Legislation of the States south of Maryland for the children is like the legislation of England in 1844. We are sixty-two years behind England in caring for the children of the textile industries. May we not also trace some of this national indifference to the disposition of the past century to love children without really knowing them? We refuse to recognize them as the great national asset and are content to surround them with a glamour of innocence and charm. We put them prematurely to work, ignorant of the havoc it brings, because no really careful study has been made of their capacities and possibilities--that is, no study really fitted to the industrial conditions in which they live. Each age has, of course, its own temptations and above all its own peculiar industrial temptations and needs to see them not only in the light of the increased sensibility and higher ethical standards of its contemporaries, but also in relation to its peculiar industrial development. When we ask why it is that child-labor has been given to us to discuss and to rectify, rather than to the people who lived before us, we need only to remember that, for the first time in industrial history, the labor of the little child has in many industries become as valuable as that of a man or woman. The old-fashioned weaver was obliged to possess skill and strength to pull his beam back and forth. It is only through the elaborated inventions of our own age that skill as well as strength has been so largely eliminated that, for example, a little child may “tend the thread” in a textile mill almost as well as an adult. This is true of so many industries that the temptation to exploit premature labor has become peculiar to this industrial epoch and we are tempted as never before to use the labor of little children.