No combination of figures can give any idea of that price. Statistics cannot express the withering of child lips in the poisoned air of factories; the tired, strained look of child eyes that never dance to the glad music of souls tuned to Nature’s symphonies; the binding to wheels of industry the little bodies and souls that should be free, as the stars are free to shine and the flowers are free to drink the evening dews. Statistics may be perfected to the extent of giving the number of child workers with accuracy, the number maimed by dangerous machines, and the number who die year by year, but they can never give the spiritual loss, if I may use that word in its secular, scientific sense. Who shall tally the deaths of childhood’s hopes, ambitions, and dreams? How shall figures show the silent atrophy of potential genius, the brutalizing of potential love, the corruption of potential purity? In what arithmetical terms shall we state the loss of shame, and the development of that less than brute view of life, which enables us to watch with unconcern the toil of infants side by side with the idleness of men? IX The moral ills resulting from child labor are numerous and far-reaching. When children become wage-earners and are thrown into constant association with adult workers, they develop prematurely an adult consciousness and view of life. About the first consequence of their employment is that they cease almost at once to be children. They lose their respect for parental authority, in many cases, and become arrogant, wayward, and defiant. There is always a tendency in their homes to regard them as men and women as soon as they become wage-earners. Discipline is at once relaxed, at the very time when it is most necessary. When children who have just entered upon that most critical period of life, adolescence, are associated with adults in factories, are driven to their tasks with curses, and hear continually the unrestrained conversation, often coarse and foul, of the adults, the psychological effect cannot be other than bad. The mothers and fathers who read this book need only to know that children, little boys and girls, in mills and factories where men and women are employed, must frequently see women at work in whom the signs of a developing life within are evident, and hear them made the butt of the coarsest taunts and jests, to realize how great the moral peril to the adolescent boy or girl must be.