These are samples of the reforms in the laws of business that we intend to put on the Nation’s statute books.  But there are other questions as important and pressing that we mean to answer by sound and humane laws.  Child labor in factories, mills, mines and sweat-shops must be ended throughout the Republic.  Such labor is a crime against childhood because it prevents the growth of normal manhood and womanhood.  It is a crime against the Nation because it prevents the growth of a host of children into strong, patriotic and intelligent citizens.

Only the Nation can stop this industrial vice.  The States cannot stop it.  The States never stopped any national wrong—­and child labor is a national wrong.  To leave it to the State alone is unjust to business; for if some States stop it and other States do not, business men of the former are at a disadvantage with the business men of the latter, because they must sell in the same market goods made by manhood labor at manhood wages in competition with goods made by childhood labor at childhood wages.  To leave it to the States is unjust to manhood labor; for childhood labor in any State lowers manhood labor in every State, because the product of childhood labor in any State competes with the product of manhood labor in every State.  Children workers at the looms in South Carolina means bayonets at the breasts of men and women workers in Massachusetts who strike for living wages.  Let the States do what they can, and more power to their arm; but let the Nation do what it should and cleanse our flag from this stain.

Modern industrialism has changed the status of women.  Women now are wage earners in factories, stores and other places of toil.  In hours of labor and all the physical conditions of industrial effort they must compete with men.  And they must do it at lower wages than men receive—­wages which, in most cases, are not enough for these women workers to live on.

This is inhuman and indecent.  It is unsocial and uneconomic.  It is immoral and unpatriotic.  Toward women the Progressive party proclaims the chivalry of the State.  We propose to protect women wage-earners by suitable laws, an example of which is the minimum wage for women workers—­a wage which shall be high enough to at least buy clothing, food and shelter for the woman toiler.

The care of the aged is one of the most perplexing problems of modern life.  How is the workingman with less than five hundred dollars a year, and with earning power waning as his own years advance, to provide for aged parents or other relatives in addition to furnishing food, shelter and clothing for his wife and children?  What is to become of the family of the laboring man whose strength has been sapped by excessive toil and who has been thrown upon the industrial scrap heap?  It is questions like these we must answer if we are to justify free institutions.  They are questions to which the masses of people are chained as to a body of death.  And they are questions which other and poorer nations are answering.