Cold storage enables vast quantities of goods to be brought together and kept for a rise in the market. James E. Wetz, the so-called egg-king of Chicago, boasted early last winter that he had six million dozen eggs in storage, and in defiance of the Federal Prosecutor said, “All the investigation, legislative or otherwise, will not bring the price of eggs down this year. This is a broker’s year and as for me I am going to sit tight, watch the prices climb up, and the public can pay. Nobody can do anything to me.” In the French Revolution the queen appealed to one of the superintendents of finance and urged him to bring about a change, for the people were starving. He was obdurate, however, and in despair she said to him, “What will the people eat?” The contemptuous statement of the French official was, “Let the people eat grass.” With the increased cost of living, and the manipulation of the market so as to keep prices always above a certain level, the present rise in wages is not as great as under ordinary circumstances. As long as there is poverty there will always be a strong incentive for the piratical industrial agent and the greedy conscienceless father to join hands in exploiting childhood. =Effect of Child Labor.= The children of the nations at war have been called the second line of national defense. The men in the front line are the soldiers and the children growing up will take their places. If the childhood of the nations at war is destroyed, there is no chance for men to take the places of the ones who fall at the front. It is perfectly clear then that in times of war the nations are dependent upon the growing boys. If, however, the children in times of war form the second line of defense, in times of peace they form the first line of defense. The future of a nation is in the hands of the boys and girls of the present generation. They are the men and women that will take the places of the business men, the workers in the factories and workshops, and the tillers of the soil. They must become the future people who will be responsible for transportation, producers of the raw materials of civilization, and those who with cunning hands and ingenious brains work these raw materials into finished fabrics that go to make up the wonders of civilization and of the age. We are robbing the nation when we set children to work and make producers out of them.