While the upper classes show that they are crude, immoderate, lazy, devoted to enjoying themselves; while the majority are aiming at getting and spending money; while so many are able to eat without working, and so few can find work who look for it; while careless luxury lives side by side with careless necessity, the upper class has not the shadow of right to expect an improved lower class. The society of the present day creates and maintains a social system whose effects are notorious in the economic crimes of the upper and lower class alike. It is not surprising that great cities are full of tramps and street urchins, like a spoilt cheese full of maggots. A destroyed home life, an idiotic school system, premature work in the factory, stupefying life in the streets, these are what the great city gives to the children of the under classes. It is more astonishing that the better instincts of human nature generally are victorious in the lower class, than the fact that this result is occasionally reversed. There is another argument against child labour, to be found in its immediate effect on industry itself. Working men trained in the schools are everywhere notoriously most efficient; even in Russia, where popular education is still so defective, this experience has been noted. The working man able to read and to write receives without exception on that account a higher pay than the illiterate ones who can be only used for the coarsest kind of work. The present development of German industry, as compared with English, is to be ascribed among other things to the superior educational training of the German people. The intensive and intelligent work of the American working man has apparently the same cause. But when children made sleepy by work in the factory enter evening schools, or when children are taken too early from school, they lose under continuous hard work the desire and possibility of adapting themselves to a higher education; they become organic machines which feed the inorganic ones. This must cause the value of their work to decline. These organic machines are passive, they do not try to improve their condition of life, as do the higher workmen. Besides living machines cannot increase the product of labour. Intelligent working men who watch over their own rights and increase them are also those who learn easiest new methods of work, discover new inventions which are of advantage to their line of work, and so increase the value of their product. It is only by the growth of this class of workmen, that any country to-day can stand the pressure of foreign competition. But the chief condition of this growth is that the bodily and mental powers of the child shall be used for his own development in school games and play; at the same time his capacity for work must be trained by occupation at home and in the technical school, not by work in a factory.