It is the fact that, until 1874, there was no organized movement to defend the “rights” of children that led the author to investigate the conditions that had existed previous to that time. The first Child’s Protective Movement began in New York in the year mentioned, and the rapidity with which this spread throughout the world indicated that some general law, or as Brinton says, psychological process was at work. Today there are protecting societies in every country where there are Caucasian peoples. To go to the sources of the Child Protection Movement, it was necessary to understand the industrial conditions which arose in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century, and the latter part of the seventeenth, when the boast was made that children were at last being made useful. Back of the misuse of children in factories is the interesting story of the rise of modern industrialism with the early attempts of the guilds to protect children, not so much out of any development of the human feelings as from the guild’s desire to protect the male labourer from unfair competition. The Decree of Napoleon in 1811,[13] declaring that the unprotected infant was a charge on the state, marked another advance in humanitarianism; back of this advance was the long and interesting story of the endeavours of the religious orders and the charitably disposed persons of the Middle Ages to save the lives of children, the most conspicuous benefactor of childhood being the noble St. Vincent de Paul. It was he who gave to the golden glories of France’s golden age a touch of humanity that would otherwise have been lacking in the epoch ruled over by Mazarin and later the Great Louis. Leading up to the efforts of St. Vincent de Paul was that complex and interesting chapter of the mixing of the old German laws with the Roman laws, as the barbarians found them. That the semi-barbarous tribes that descended on Rome were better qualified to take up the humane side of the Christian work than was the decadent Roman, we can assume from the statement of Tacitus, that among the Germans children were treated more kindly than they were by the then ruling lords of the earth. Satire there may have been, as Guizot and Voltaire suggest, in much that Tacitus wrote about the superior morality of the Germans, but later history demonstrated their ethical superiority over the nation that was then on the verge of moral decay. In any case, as the Christian religion spread among the tribes that had enfiladed Rome, there are evidences of more humane consideration for children until we find Bishop Datheus as early as 787 A.D. founding an asylum for children in a spirit strangely in advance of his time, though the bitter protests of the Christian fathers in the second century against the slaughter and misuse of children put the mark of infamy on the persecutors of children for all time.