It is less easy to understand the problem of child labor in its relation to parental responsibility. It is continually asked: “Why do parents send their little ones to work at such an early age? Is it possible that there are so many parents who are so indifferent to the welfare of their children that they send them to work, and surround them with perils and evil influences, or are there other, deeper reasons? Are the parents helpless to save their little ones?” These are questions which have never yet been satisfactorily answered; they deal with a phase of the problem which has never been fully investigated, notwithstanding that it is of vital importance. As already noted, when the manufacturers of England sought first to get child workers for the cotton and woollen mills, they found the parents arrayed against them, defending their children. For a long time no self-respecting father or mother would allow a child to go to the factories to work, and it remained for many years a brand of social disgrace to have one’s children so employed. Not until their pride was conquered by poverty, not until they were subjugated by hunger and compelled to surrender and accept the inevitable, did the parents send their children into the factories. It was poverty, bitter poverty, which led the first “free” child into the mills to economic servitude, and I am disposed to think that poverty is still the main reason why parents send their children to body-and-soul-destroying toil. Many of those whose work for the enactment of legislation to protect the children from the ills of premature labor entitles them to lasting honor and gratitude, have shown an inclination to minimize the extent to which poverty is responsible for child labor. The opponents of child-labor legislation have so strongly insisted upon the hardships which would follow if parents were deprived of their children’s earnings, and have so eloquently pleaded the cause of the “poor widowed mothers,” as almost to make the employment of children appear as a philanthropic enterprise. Very often, it seems to me, the advocates of child-labor legislation, in their eagerness to refute their critics, have resorted to arguments which rest upon exceedingly slight foundations of fact, and, in this case especially, laid insufficient stress upon the logical answer. The more closely the problem is scrutinized and investigated, the larger the influence of poverty will appear, I think. At the same time, it is well to remember that poverty is not the only cause by any means. There are many other causes, some closely associated with poverty, others only remotely or not at all. Ignorance, cupidity, indifference, feverish ambition to “get on,”—these are a few of the many other causes which might be named.