(3) The most piteous form of industrial slavery is that of young children, who should be in school or out of doors, developing their minds and bodies into some measure of readiness for adult work and responsibility, instead of prematurely losing the joy of life and stunting their mental and physical growth. In 1910 some two million children under sixteen were earning their living in this country. Even many thousands of children of twelve years or less are set to work in our factories and canneries. These children get almost no development and wholesome recreation; in great numbers they die early, and if they live it is commonly to fall into some form of vice or crime, and to breed an inferior race. Nothing is more inhumane or more mad than for the community to permit cheapness of goods at such a price. Indeed, child labor means, in the end, economic waste; the ultimate loss in efficiency on the part of these undeveloped, uneducated children, far more than overbalances the temporary industrial gain. The situation has been incredibly shocking; the employers who seek such an advantage over their humaner rivals, and the legislators who have winked at their inhumanity, deserve no mild reprobation. But legislation alone is not adequate to meet the situation; the underlying cause is the insufficient payment of adult workers, which practically necessitates supplementation by what the children can add to the family income. This is one illustration of the way in which all our social problems are tangled together so that it is impossible fully to solve any one without solving the others. When every adult receives wages enough to support a normal family-and when he is content to restrict his family to normal size; when the public schools are made efficient enough to show their evident worth to parents and to attract the children themselves, and a strict truant system takes care that the law is really obeyed; when the sick and defective and aged among the poor are cared for at public expense as a matter of course, there will be no need for children to work to help support the family; and we must endeavor, by the arousal of public opinion and by nationwide legislation, to keep children out of the factories, the shops, and the mines, till they are full-grown and educated. [Footnote: S. Nearing, The Solution of the Child-Labor Problem. J. Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children. E. N. Clopper, Child Labor in City Streets. Reports of Annual Meetings of the National Child Labor Committee. (Free literature. 105 East Twenty-second Street, New York City.)]