American child labor laws usually contain a provision to the effect that no child under sixteen years shall engage in any employment that may be considered dangerous to its life or limb or where its health may be injured or morals depraved. This is sonorous, but ineffective,--the particular kinds of improper work should be specified. In this list of undesirable forms of labor, street work should be included. Great Britain has had far more experience in the matter of regulating the work of children than any state of this country, and, in the light of all this experience, her departmental committee of 1910 has emphatically declared that street trading by boys under seventeen and girls under eighteen years should be absolutely prohibited. This should be our ideal in America. Commenting on the banishment of young girls from the streets of New York City, Mrs. Florence Kelley says, "If the law against street selling and peddling by girls to the age of sixteen years can be thus effectively enforced in a city in which the depths of poverty among the immigrants are so frightful as they are in New York, there is no reason for assuming that it is impossible to prohibit efficiently street selling by boys."[146] Girls under eighteen years should never be allowed to go out in the streets for commercial purposes, no matter how innocent these purposes may be in themselves. One of the most important features of the movement in America should be the absolute prohibition of such work by minors under eighteen years at night; this is urged because it is in harmony with the provisions of our most advanced child labor laws and is fully justified because of the evil character of the influences rampant in cities after dark, and because such night work affords children a constant opportunity to cultivate their acquaintance with, if not to know for the first time, conditions from which every effort should be made to isolate them. For night messenger service the age limit should be twenty-one years. The enforcement of such regulation as is now provided by the few states and cities which have given this subject any attention, is variously intrusted to factory inspectors, police, truant and probation officers, but in Boston the school committee has delivered this task into the hands of one man who is known as the supervisor of licensed minors. The Boston plan for enforcement seems to have given better results than the common system of intrusting the enforcement to officers already overburdened with other duties, but it is clearly impossible for one officer to handle the situation unaided in a large city--the plan would be considerably improved by the appointment of several assistants.