“Too many children is as great a danger to family life as too few children,” said Mr. Owen Lovejoy, General Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee. A secretary of this Committee, working for the abolition of child labor, the improvement of the compulsory education laws, and the raising of the standards of education in backward states, Mr. Lovejoy has first knowledge of the condition of children in every state in the Union. “How many are too many?” he was asked. “I should say any more than the mother can look after and the father earn a living for. There are always too many children in a family if they have to go to work before they get their growth and schooling. It may be that some day the state will help support the children, but under present conditions, as soon as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by. In doing this they not only injure their tender growing bodies, but indirectly they drag down the father’s wage. They go to work to help the family, but they really injure it. The wage tends to become an individual wage, the father receiving only enough for his personal maintenance, the mother working both at home and outside, and the children supporting themselves as soon as they can toddle into the cotton fields or hang onto the back of a delivery wagon. Thus the home is dissolved into constituent parts and the burden of the struggle for existence is laid on each. The more that children work, the lower the father’s wages become; the lower the father’s wages become, the more the children must work. So we evolve the vicious circle. The home becomes a mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with weariness and minds drunk with sleep. No fine spiritual relation can exist between parents and children where the children are an economic asset to the parents. There are people who approve this state of affairs, but no one can who really cares for the welfare of children. We fight this condition with Child Labor Laws. If the children stay out of industry, the fathers have more work and make more money in the end. But one of the strongest factors against getting laws passed or enforced after they are passed, is the families’ immediate need of the children’s pitiful earnings. If there were fewer children in these families, it would be possible to keep them in school and leave the mines and factories to the fathers. There is another aspect to the matter. Not only do these unfortunate children drag down the physique and mentality of the race, but they keep many children of more thoughtful parents from being born at all. Just as long as there are many families that are too large, there will be other families that are too small. Yet these small families are potentially the best families of all. Serious-minded laboring people whose trades are being captured by child laborers are reluctant to bring offspring into a world