“Any nation that works its women is damned,” once wrote Woods Hutchinson.  The nation that works its children, one is tempted to add, is committing suicide.  Loud-mouthed defenders of American democracy pay no attention to the strange fact that, although “the average education among all American adults is only the sixth grade,” every one of these adults has an equal power at the polls.  The American nation, with all its worship of efficiency and thrift, complacently forgets that “every child defective in body, education or character is a charge upon the community,” as Herbert Hoover declared in an address before the American Child Hygiene Association (October, 1920):  “The nation as a whole,” he added, “has the obligation of such measures toward its children... as will yield to them an equal opportunity at their start in life.  If we could grapple with the whole child situation for one generation, our public health, our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and stability of our people would advance three generations in one.”

The great irrefutable fact that is ignored or neglected is that the American nation officially places a low value upon the lives of its children.  The brutal truth is that children are cheap.  When over-production in this field is curtailed by voluntary restriction, when the birth rate among the working classes takes a sharp decline, the value of children will rise.  Then only will the infant mortality rate decline, and child labor vanish.

Investigations of child labor emphasize its evils by pointing out that these children are kept out of school, and that they miss the advantages of American public school education.  They express the current confidence in compulsory education and the magical benefits to be derived from the public school.  But we need to qualify our faith in education, and particularly our faith in the American public school.  Educators are just beginning to wake up to the dangers inherent in the attempt to teach the brightest child and the mentally defective child at the same time.  They are beginning to test the possibilities of a “vertical” classification as well as a “horizontal” one.  That is, each class must be divided into what are termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective.  In the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull leveling to mediocrity.(6)

An investigation of forty schools in New York City, typical of hundreds of others, reveals deplorable conditions of overcrowding and lack of sanitation.(7) The worst conditions are to be found in locations the most densely populated.  Thus of Public School No. 51, located almost in the center of the notorious “Hell’s Kitchen” section, we read:  “The play space which is provided is a mockery of the worst kind.  The basement play-room is dark, damp, poorly lighted, poorly ventilated, foul