making some suggestions about my own boy's education, how long he expected me to support the boy. I had begun to be a little disturbed by the time it would take to carry out his program. "Well," he said, "if you can't provide for him until he is thirty-five, you are not fit to have son." I am not in favor of raising the age limit to thirty-five, but neither do I favor leaving the years from ten to twelve, or to eighteen or to twenty entirely without protection.

Useful Education

It is a part of this new view, fourth, that the child has a right to become a useful member of society. This implies industrial—or stating it more broadly-vocational education. It supports the suggestion made by Mr. Noyes, in one of the publications of the National Child Labor Committee, that the school day might well be made longer, with greater variety in curriculum; and that the work which we deny, and rightly deny, in the factory for profit, may be demanded in the school for an hour or two or more daily for education and training. The disingenuous arguments as to the educational value of specialized long-continued factory labor may be tested by the willingness of those who make them to introduce genuinely educational employment with the element of profit eliminated, into the school curriculum, where alone it belongs. Industrial efficiency is diminished and destroyed and not increased by child labor.

The Right to Progress

There is one final element in the new view of the child, the right to inherit the past more and more fully, the right to begin farther and farther along, the right not only to begin where the parent began—even that is denied when through destroying the strength and retarding the education of children, race degeneracy sets in the right which we now assert is the right not only to be protected against degeneracy, but the right to progress. It is the new view of the child, the American view, that the child is worthy of the parent's sacrifice; that he must mount upon our shoulders and climb higher; that not only in accumulated possessions, but also in mastery over the physical universe, in spiritual attainment, in the power to serve his fellowmen and to glorify God, he shall rise above his father's level. It is not a new idea.

Hector, on the plains of Troy, had a notion that men might say of Astyanax that he was a far better man than his father, and perhaps they did, or would have done so had Hector lived to protect and rear him. In a given instance the plan may fail, but the plan itself is significant for the father and for the child. The American child is not unknown in text books and essays and fiction. He has been pictured as smart, precocious, disrespectful, and offensive. The child of the rich and preoccupied American, and of the vain and indulgent American, has sharpened the pencil of the caricaturist of every land. Kipling, in "Captains Courageous," plucked such a child from the ocean and put him at the work on a fishing dory on the banks of Newfoundland, which his regeneration required. The neglected and spoiled child of foolish indulgence, and the neglected and spoiled child of avaricious poverty, tend to develop similar or equally lamentable traits. In neither case is there recognition of these fundamental elements in what we have called the new view of the child—normal birth, physical protection, joyous infancy, useful education and an ever fuller inheritance of the accumulated riches of civilization.

SOCIAL COST OF ACCIDENT, IGNORANCE AND

EXHAUSTION

BY PROF. CHARLES R. HENDERSON,
University of Chicago.

Very properly the National Child Labor Committee is compelling the public to fix attention on the child laborer, especially the little wage-earner in the mine, mill and factory. In doing this we are led to consider all the factors which affect the child for weal or woe, not only in the work-place but elsewhere. You have asked me to discuss the "Social Cost of Accident, Ignorance and Exhaustion," no doubt with reference to causes and also with a view to prevention, protection, insurance and instruction.

A representative of the new Southwest urges upon the people of Texas the establishment of "a cotton mill in the cotton field." A vigorous, far-seeing, progressive community will not be content to ship cheap raw material to older countries and bring it back as finished goods at high prices for transportation, labor and profits. But cotton mills in the cotton fields mean an industrial revolution in the South similar in all essential respects to that through which England, Germany and some of our own older states have passed on their way from rural to urban industries. In this revolution the child will suffer unless protected by law.

Antecedents of the Exploited Child

The studies of Niceforo, Warner, Oppenheim, and by boards of education in Switzerland, England, America and elsewhere, have made one point clear-the delinquent, dependent, neglected child is physically and intellectually inferior, on the average, to the normal school child. This established fact compels us to go back to influences which affect the development of the very poor child before birth and in the years of infancy.

