l us that no less than 75 per cent. of American
children leave school between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to go
to work. This number is increasing. According to the recently published
report on "The Administration of the First Child Labor Law," in five
states in which it was necessary for the Children's Bureau to handle
directly the working certificates of children, one-fifth of the 25,000
children who applied for certificates left school when they were in the
fourth grade; nearly a tenth of them had never attended school at all or
had not gone beyond the first grade; and only one-twenty-fifth had gone
as far as the eighth grade. But their educational equipment was even
more limited than the grade they attended would indicate. Of the
children applying to go to work 1,803 had not advanced further than the
first grade even when they had gone to school at all; 3,379 could not
even sign their own names legibly, and nearly 2,000 of them could not
write at all. The report brings automatically into view the vicious
circle of child-labor, illiteracy, bodily and mental defect, poverty and
delinquency. And like all reports on child labor, the large family and
reckless breeding looms large in the background as one of the chief
factors in the problem.

Despite all our boasting of the American public school, of the equal
opportunity afforded to every child in America, we have the shortest
school-term, and the shortest school-day of any of the civilized
countries. In the United States of America, there are 106 illiterates to
every thousand people. In England there are 58 per thousand, Sweden and
Norway have one per thousand.

The United States is the most illiterate country in the world--that is,
of the so-called civilized countries. Of the 5,000,000 illiterates
in the United States, 58 per cent. are white and 28 per cent. native
whites. Illiteracy not only is the index of inequality of opportunity.
It speaks as well a lack of consideration for the children. It means
either that children have been forced out of school to go to work, or
that they are mentally and physically defective.(1)

One is tempted to ask why a society, which has failed so lamentably to
protect the already existing child life upon which its very perpetuation
depends, takes upon itself the reckless encouragement of indiscriminate
procreation. The United States Government has recently inaugurated a
policy of restricting immigration from foreign countries. Un