SOURCE: Nardinelli, Clark. “The Critics of Child Labor.” In Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 9-35. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Nardinelli examines the agendas of groups seeking regulation of child labor.

Most civilized people consider the mistreatment of children to be an outrage. Because the employment of children in factories and workshops has long been considered to be the worst sort of treatment, child labor has never lacked critics. Indeed, by far the greater part of the commentators on child labor have been highly critical of the practice. In this chapter, I will assess the views of some of the leading critics in an attempt to discover the principal reasons for the criticisms. My survey will be confined to two groups of critics: the contemporary critics of industrial child labor and the historians of later eras. Although the focus will be on the...