=Physical Evils.= The effects of child labor are so bad and so well known that there is no need of entering into a formal discussion of the question. I taught a class of boys in a settlement in Chicago some years ago. One of the little fellows had hands that were as black as a Negro’s, and he always held his hand in a certain position. One night after class I asked him to wait for a few minutes. I said, “Just a minute, Fred. I notice that you always hold your hand in a peculiar way.” “Gee, it is the only way I can hold it,” he replied. Then he showed me that his fingers were all pressed out of shape and that the black stain was ink that had been ground into his hand and into his very flesh. This boy looked to be about twelve years old but he was nearly nineteen. For almost nine years he had been working in a box factory. His job was to stencil the ends of boxes. He would lay the stencil on the wooden end of the boxes, then hold a brush resembling a shaving brush in his hand and this he would dip into the pot of black and rub it across the stencil. This constant work for ten hours a day for nine years had blackened his hands so that they would never be white again; and the constant pressure from the brush had deformed his right hand so that it was good for nothing else than to hold a stencil brush. Nearly all the unemployable men who gather in our cities, who sleep on the park benches in good weather, eat wherever they can, and in cold weather fill up the municipal lodging houses or sleep upon the floors of the police stations, are physically unfit because they were forced to go to work at too early an age. The number of these men who are the victims of child labor is remarkable. A student of social conditions, who made a study of the problem of unemployment in this country in the winter of 1913-14 said, “We are coming to see the rank folly of putting children in at one end of the industrial hopper, grinding them up, and taking inefficient, no-account men out at the other end. We have thousands of children in the country doing work that they ought not to do, and hundreds of thousands of men who can get nothing to do. We are not only faced with the problem to-day, but we are projecting the problem into to-morrow.”