To get the 2,500 new members we are appealing to you. We do not ask you to try to get all of them, but we ask you to get one. If each of our 7,500 members will do this, we shall pass well beyond the goal on April 14th.

You have a large group to select from. There are 90,000,000 people in the country and 89,992,500 are still outside the Committee. membership. If you will concentrate your attention on one of these we are sure of the result.

HOW TO GET A NEW MEMBER

Make the figures live! An organization of 10,000 members to protect 2,000,000 working children means one member for each 200 children. Obviously no man or woman alone could undertake to liberate 200 children from bad industrial conditions and open the way to education for them, but joined together in this powerful organization we are sure to succeed. Don't beg your friend to join the Committee but show him what an opportunity he has. A few years ago he probably spent several dollars to buy that beautiful little picture "The Yard of Babies". Show him that joining this Committee makes him the patron of a half mile of boys and girls. Glance at the map on the page 44 and you will get the idea. The army of working boys and girls stretching from San Francisco to Boston and from Boston to New Orleans contains 400 children in each of these five thousand miles, and everyone of our 10,000 members becomes the guardian of a half mile stretch of this weary train. Tell your friend you can not undertake to cover a whole mile, but you will gladly divide it with him.

THREE SUGGESTIONS

1. Go to your friend personally and extend the direct invitation to join the membership of the Committee in the class to which you belong.

2. Or write a letter extending the same invitation and enclosing any of our publications you think would interest your friend,

3. Or write a letter to your friend and mail it to us, permitting us to enclose it with one of ours in which we will explain in greater detail the work of the Committee and its needs.

If you can think of any more effective method of helping us build up this membership, use it; but manifestly, to neglect all of the methods we suggest and to employ no other method would not be better, but worse. May we count on your help now?

EDGAR GARDNER MURPHY

OWEN R. LOVEJOY.

From New York Evening Post, July 2, 1913.

The Reverend Edgar Gardner Murphy who died on June 23d will be remembered as a fearless pioneer in the fight against child labor. He was a southerner by birth and education who had watched the growth of a new slavery in the new south. He came to his active ministry in Alabama with a firm conviction that his pastorate included an obligation to the 2,400 children in the factories of the state. Before Mr. Murphy's day, Alabama had in 1887 fixed a 14 year limit for factory workers and an eight hour day for those under 16. This had been for those days an extraordinary achievement which placed Alabama among the foremost states of the Union. But in the course of time a northern mill that had moved into Alabama brought about the repeal (in 1895) of this good law, and when Mr. Murphy organized the Alabama Child Labor Committee children of ten were at work in the cotton mills and nearly a third of the mill hands were under 16 years old. Throughout the campaigns of those years any improvement of the child labor law was persistently opposed by officials of mills controlled by northern interests, and only after seven years of fighting did Alabama establish in 1907 a 12 year age limit. Even to-day she has not returned to her former standard but lags behind with eight other states that permit children of 12 years to work in factories.

Mr. Murphy added to a persistent zeal for righteousness the gift of rousing others for his cause. In fact, it may truly be said that by his address at the National Conference of Charities in 1903 he brought home to the social workers of the country the seriousness of the child labor situation.

About this time also, the persistent opposition of northern interests to better child labor laws in Alabama led Mr. Murphy to see the need of developing an enlightened public opinion through

out the country and as a direct result of his personal pleading, the National Child Labor Committee was organized in 1904.

Some words from a letter by Mr. Murphy to the members of the Alabama legislature in 1907 are worth quoting to-day:

"How utterly fatuous is the silly charge that the advocacy of such a policy is due to the selfish interest of Eastern mills who are said to have 'initiated and subsidized' our agitation for reforms? Who, then, has 'subsidized' the conferences of such a body as the Methodist Church of Alabama? Who has 'subsidized' the press of this state? Who has 'subsidized' the noble women of the Alabama Federation? Who has 'subsidized' the great masses of our people, to whom the abuses of the child labor system have become matters of familiar knowledge and whose solicitude for the children of their own state is as unpurchasable as it is sincere? Their will may be defeated, for a season, but I wish here to predict that the increasing vigor of their demands and the cumulative force and volume of this agitation will be in precise proportion to the inaction of their representatives and to the failure of just and wise reforms."

Mr. Murphy's book "The Present South" shows how well he understood the growth of the industrial South and the new promise of prosperity that it brought. But he insists on clear thinking concerning the good and the bad involved and one sentence in particular may well be remembered by those who would defend. the employment of children in the mills. He says: "Let us not credit the good fortune of the family to the misfortune of the child."

Mr. Murphy's interest in the cause of working children continued through the recent years of invalidism that made activity impossible. He felt that his task was only half completed when the law of 1907 was passed and he hoped he might live to see Alabama return to her high standard of twenty years before. Since that was not granted him, what more fitting tribute could Alabama pay to his memory than to enact at the next legislature a child labor law even better than the law of 1887 and so take her place again with the states that are foremost in the protection of their children.

THE CHILD AGAINST THE MAN

by

A. J. McKELWAY

In an article in the Outlook of September 20, by Mr. George F. Stratton, entitled "The Man behind the Child," the author says: "In all the articles I have seen during the past year—articles eloquently sympathetic, trenchantly critical, and urgently insistent upon legislative restriction of child labor-not one thought is expressed as to the effect of such restriction upon the family earnings." And again: "The noble men and women who are actively engaged in the crusade against the crime of child labor might well look a little deeper." It is presumed that the National Child Labor Committee and its affiliated State Committees, with a total membership of about 7,000 persons, may at least be included among those who are "actively engaged" in this crusade. It comes with something of a shock to learn, therefore, that no one of them has thought deeply enough on the subject to reach the author's conclusion that poverty is one cause of child labor. It is also a little humiliating to realize that the literature of child labor created by the Committee, published in nine volumes and some 200 pamphlets seems to have been entirely overlooked. The latest volume published had as its title "Child Labor and Poverty" and contained such articles as "The Child Breadwinner and the Dependent Parent" by Mrs. Florence Kelley; "Child Labor and Need" by M. Louise Boswell; "Child Labor and Poverty-Both Cause and Effect" by John A. Kingsbury; "Child Labor and Low Wages" by Jerome Jones, the most prominent labor leader in the South; to say nothing of "Child Wages in the Cotton Mills" by A. J. McKelway. With regard to the inadequacy of industrial education of which Mr. Stratton also complains, by way of making another discovery, it happens that the preceding volume of the National Child Labor Committee was devoted to the subject of "Child Labor and Education," and contained such articles as “National Aid to Education” by Felix Adler; "Child Labor and Vocational Work in the Public Schools" by E. O. Holland; "Child Labor and Vocational Guidance"