eet children" are artificially retarded
in their growth, and that the tendency is to reduce their intelligence
to the level of the congenital imbecile.

Nor must it be concluded that these large "beet" families are always the
"ignorant foreigner" so despised by our respectable press. The following
case throws some light on this matter, reported in the same pamphlet:
"An American family, considered a prize by the agent because of the fact
that there were nine children, turned out to be a `flunk.' They could
not work in the beet-fields, they ran up a bill at the country-store,
and one day the father and the eldest son, a boy of nineteen, were seen
running through the railroad station to catch an out-going train. The
grocer thought they were `jumping' their bill. He telephoned ahead
to the sheriff of the next town. They were taken off the train by the
sheriff and given the option of going back to the farm or staying in
jail. They preferred to stay in jail, and remained there for two weeks.
Meanwhile, the mother and her eight children, ranging in ages form
seventeen years to nine months, had to manage the best way they could.
At the end of two weeks, father and son were set free.... During all of
this period the farmers of the community sent in provisions to keep
the wife and children from starving." Does this case not sum up in a
nutshell the typical American intelligence confronted with the
problem of the too-large family--industrial slavery tempered with
sentimentality!

Let us turn to a young, possibly a more progressive state. Consider the
case of "California, the Golden" as it is named by Emma Duke, in her
study of child-labor in the Imperial Valley, "as fertile as the Valley
of the Nile."(3) Here, cotton is king, and rich ranchers, absentee
landlords and others exploit it. Less than ten years ago ranchers
would bring in hordes of laboring families, but refuse to assume any
responsibility in housing them, merely permitting them to sleep on
the grounds of the ranch. Conditions have been somewhat improved, but,
sometimes, we read, "a one roomed straw house with an area of fifteen
by twenty feet will serve as a home for an entire family, which not
only cooks but sleeps in the same room." Here, as in Michigan among the
beets, children are "thick as bees." All kinds of children pick,
Miss Duke reports, "even those as young as three years! Five-year-old
children pick steadily all day.... Many white American children are
a