mong them--pure American stock, who have gradually moved from the
Carolinas, Tennessee, and other southern states to Arkansas, Texas,
Oklahoma, Arizona, and on into the Imperial Valley." Some of these
children, it seems, wanted to attend school, but their fathers did not
want to work; so the children were forced to become bread-winners. One
man whose children were working with him in the fields said, "Please,
lady, don't send them to school; let them pick a while longer. I ain't
got my new auto paid for yet." The native white American mother of
children working in the fields proudly remarked: "No; they ain't
never been to school, nor me nor their poppy, nor their granddads and
grandmoms. We've always been pickers!"--and she spat her tobacco over
the field in expert fashion.

"In the Valley one hears from townspeople," writes the investigator,
"that pickers make ten dollars a day, working the whole family. With
that qualification, the statement is ambiguous. One Mexican in the
Imperial Valley was the father of thirty-three children--`about thirteen
or fourteen living,' he said. If they all worked at cotton-picking, they
would doubtless altogether make more than ten dollars a day."

One of the child laborers revealed the economic advantage--to the
parents--in numerous progeny: "Us kids most always drag from forty to
fifty pounds of cotton before we take it to be weighed. Three of us
pick. I'm twelve years old and my bag is twelve feet long. I can drag
nearly a hundred pounds. My sister is ten years old, and her bag is
eight feet long. My little brother is seven and his bag is five feet
long."

Evidence abounds in the publications of the National Child Labor
Committee of this type of fecund parenthood.(4) It is not merely a
question of the large family versus the small family. Even comparatively
small families among migratory workers of this sort have been large
families. The high infant mortality rate has carried off the weaker
children. Those who survive are merely those who have been strong enough
to survive the most unfavorable living conditions. No; it is a situation
not unique, nor even unusual in human history, of greed and stupidity
and cupidity encouraging the procreative instinct toward the manufacture
of slaves. We hear these days of the selfishness and the degradation
of healthy and well-educated women who refuse motherhood; but we hear
little of the more sinister selfishness of men and women who bring
babie