finally take possession of the machines which they will guide and feed. But there is another side to the benefits of child-labor legislation represented by the time element, the leisure which is secured to the child for the pursuit of his own affairs, quite aside from the opportunity afforded him to attend school. Helplessness in childhood, the scientists tell us, is the guarantee of adult intellect, but they also assert that play in youth is the guarantee of adult culture. It is the most valuable instrument the race possesses to keep life from becoming mechanical. The child who cannot live life is prone to dramatize it, and the very process is a constant compromise between imitation and imagination, as the over-mastering impulse itself which drives him to incessant play is both reminiscent and anticipatory. In proportion as the child in later life is to be subjected to a mechanical and one-sided activity, and as a highly subdivided labor is to be demanded from him, it is therefore most important that he should have his full period of childhood and youth for this play expression in order that he may cultivate within himself the root of a culture which alone can give his later activity a meaning.[14] This is true whether or not we accept the theory that the aesthetic feelings originate in the play impulse, with its corollary that the constant experimentation found in the commonest forms of play are to be looked upon as “the principal source of all kinds of art.” At this moment, when industrial forces are concentrated and unified as never before, unusual care must be taken to secure to the children their normal play period, that the art instinct may have some chance, and that the producer himself may have enough individuality of character to avoid becoming a mere cog in the vast industrial machine. Quite aside also from the problem of individual development and from the fact that play, in which the power of choice is constantly presented and constructive imagination required, is the best corrective of the future disciplinary life of the factory, there is another reason why the children who are to become producers under the present system should be given their full child-life period. The entire population of the factory town and of those enormous districts in every large city in which the children live who most need the protection of child-labor legislation, consists of people who have come together in response to the demands of modern industry. They are held together by the purely impersonal tie of working in one large factory, in which they not only do not know each other, but in which no one person nor even group of persons knows everybody. They are utterly without the natural and minute acquaintance and inter-family relationships that rural and village life afford, and are therefore much more dependent upon the social sympathy and power of effective association which is becoming its urban substitute.