permits, naturally
the piece of paper bearing his name, when displayed by a child, checked
the activity of the police officer. The incident was but one more
example of the old conflict between mistaken kindness to the individual
child in need of money, and the enforcement of those regulations which
may seem to work a temporary hardship upon one child, but save a hundred
others from entering occupations which can only lead into blind alleys.
Because such occupations inevitably result in increasing the number of
unemployables, the educational system itself must be challenged.

A royal commission has recently recommended to the English Parliament
that "the legally permissible hours for the employment of boys be
shortened, that they be required to spend the hours so set free, in
physical and technological training, that the manufacturing of the
unemployable may cease." Certainly we are justified in demanding from
our educational system, that the interest and capacity of each child
leaving school to enter industry, shall have been studied with reference
to the type of work he is about to undertake. When vo