In great measure we are dealing with the results of generations of social neglect. Our ancestors have permitted multitudes of human

beings to grow up under the blinding and perverting influence of a laissez faire philosophy, a theory made to excuse, justify and glorify neglect. The more conscientious and logical they were who held this theory the worse the results. Consequently we are called upon to deal with the offspring of the ignorant, underpaid, neglected, often vicious and depraved, alcoholic, narcotized, neurotic ancestors. The conditions of motherhood and infancy affect the child's chances in life. Whether born crippled or normal, the children of the poor, ignorant and neglected, begin again a round of deficient nutrition and care. The factory girl, without instruction and training, becomes a mother under serious difficulties, and if her infants survive, they enter the struggle for existence too early and with a heavy handicap. The mother's history is written in deeper, darker lines in the baby. During her childhood, deprived of play and school, she failed to accumulate physiological reserves; during her early adolescence she was ill-fed, poorly nourished, ill-taught, overworked. Before the birth of her infant, while it was directly and completely dependent on her for life and growth, she had not good food, and her energies were depleted by toil. During the months before weaning time she was unfit for her function as nurse. These conditions explain the frightful rate of infant mortality among the very poor and ignorant, and the prevalence of disease and death in later years, with the diminished industrial efficiency of adult wage

earners.

The fated circle begins again with each new generation of weaklings. You will not find all this in the statistics of "factory labor," but must seek the information elsewhere. The condition of the mother enceinte affects her offspring. Insufficient nutrition and excessive toil have for their results either the death of the embryo, or premature birth, and in any case constitutional feebleness of the child results, later showing itself in diminished resistance to disease or in defect in some organ.

In Belgium, in the period 1890-1900, 44.9 in 1,000 births were dead born. Among working people, in industrial centers, the ratio is high. In 1900 in Prussia, out of 1,275,712 births, 39,993 were dead born; in Switzerland in a total of 97,695 births, 3,379 were dead born; in France, of 827,297 births, 39,246 were dead born. Unless sickness insurance is organized to provide support during the latter part of pregnancy and after confinement of the mother, it

is impossible to enforce a law forbidding very poor women at their time of need to work for wages.1

Mr. Louis D. Brandeis, in his brief before the Supreme Court of the United States, in October, 1907, in the case Curt Muller vs. State of Oregon, has collected a mass of expert testimony from physicians, factory inspectors and statisticians, proving beyond reasonable ground for doubt that too prolonged terms of work are destructive of the health of working women and ruinous to their offspring; and in February, 1908, the Supreme Court of the United States heeded this testimony and it became a part of the legal opinion of our highest judicial body. It is now good law that the courts are bound to recognize the verdict of science and not merely abide by outworn precedents; that judges can look forward to consequences, as well as backward to prejudices based on ignorance.2

The surroundings of the child in school from the sixth to the fourteenth year are frequently part cause of the subsequent exhaustion of energy and industrial efficiency. The school ought to be, can be, and sometimes is, a training in physical development. A child properly educated, in the widest and best sense of that term, does grow in stature, weight and force. Every school should be under the control of medical authorities who should have the children weighed, measured and tested by modern instruments of precision so as to make physical development certain. As a matter of The French association for the legal protection of workpeople adopted this resolution January 29, 1903:

"That in establishments supervised by factory inspectors the work of pregnant women, or those recently confined, should be regulated as follows: 1. Women should not be permitted to work during the two months preceding confinement. 2. Pregnant women should be permitted to ask for cessation of work before their approaching confinement without breaking the work contract. 3. Administrative regulations should determine the different kinds of work which are to be interdicted or permitted only on certain conditons to pregnant women or those recently confined.

"The strict application of a law relating to obligatory rest of pregnant women or those recently confined can be made only when the loss of wages is compensated by relief at the charge of the state or local funds, in the absence of a general system of industrial insurance guaranteeing legal indemnities."

obvious.

2The language and doctrine of the decision of the Supreme Court (Curt Muller vs. State of Oregon) apply with all their weight to the laws protecting children. Justice Brown wrote: "That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is This is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her. Even when they are not, by abundant testimony of the medical fraternity, continuance for a long time on her feet at work, repeating this from day to day, tends to injurious effects upon the body, and as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of women becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race."