In agricultural conditions, such as have prevailed generally in America, there is little need of limiting the hours of work and the age at which children may begin to work.  The barefoot boy trudging over clover fields to carry water to the harvesters may be the happier, healthier, and better for his work.  Child-labor in agriculture has never become a social “problem” so long as the children work with their own parents at their own homes; but the labor of children for wages, especially in gangs on large farms (as in beet cultivation and cranberry picking) or in canning factories, has exhibited evils as pronounced as any in urban manufacturing conditions.

The evil of forcing children into factories was early recognized.  The most obvious evils of child-labor are neglect of the child’s schooling; destruction of home life; overwork, overstrain, and loss of sleep, with resulting injury to health; unusual danger of industrial accidents; and exposure to demoralizing conditions.  The usual assumption that the worker is able to contract regarding the conditions of labor on terms of equality with the employer is most palpably false in the case of children.  The child, subject to the commands of his parents and guardians, is not a free agent.  Lazy fathers are tempted to support themselves in idleness on the wages of their young children.  Often poverty leads the parents to rob their children of health, of schooling, and of the joys of childhood.  The competition of child-labor also depresses the wages of adults, and thus the evil grows.

Sec. 5. #Child-labor legislation.# The limitation of hours was first applied to children working in English factories early in the nineteenth century and thence has extended throughout the world, tardily following the spread of the factory system.  The first American law of the kind was in Massachusetts, in 1842, limiting to 10 hours the labor of children under twelve years of age in manufacturing establishments.  All the earlier state laws established low minimums of age and high maximums of hours, and were poorly enforced for lack of adequate administrative machinery, this in turn being the result of lack of active public interest.  In all these respects many states gradually improved their child-labor laws in the latter part of the last century, and much more rapidly since 1903.  Now the maximum working day for children in about one half of the states is 8 hours, in one quarter is 9 hours, and in one quarter is 10 hours (and in a few southern states, 11 hours).  Night work by children is very generally forbidden (in about forty states).  During the same time the minimum age has been pretty generally raised to fourteen years for factory work, with higher ages (sixteen, eighteen, or even twenty-one) in some states for certain occupations dangerous to health or morals.  In addition to these general limitations, special provision is made for individual examinations to determine whether the child is mentally and physically fit to work and has met the requirements of the compulsory education laws of the state.