children the living energy of others is forced out of existence. Industrial work at home is done by children four to five years old, while the age limit for child labour in factories, both in Germany and in Switzerland, is fourteen years. The government of Denmark has proposed the same limit of age. In Italy most of the crippled young children were brought up in the sulphur districts of Sicily, crowded together in low galleries, burdened with heavy sacks at an age at which their tender limbs under such conditions must inevitably and incurably be contorted. As early as twelve and thirteen years old many of them are incapable of work. In the magnesium mines of Spain, quantities of children six to eight years old are kept at work; through the poisonous odours they fall victims to severe diseases. Other children carrying heavy pitchers on their head are employed to water dry places. The child is a cheaper means of transportation than the ass. Despite protective legislation the average of height and weight in the Lancashire children is and continues to be lower than anywhere else. Of the two thousand children investigated in this district only one hundred and fifty-one were really sound and strong; one hundred and ninety-eight were seriously crippled; the rest more or less under the standard of good health. All work in the cotton industry done from six o'clock in the morning till five in the evening changes, so this doctor says, the hopeful ten-year-old child into the thin pallid thirteen-year-old boy. This degeneration of the population in industrial districts is becoming a serious danger for England's future. After people are convinced that all civilised nations are exposed to this same danger, industrial and street work of children will be everywhere forbidden. This will be a victory for the principle of child protection, which, in this as in other like spheres, was opposed at first on both economic and industrial grounds. Among these was the uncontested right of fathers to decide on the work of their children.