are equally interested in the establishment of a minimum wage, as they have been in the mothers' pension laws, they want the minimum wage measured by the needs of the adult worker, including the need to educate his children, and not by the simpler needs of the child for food and clothing.

But Mr. Stratton started out with the discussion of the children who are not able to go through the high school because of the poverty of their fathers. That is hardly yet a child labor problem, for the Uniform Child Labor Law, endorsed by the American Bar Association, fixes fourteen as the general age limit and is concerned with the children above that age when it comes to dangerous or immoral occupations, or the regulation of their employment as to the hours of their labor. Perhaps another generation will prohibit the entrance of the child under sixteen into competitive industry for economic as well as social reasons. But in the mean time we do not need any discouragement in the mere pressing work that is just at hand, by the intimation that we do not know what we are doing. To illustrate: Just a few days ago, I stopped at Eufaula, Alabama, and looked into the conditions of child labor in a cotton mill there. I found few if any children under the legal age. I talked with a little fellow on his way home, and asked him if he worked in the mill. He said no, that he was only eleven years old and they did not allow children under twelve in the mill, which was a compliment to the mill so far as it might plead that it was the victim of a system, but was an indictment against the State that allowed employment, for an eleven hour day, at twelve years of age. Then I asked the boy if he was going to school and he said yes. "What grade are you in?" "The first." Then with a sigh he said: "I wish I could go on to the tenth grade, but I got to go to work next year." We make bold to claim that this child should be enabled to go on to the tenth grade. If the wages are low because of his early prospective employment, and the employment of twelve year olds, the first thing to do is to prohibit that employIf then the family is unable to make both ends meet, we have a problem of relief, rather than a child labor problem. If through the bringing in of immigrants with a low wage standard the wages continue to be below the right standard of living, let the State step in and fix the minimum wage. And if through foreign com

petition the industry is unable to survive with a proper wage scale, let it die. It is alien to the land that produced the Declaration of Independence at its birth. But the abolition of child labor is the first step in the process, and until that is done, society will be too much inclined to shift consideration of the other problems involved. It has shifted the burden of family support upon the child's shoulders long enough as it is.

VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE AND CHILD LABOR

OWEN R. LOVEJOY.

The problem of child labor is so largely due to a lack of educational facilities or of ill-adapted agencies that we believe the National Child Labor Committee may appropriately define its position at this time in relation to the present educational revolution. We do not undertake to discuss any of the questions of method or curriculum in the development of vocational guidance, questions on which the country's educators are presumably better qualified to advise. But vocational guidance as related to child laborthe industrial side of the problem-we deem entirely within our field.

The present awakening toward practical education has been stimulated from the industrial rather than from the educational side. This fact is both promising and disquieting.

In so far as society is coming to realize that the whole problem of feeding, clothing and housing the race is a problem of social interest, we may welcome every tendency to make labor significant and purposeful. We have too long divided labor into mental and manual, assuming that although both were necessary to society, they were not both necessary to the same individual. The result has been to exalt those forms of work in which mental activities were most necessary, which demand initiative, originality, creative and organizing genius; and leave to the less fortunate members of society the physical forms of work called "manual" labor. The effect of such a division is fatal to the progress of those who engage in the manual forms, and fatal to the society of which they are a part. It has served for centuries to keep a large percentage of people just above the plane of bare subsistence as reward for the hardest kind of labor.

And much of such work has been poorly done. With no incentive to higher positions; with no release from a long daily grind upon forms of work that are crude and monotonous; with quantity rather than quality the measure of usefulness; with a decreasing wage accompanying advancing age-it is not strange that the

industrial life of thousands of workers is barren of inspiration or hope. Nor is it surprising that the products of such labor have been the least satisfactory of any, whether viewed from the standpoint of the employer or from the wider considerations of social wealth.

Over sixty years ago, Lord Macaulay declared on the floor of the British Parliament in reference to the employment of children: "Intense labor, beginning too early in life, continued too long every day, stunting the growth of the mind, leaving no time for healthful exercise, no time for intellectual culture, must impair all those high qualities that have made our country great. Your overworked boys will become a feeble and ignoble race of men, the parents of a more feeble progeny; nor will it be long before the deterioration of the laborer will injuriously affect those very interests to which his physical and moral interests have been sacrificed. If ever we are forced to yield the foremost place among commercial nations, we shall yield it to some people pre-eminently vigorous in body and in mind."

We have already begun to reap the harvest of consigning a certain part of our national family to tasks of meaningless, manual drudgery, and naturally enough we do not like the harvest. Let us not be misled by the fact that the prophecy in Lord Macaulay's indictment has not come true. We are gratified that we are not "forced to yield the foremost place among commercial nations". This is not, however, because of our intelligent organization of labor. It is simply because there is no such other race as Macaulay described "some people pre-eminently vigorous in body and in mind".

THE POLICY OF OTHER NATIONS

That many other nations have apparently resigned themselves to the fate of such commercial prosperity as they may grind out of their underpaid and overworked children has been amply demonstrated in the international response to the recent proposal in the United States Tariff Bill to exclude the products of child labor from our ports.

The Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee proposed this amendment to the Tariff Bill not with any expectation of its enactment, but for the double purpose of calling the attention of our sister nations to the awakening conscience of American citizens against exploitation of young children for the convenience of the purchasing public, and with the further object of forcing into the

spotlight of universal condemnation, those few of our commonwealths that still persist in exploiting the labor of children of 12 or 10 years. Both purposes have been achieved. The European press has called us hypocrites for proposing an international 14 year age limit, while certain of our own states permit children to work at 12. And both the European and Asiatic press have resented the proposed action of the United States as a menace to their commercial intercourse with us. One English paper says it would destroy the textile industry of Lancashire. The press of Japan urges with great heat that it would virtually destroy the commercial relations between Japan and our country because so large a percentage of their manufactured products are made by the labor of little children, and has gone so far as to charge that the amendment was initiated by the Japanese haters of the Pacific Coast. The whole situation would be extremely amusing were it not streaked with the blood stains of little boys and girls whose lives in nearly all lands are being sacrificed to the poverty or shortsighted economic ambition of their countrymen.

DEMAND EFFICIENT WORKERS

Thus we see thrown into definite perspective the generally accepted policy of forcing, or at least permitting, a certain portion of every community to become the so-called "unskilled workers" glad to take any kind of job for any kind of wage. And in the past our own people have been inclined to uphold such a system because they thought there was economy in low wages, but we are awakening to learn that it is extravagance instead of economy, and naturally our captains of industry, our leaders in manufacturing enterprises, are among the first to see the error and are clamoring for efficient workers.

It is a commonplace to hear that positions requiring brains can not be filled; that important departments of large manufacturing and commercial enterprises suffer because there are none among the workers who can advance to positions of responsibility requiring initiative and mental resourcefulness. Therefore business is calling. on the schools to turn out a better product and to supply the demands of our enterprising industrial age.