We naturally associate a factory with orderly productive action; but similarity of action, without identical thought and co-operative intelligence, is coercion, and not order. The present factory discipline needs to be redeemed as the old school discipline has been redeemed. In the latter the system of prizes and punishments has been largely given up, not only because they were difficult to administer, but because they utterly failed to free the powers of the child. “The fear of starvation,” of which the old economists made so much, is, after all, but a poor incentive to work; and the appeal to cupidity by which a man is induced to “speed up” in all the various devices of piece-work is very little better. Yet the factory still depends upon these as incentives to the ordinary workers. Certainly one would wish to protect children from them as long as possible. In a soap factory in Chicago little girls wrap bars of soap in two covers at the minimum rate of 3,000 bars a week; their only ambition is to wrap as fast as possible and well enough to pass the foreman’s inspection. The girl whose earnings are the largest at the end of the week is filled with pride--praiseworthy, certainly, but totally without educational value. Let us realize before it is too late that in this age of iron, of machine-tending, and of subdivided labor, we need as never before the untrammeled and inspired activity of youth. To cut it off from thousands of working children is a most perilous undertaking, and endangers the very industry to which they have been sacrificed.