Last of all, we come to the children. In these days we are continually talking in tones of alarm about a declining birth rate and are at last seriously considering how to check the appalling infant mortality that makes an annual massacre of the innocents; but most of us are still very little awake to the sacrifice of childhood that is daily being made in our midst. We pass a pale child in the street, carrying a long bundle in a black wrapper, and the sight makes no impression. But, to those of us who have seen the under side of London, that little figure is a type of unremunerative toil, of stunted growth, of weakened vitality and of wasted school teaching: an example of that most cruel form of improvidence described by the French proverb as “eating our wheat as grass.” Labour in childhood inevitably means, in nine cases out of ten, decadence in early manhood or womanhood; and the prevalence of it among ourselves is perhaps the most serious of national dangers. There is probably no branch of home work in which child labour is not involved, and but very few branches of retail trade. Our milk, our newspapers, our greengrocery are brought to us by small boys; young boys are out at all hours and in all weathers with parcel-delivering vans; and many and many a perambulator is pushed by a small girl whose chin is on a level with the handle. If, in 1901, there were, as the Interdepartmental Committee declared, _at least_ 200,000 school children working for wages, and if, as seems practically certain, the number is larger now, can we wonder that so many grown up workers have remained inefficient, incompetent and listless? We cannot have grain, if we choose to eat the wheat in the blade.