older industrial nations. There is no other explanation of their neglect short of a charge of sheer brutality. Ignorance of the general public, of legislators, of teachers, of lawyers, of governors, of preachers and editors, is in great measure the cause of our criminal 'negligence as a people. Ignorance permits accidents which might be prevented. Ignorance permits occupational diseases and exhaustion which might be diminished. Ignorance permits neglect of insurance which would provide funds for care, lead to precautions and diminish the burden of starvation conditions. The total situation calls for a prolonged campaign of education of teachers, pastors, workmen, and employers in the findings of the science of hygiene and sanitation and of general social protection.

THE LEADERSHIP OF THE CHILD

By A. J. McKELWAY,

Secretary for the Southern States, National Child Labor Committee.

It was written of old, “A little child shall lead them." It was written deeply into the very constitution of our nature that the child should lead. Science and revelation unite to proclaim this truth.

Henry Drummond pointed out the fact that there were two struggles for life, the struggle for the individual life, which is concerned with nutrition, and the struggle for the life of others, which is concerned with reproduction, with the life of the species. He showed that at the beginnings of life on this planet, "that early world was for millions and millions of years, a bleak and loveless world, without mothers and without children," and that Nature to develop mothers had to make the young helpless. He bade us "contrast the free, swimming embryo of the Medusa, dashing out into the heroic life the moment it is born, with the helpless kitten or the sightless pup." Then rising to the consideration of the human, he declared: "No greater day ever dawned for evolution. than that on which the first human child was born. The child teaches the mother. The next effort of evolution is to lengthen. out these school days and give affection time to grow." In the same way, through the leadership of the child, came the development of fatherhood, and the family, the clan, the state.

Wallace declares that in this prolongation of the period of human infancy, "Nature has begun to follow a new path, and make psychical changes instead of physical." And our own John Fiske made an important contribution to evolutionary science by establishing the fact that the prolongation of the period of childhood is the very measure of the progress of the race. "If it were not for our period of infancy we should not be progressive." He says, "The knitting together of permanent relations between mother and infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part of the male parent, came to bring about the family, the clan . . . the germ of altruism, of morality." He states this truth more fully

thus: "From of old ye have heard the monition, 'Except ye be as babes, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven;' the latest science now shows us .. that unless we had been as babes, the ethical phenomena which give all its significance to the phrase, the Kingdom of Heaven would have been non-existent for us. Without the circumstance of infancy, we might have become formidable among animals, through sheer force of sharp-wittedness. But except for that circumstance we should never have comprehended the meaning of such phrases as 'self-sacrifice,' or 'devotion.' The phenomena of social life would have been omitted from the history of the world, and with them the phenomena of ethics and religion." The history of civilization bears out the teachings of evolution on this point. We need not look beyond the fact of the child marriages that prevail in India to understand why the teeming millions of one of the oldest human civilizations are held in check, are controlled and developed, by the handful of English soldiers and rulers; or why the native tropical races, with their forced ripening of manhood and womanhood, have never developed civilizations of their own. It is a law of nature, "To be a man too soon is to be a small man," no matter what the physical development may be. The virile races are those that have believed in the tutelage of childhood and the development of manhood, the Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman. And in the decaying days of the Roman Empire the historian Tacitus, attributes two pre-eminent virtues to the Germanic races that have since over-run the world, the honor that they paid to womanhood and the prolongation of the period of adolescence. He tells us that it was considered a shame to marry before mature manhood had been reached.

Child Labor Thwarts Progress

Consider briefly how the modern system of child labor cuts across this line of development and progress. Here, through the long eons, the family as the social unit has been developing, motherhood, fatherhood, brotherhood, patriotism, philanthropy. Child labor begins its destructive tendency by disintegrating the family and ends with the destruction of the state. The period of childhood is shortened instead of prolonged. The dependence of the child, so necessary to the development of the social virtues, becomes the independence of the bread-winner. The task of the

father, the husband, the house-bond, is relegated in part or in whole, to the child, who is made the food-provider. The child, from being a blessed incumbrance, tending to home-building, becomes an industrial asset, to be exploited for gain. The child-laborer, coming into competition with the father in the labor market, brings down wages to the child standard, and the mother is forced into the ranks of the bread-winners, because the system of adult male labor has degenerated, by reason of the low wage scale, to the basis of family labor.

The system perpetuates itself. By reason of the illiteracy which is invariably the result of the child labor system, the victim of that system is handicapped in competition with his more fortunate fellows and is relegated to the ranks of the unskilled. He must continue to receive the low wages of the unskilled laborer. Having become independent of parental nurture, he becomes free from parental restraint. We even recognize in some of our defective child labor laws the fact of the dependency of the parent upon the child for bread. Having to fulfil the duties of manhood he feels a right to its privileges, and early marriages become the rule instead of the exception. So the poverty, and the immaturity are handed down in intensified form to the next generation. Illiteracy and resulting poverty are perpetuated and racial degeneracy is the inevitable result. In this new country of ours, with its shifting population, it has not been possible as yet to study such a development in its ultimate results. In the textile industry, which has always been cursed with child labor, and therefore with low wages and long hours, foreign immigration has changed the character of the population. The native New England and Pennsylvania stock, with American habits of thrift and industry, went from the textile mills. into the skilled trades as soon as industries were sufficiently diversified to accommodate them. Their places were taken by the English, the Irish and the Scotch, who went through the same process of changing to better conditions as to wages and hours, and their places have been taken by the French Canadians, the Portuguese and the Greeks. In the South, where there has thus far been little help from immigration, and the native American stock is almost universally employed, the industry itself is only measured, in its real development, by a single generation. I have given elsewhere an account of the process of steady degeneracy that has gone on for a hundred

years in England, in its great milling centers, until there has come about "an alarming impairment of the national physique," to quote the words of an English physician.

Paisley

But we have a striking case of this moral and physical degeneration in a Scotch city, the history of which is quoted by Dr. Thomas Chalmers, from a contemporary writer: "From about 1770 to 1800 the manufactures of silk gauzes and fine lawns flourished in Paisley; as also, during a portion of the period alluded to, that of figured-loom and hand-tambourined muslin. These branches afforded to all classes excellent wages, and being articles of fancy, room was afforded for a display of taste as well as enterprise and intelligence, for which the Paisley weavers were justly conspicuous. Sobriety and frugality being their general character, good wages enabled almost every weaver to possess himself of a small capital, which, joined with their general intelligence and industry, enabled and induced many to spend days and even weeks together, in plodding over a new design, assisted frequently by their obliging neighbors, knowing that the first half-dozen weavers who succeeded in some new style of work were sure to be recompensed ten-fold.

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"Nearly one-half of Paisley at that period was built by weavers, from savings off their ordinary wages. Every house had its garden, and every weaver, being his own master, dould work it when he pleased. Many were excellent florists; many possessed a tolerable library, and all were politicians. So that, about the period of the French Revolution, Mr. Pitt expressed more fear of the unrestricted political discussions of the Paisley weavers than of ten thousand armed men. Had Paisley been then, what Paisley is now, crowded with half-informed Radicals and infidels, his fears would have been justified. But truth and honest dealing could fear nothing from a community constituted as Paisley was; and never perhaps in the history of the world, was there a more convincing proof of the folly of being afraid of a universal and thorough education, especially when impregnated with the religion of the Bible, than in the state of Paisley at that period."

Significantly enough, the period of Paisley decadence began with the manufacture of a sham, an incentive to human vanity