Oklahoma, Arizona, and on into the Imperial Valley.”  Some of these children, it seems, wanted to attend school, but their fathers did not want to work; so the children were forced to become bread-winners.  One man whose children were working with him in the fields said, “Please, lady, don’t send them to school; let them pick a while longer.  I ain’t got my new auto paid for yet.”  The native white American mother of children working in the fields proudly remarked:  “No; they ain’t never been to school, nor me nor their poppy, nor their granddads and grandmoms.  We’ve always been pickers!”—­and she spat her tobacco over the field in expert fashion.

“In the Valley one hears from townspeople,” writes the investigator, “that pickers make ten dollars a day, working the whole family.  With that qualification, the statement is ambiguous.  One Mexican in the Imperial Valley was the father of thirty-three children—­`about thirteen or fourteen living,’ he said.  If they all worked at cotton-picking, they would doubtless altogether make more than ten dollars a day.”

One of the child laborers revealed the economic advantage—­to the parents—­in numerous progeny:  “Us kids most always drag from forty to fifty pounds of cotton before we take it to be weighed.  Three of us pick.  I’m twelve years old and my bag is twelve feet long.  I can drag nearly a hundred pounds.  My sister is ten years old, and her bag is eight feet long.  My little brother is seven and his bag is five feet long.”

Evidence abounds in the publications of the National Child Labor Committee of this type of fecund parenthood.(4) It is not merely a question of the large family versus the small family.  Even comparatively small families among migratory workers of this sort have been large families.  The high infant mortality rate has carried off the weaker children.  Those who survive are merely those who have been strong enough to survive the most unfavorable living conditions.  No; it is a situation not unique, nor even unusual in human history, of greed and stupidity and cupidity encouraging the procreative instinct toward the manufacture of slaves.  We hear these days of the selfishness and the degradation of healthy and well-educated women who refuse motherhood; but we hear little of the more sinister selfishness of men and women who bring babies into the world to become child-slaves of the kind described in these reports of child labor.

The history of child labor in the English factories in the nineteenth century throws a suggestive light on this situation.  These child-workers were really called into being by the industrial situation.  The population grew, as Dean Inge has described it, like crops in a newly irrigated desert.  During the nineteenth century, the numbers were nearly quadrupled.  “Let those who think that the population of a country can be increased at will, consider whether it is likely that any physical, moral, or psychological change came over the nation co-incidentally with the inventions of the spinning jenny and the steam engine.  It is too obvious for dispute that it was the possession of capital wanting employment, and of natural advantages for using it, that called those multitudes of human beings into existence, to eat the food which they paid for by their labor."(5)