Of the three hundred and forty children who were not going or had never gone to school, only four had reached the point of graduation, and only one had gone to high school.  These large families migrated to the beet-fields in early spring.  Seventy-two per cent. of them are retarded.  When we realize that feeble-mindedness is arrested development and retardation, we see that these “beet children” are artificially retarded in their growth, and that the tendency is to reduce their intelligence to the level of the congenital imbecile.

Nor must it be concluded that these large “beet” families are always the “ignorant foreigner” so despised by our respectable press.  The following case throws some light on this matter, reported in the same pamphlet:  “An American family, considered a prize by the agent because of the fact that there were nine children, turned out to be a `flunk.’  They could not work in the beet-fields, they ran up a bill at the country-store, and one day the father and the eldest son, a boy of nineteen, were seen running through the railroad station to catch an out-going train.  The grocer thought they were `jumping’ their bill.  He telephoned ahead to the sheriff of the next town.  They were taken off the train by the sheriff and given the option of going back to the farm or staying in jail.  They preferred to stay in jail, and remained there for two weeks.  Meanwhile, the mother and her eight children, ranging in ages form seventeen years to nine months, had to manage the best way they could.  At the end of two weeks, father and son were set free....  During all of this period the farmers of the community sent in provisions to keep the wife and children from starving.”  Does this case not sum up in a nutshell the typical American intelligence confronted with the problem of the too-large family—­industrial slavery tempered with sentimentality!

Let us turn to a young, possibly a more progressive state.  Consider the case of “California, the Golden” as it is named by Emma Duke, in her study of child-labor in the Imperial Valley, “as fertile as the Valley of the Nile."(3) Here, cotton is king, and rich ranchers, absentee landlords and others exploit it.  Less than ten years ago ranchers would bring in hordes of laboring families, but refuse to assume any responsibility in housing them, merely permitting them to sleep on the grounds of the ranch.  Conditions have been somewhat improved, but, sometimes, we read, “a one roomed straw house with an area of fifteen by twenty feet will serve as a home for an entire family, which not only cooks but sleeps in the same room.”  Here, as in Michigan among the beets, children are “thick as bees.”  All kinds of children pick, Miss Duke reports, “even those as young as three years!  Five-year-old children pick steadily all day....  Many white American children are among them—­pure American stock, who have gradually moved from the Carolinas, Tennessee, and other southern states to Arkansas, Texas,