This same British commission divided all of the unemployed, the under-employed, and the unemployable as the results of three types of trades:  first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein women and children are paid wages insufficient to maintain them at the required standard of health and industrial efficiency, so that their wages must be supplemented by relatives or charity; second, labor deteriorating trades, which have sapped the energy, the capacity, the character, of workers; third, bare subsistence trades, where the worker is forced to such a low level in his standard of life that he continually falls below self-support.  We have many trades of these three types in America, all of them demanding the work of young and untrained girls.  Yet, in spite of the obvious dangers surrounding every girl who enters one of them, little is done to guide the multitude of children who leave school prematurely each year into reasonable occupations.

Unquestionably the average American child has received a more expensive education than has yet been accorded to the child of any other nation.  The girls working in department stores have been in the public schools on an average of eight years, while even the factory girls, who so often leave school from the lower grades, have yet averaged six and two-tenths years of education at the public expense, before they enter industrial life.  Certainly the community that has accomplished so much could afford them help and oversight for six and a half years longer, which is the average length of time that a working girl is employed.  The state might well undertake this, if only to secure its former investment and to save that investment from utter loss.

Our generation, said to have developed a new enthusiasm for the possibilities of child life, and to have put fresh meaning into the phrase “children’s rights,” may at last have the courage to insist upon a child’s right to be well born and to start in life with its tiny body free from disease.  Certainly allied to this new understanding of child life and a part of the same movement is the new science of eugenics with its recently appointed university professors.  Its organized societies publish an ever-increasing mass of information as to that which constitutes the inheritance of well-born children.  When this new science makes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcome of the social evil are clearly responsible for race deterioration, effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against the preventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible, and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflicted children infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage to another generation.  Public societies for the prevention of blindness are continually distributing information on the care of new-born children and may at length answer that old, confusing question “Did this man sin or his parents, that he was born blind?” Such knowledge is becoming more widespread every day and the rising interest in infant welfare must in time react upon the very existence of the social-evil itself.