down through the higher
levels. It is the condition which leads toward the misuse of young
girls in wage-earning tasks. There is a difference of opinion among
the wisest in regard to the social usefulness of forms of protective
labor legislation for adult women which are not shared by men. There
can be none in respect to the social harm of using the vitality, the
charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential
mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of
manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or
mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It
means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education
and development and meant to attract toward successful family life
rather than away from it.

The wrong and injustice of child-labor is equal for both sexes and no
law can be too stringent or too severely enforced against it. The
social waste of using youth exclusively in wage-earning pursuits can
easily be proved, in the case of girls, to extend to years older than
in the case of boys. The family cannot be maintained in stable
condition, and certainly can not progress in social value, unless the
majority of young girls are given the right attitude toward it and
time to prepare for its opportunities and responsibilities. If, as is
generally now believed, the legal majority and voting age for boys and
girls should be the same, namely, twenty-one years, then the girls, as
potential mothers, must have a distinct and specialized protection up
to that legal majority from all that harms health, prevents
safeguarded recreation, or turns life-currents away from the home to
the factory. The death-rate of babies when mothers work in factories
or shops with no provision for special rest is one testimony to the
social improvidence of our present industrial use of older women. The
life-long invalidism of many women, the childlessness of multitudes,
the statistics of home conditions revealed by Children's Courts
furnish testimony of like character. The unknown toll of loss of
personal aptitude for family life leading to broken homes, or to
hopeless struggles against invasions by poverty of the right of common
men and women to a home, are proof positive that a change in economic
conditions is demanded in the interest of family life.

=Social Measures Needed to Prevent These Evils.=--These social evils
connected with child-labor and the ne