“I keep ’em a-working all the year. In the winter, bring ’em down here to the gulf. In Summer, take ’em to the berry fields of Maryland and Delaware. They don’t lose many weeks’ time, but I have a hard time to get ’em sometimes. Have to tell ’em all kinds of lies.” So here we have a certain kind of “scientific management” of child labor by means of which even the vacation time of the children is utilized. “Why do they do it?”—that question comes to one over and over; what keeps these little ones at their uninteresting task? In the first place, their immigrant parents are frugal, even parsimonious, and every little helps. Then they think it keeps the children out of trouble, little realizing that they are storing up trouble when they grow up, handicapped by lack of education, broken physically, and with a distaste for work. Small wonder if they drift into the industrial maelstrom of cheap, inefficient labor, and float on as industrial misfits. If we look at it from the employer’s point of view, we find his chief justification is that children are needed because the goods are perishable, and must be put up immediately. You ask him if the children are not perishable, and he says he can’t see that they are spoiled. “It doesn’t hurt ’em. They’re tough. I began myself at their age,” and so on. It will be long years before these employers will be looking at this children’s labor with a long-range finder, a problem to be met along with that of improved machinery. The children themselves are docile; they do as they are told; they are imitative, like to do what the rest are doing; they are easily stimulated by the idea of competing with other children; and they are very sensitive to criticism and ridicule. I do not, however, recall a single case of a child being whipped for not working. It can easily be seen that with the parents, or employers, and children against it, the task of liberation from this commercialized family peonage of immature workers is not an easy one. On the Atlantic Coast more Negroes are employed, than on the Gulf Coast, and they do not work the children very much, except where they have come under the influence of the immigrant workers. In almost every case, the bosses and padrones agree that the Baltimore workers are much more satisfactory than the Negroes. They say: “There is no comparing them. The whites work harder, longer hours, are more easily driven, and use the children much more.” The chief advantage of Negro help is that it saves the cost of transportation. Where it is necessary to get the work done promptly the immigrants are imported.