This alleged distinction between street trading and street employment should be clearly understood, as any movement designed to remedy present conditions must be sufficiently comprehensive to avoid the great mistake of protecting one class and ignoring the other. On the one hand there is said to be an army of little independent "merchants" conducting business affairs of their own, while on the other there is an array of juvenile employees performing the tasks set them by their masters. For purposes of regulation this distinction is hairsplitting, narrow-minded and unjust, as it has been made to defeat in part the beneficent aim of the great campaign for child welfare, but nevertheless it must be reckoned with. Children under fourteen years of age at work in factories and mines are often properly called "slaves," and their plight is regarded with pity coupled with a clarion cry for their emancipation. But tiny workers in the streets are referred to approvingly as "little merchants" and are freely patronized even by the avowed friends of children, who thereby contribute their moral support toward continuing these conditions and maintaining this absurd fiction of our merchant babyhood. As an instance of this remarkable attitude, there was proudly printed in the Pittsburgh _Gazette-Times_ of April 11, 1910, the picture of a four-year-old child who had been a newsboy in an Ohio town since the age of _thirty months_, and this was described as a most worthy achievement! That the term "child labor," whose meaning has so long been popularly restricted to the employment of children in factories, mills, mines and stores, is properly applicable to the activities of children in all kinds of work for profit, is now virtually recognized by a few states which prohibit employment of children under fourteen years of age "in any gainful occupation." But unfortunately the courts have rigidly construed the word "employ" to mean the purchasing of the services of one person by another, hence newsboys, peddlers, bootblacks and others who work on their own account, do not enjoy the protection of such a statute because they are not "employed." Under this interpretation a fatal loophole is afforded through which thousands of boys and girls escape the spirit of the law which seeks to prevent their _labor_ rather than their mere employment. It is for this reason that, in states having otherwise excellent provisions for the conservation of childhood, we see little children freely exploiting themselves on city streets. This situation has been calmly accepted without protest by the general public, for, while the people condemn child labor in factories, they tolerate and even approve of it on the street. They labor under the delusion that merely because a few of our successful business men were newsboys in the past, these little "merchants" of the street are receiving valuable training in business methods and will later develop into leaders in the affairs of men. A