In an attempt to minimize the bad effects of street trading most of the communities which have enacted laws or ordinances on the subject provide for the issuance of licenses to boys, and in some cases also to girls, in the belief that in this way the work of the children can best be brought under some degree of control. However, this is merely temporizing, although it affords an opportunity to gather facts and undoubtedly marks a step toward a better solution of the problem. This is brought out clearly by a recent British report on street trading: "Our general impression, gathered in towns in which by-laws had been made, was that, though in exceptional cases much good had resulted from their adoption, on the whole this method of dealing with what we have come to consider an unquestionable evil, has not proved adequate or satisfactory. In many instances it has been pointed out to us that a system of licensing and badging is but a method of legalizing what is indisputably an evil, and that a set of by-laws, however rigorously enforced, can at best only modify the difficulties of the position."[141] The social workers of Chicago, keenly alive to the menace of the situation, bewail the lack of protection for street workers in the following words: "The child labor law and the compulsory school law and the juvenile court law form the body of protective legislation which has been developing in behalf of the children of Illinois during the past twenty years. By none of the three, however, except in so far as street trading by a child under ten is counted an element in dependency, is the street-trading child safeguarded against parental neglect or greed, the vicious sights and sounds of the city street and the demoralizing habit of irregular employment."[142] _Opposition to Regulation_