But when child labor in the factories became such a scandal and such a disgrace that child-labor was finally forbidden by laws that possessed the advantage over our own that they were enforced, the proletariat ceased to supply children.  Almost by magic the birth rate among the workers declined.  Since children were no longer of economic value to the factories, they were evidently a drug in the home.  This movement, it should not be forgotten however, was coincident with the agitation and education in Birth Control stimulated by the Besant-Bradlaugh trial.

Large families among migratory agricultural laborers in our own country are likewise brought into existence in response to an industrial demand.  The enforcement of the child labor laws and the extension of their restrictions are therefore an urgent necessity, not so much, as some of our child-labor authorities believe, to enable these children to go to school, as to prevent the recruiting of our next generation from the least intelligent and most unskilled classes in the community.  As long as we officially encourage and countenance the production of large families, the evils of child labor will confront us.  On the other hand, the prohibition of child labor may help, as in the case of English factories, in the decline of the birth rate.

Uncontrolled breeding and child labor go hand in hand.  And to-day when we are confronted with the evils of the latter, in the form of widespread illiteracy and defect, we should seek causes more deeply rooted than the enslavement of children.  The cost to society is incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out.  “It is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by charitable organizations.”

To-day we are paying for the folly of the over-production—­and its consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood—­of yesterday.  To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our surplus children of to-day.  The child-laborer of one or two decades ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed, illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable.  “He is the last person to be hired and the first to be fired.”  Boys and girls under fourteen years of age are no longer permitted to work in factories, mills, canneries and establishments whose products are to be shipped out of the particular state, and children under sixteen can no longer work in mines and quarries.  But this affects only one quarter of our army of child labor—­work in local industries, stores, and farms, homework in dark and unsanitary tenements is still permitted.  Children work in “homes” on artificial flowers, finishing shoddy garments, sewing their very life’s blood and that of the race into tawdry clothes and gewgaws that are the most unanswerable comments upon our vaunted “civilization.”  And to-day, we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday is becoming the father or the mother of the child laborer of to-morrow.