as a future citizen is not imperilled by the compact. Here in New
York we set about this within the memory of the youngest of us. To-day we
have compulsory education and a factory law prohibiting the employment of
young children. All between eight and fourteen years old must go to school
at least fourteen weeks in each year. None may labor in factories under
the age of fourteen; not under sixteen unless able to read and write
simple sentences in English. These are the barriers thrown up against the
inroads of ignorance, poverty's threat. They are barriers of paper. We
have the laws, but we do not enforce them.

By that I do not mean to say that we make no attempt to enforce them. We
do. We catch a few hundred truants each year and send them to
reformatories to herd with thieves and vagabonds worse than they, rather
illogically, since there is no pretence that there would have been room
for them in the schools had they wanted to go there. We set half a dozen
factory inspectors to canvass more than twice as many thousand workshops
and to catechise the children they find there. Some are turned out and go
back the next day to that or some other shop. The great mass that are
under age lie and stay. And their lies go on record as evidence that we
are advancing, and that child-labor is getting to be a thing of the past.
That the horrible cruelty of a former day is; that the children have
better treatment and a better time of it in the shops--often a good enough
time to make one feel that they are better off there learning habits of
industry than running about the streets, so long as there is no way of
_making_ them attend school--I believe from what I have seen. That the law
has had the effect of greatly diminishing the number of child-workers I do
not believe. It has had another and worse effect. It has bred wholesale
perjury among them and their parents. Already they have become so used to
it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them. The child
of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a
matter of course. Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose
of the law.

More than a year ago, in an effort to get at the truth of the matter of
children's labor, I submitted to the Board of Health, after consultation
with Dr. Felix Adler, who earned the lasting gratitude of the community by
his labors on the Tenement House Commission, certain questions to be asked
concerning the chil