a
chance at manual training. She probably is convinced that he alone, by
his unaided efforts, is supporting a widowed mother, and her heart is
moved to do all she can for him. Next to her sits a workingman trained
in trades-union methods. He knows that the boy's natural development is
arrested, and that the abnormal activity of his body and mind uses up
the force which should go into growth; moreover, that this premature use
of his powers has but a momentary and specious value. He is forced to
these conclusions because he has seen many a man, entering the factory
at eighteen and twenty, so worn out by premature work that he was "laid
on the shelf" within ten or fifteen years. He knows very well that he
can do nothing in the way of ameliorating the lot of this particular
boy; that his only possible chance is to agitate for proper child-labor
laws; to regulate, and if possible prohibit, street-vending by children,
in order that the child of the poorest may have his school time secured
to him, and may have at least his short chance for growth.

These three people, sitting in the street car, are all honest and
upright, and recognize a certain duty toward the forlorn children of the
community. The self-made man is encouraging one boy's own efforts; the
philanthropic lady is helping on a few boys; the workingman alone is
obliged to include all the boys of his class. Workingmen, because of
their feebleness in all but numbers, have been forced to appeal to the
state, in order to secure protection for themselves and for their
children. They cannot all rise out of their class, as the occasionally
successful man has done; some of them must be left to do the work in the
factories and mines, and they have no money to spend in philanthropy.

Both public agitation and a social appeal to the conscience of the
community is necessary in order to secure help from the state, and,
curiously enough, child-labor laws once enacted and enforced are a
matter of great pride, and even come to be regarded as a register of the
community's humanity and enlightenment. If the method of public
agitation could find quiet and orderly expression in legislative
enactment, and if labor measures could be submitted to the examination
and judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, we
should have the ideal development of the democratic state.

But we judge labor organizations as we do other living institutions, not
by their declaration of