old but outside of
Baltimore and three other counties there is no limit whatever to
the work of any child. Moreover, here in Baltimore where the law
nominally applies children are free to work at any age if they
have a dependent relative or if they are liable to become
dependent themselves!

It is five years since the first delegation of women went to
Atlanta to ask for legislation on behalf of the working children
of Georgia, carrying petitions with them, and they have gone in
vain every year since. Each year the number of women joining in
the protest has been greater and, alas, the number of little
girls under ten years old, who work in Georgia cotton mills all
night, has also been greater. The number of working children
grows faster than the number of petitioning women.... In New
York, where women can vote on school questions in the country
only, not in the city, children five, six, seven and eight years
old, who ought to be in the kindergarten and public schools, are
working in cellars and garrets, under the sweating system, sewing
on buttons and making artificial flowers. So many such children
are not in the schools that no city administration in the last
ten years has dared to make a school census; and we are striving
in vain, (all the philanthropic bodies), to induce the present
Tammany administration just to count the children of school age
but they dare not reveal the extent to which they are failing to
provide for them....

We Americans do not rank among the enlightened nations when we
are graded according to our care of our children. We have,
according to the last census, 580,000 who cannot read or write,
between the ages of ten and fourteen years, not immigrant but
native-born children, and 570,000 of them are in States where the
women do not even use their right of petition. We do not rank
with England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Holland or the
Scandinavian countries when we are measured by our care of our
children, we rank with Russia. The same thing is true of our
children at work. We have two millions of them earning their
living under the age of sixteen years. Legislation of the States
south of Maryland for the children is like the legislation of
England in 1844.... Surely it behooves us to do something at once