Industries affected. The census of 1910 shows a distribution of the children of the several States among the industries that will be more or less affected by the operation of this bill if enacted into law, according to the following table:

Mr. KITCHIN. As I recollect it, that made 18,500 of those ages in Massachusetts.

Mr. McKELWAY. Mr. Conant states-and. I will say, this was printed two years ago:

In 1913 Massachusetts took the advanced step of limiting the labor of children between 14 and 16 to eight hours a day. The law was enacted after most careful and thorough deliberation, after many debates which brought out all conceivable arguments for and against it.

Greatest insistence was placed by the opposition upon the alleged fact that under the law the children would not get the benefit of the eight-hour day, but would be discharged entirely. It was pointed out that children could not be em

ployed in a mill for 8 hours while the adults and the machinery were working 10 hours. The result would be, said the manufacturers, that the children would spend their time in dangerous and unprofit: ble idleness and be worse off than when at work 10 hours a day, and that the wholesale hardship among families would be greater than public relief or private charity could alleviate. The test which the law has had since it went into effect last September proves that the law has not had any such results. The law has been successful and is working well. The fact is that very nearly all the children who were at work when the law went into effect are to-day at work in the same occupations, that the small proportion who have lost employment have returned to school, and that there has been no perceptible increase in family hardship.

When the bill went into effect it was subjected to a storm of protest and criticism, based on the misapprehension that the law prohibited the employment of children under 16. The newspapers estimated that about 25,000 children under 16 would be thrown out of employment. During this period of newspaper agitation the special recess committee of the legislature on child labor made its investigations, giving hearings from two to six weeks after the bill took effect. and asking manufacturers, by letter, how many children were discharged. Four thousand and twelve children were reported to the committee as discharged in the 10 principal manufacturing cities of the State. One hundred and seventy of the 250 employers who replied-68 per cent--added that they had reemployed some of the children discharged. The report of the committee stated, in December: Many employers who declared in September that it would be impossible for them to arrange their schedules so as to permit the employment of boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 16 for not more than eight hours a day have found that a little study will permit them to do so."

A questionnaire sent by Deputy Commissioner of Education Small to all superintendents of schools shows the situation in November, 1913. Two hundred and thirty-four cities and towns where there were industries which employed 14 to 16 year old children replied to the questionnaire; 211 of the 234, nine-tenths, reported that the industries had adjusted themselves to the law and that the children were not thrown out of employment. Of the remaining 23 cities and towns, 10 were of slight importance. Of the 13 cities and towns which had not at that time adjusted themselves, Lawrence and Waltham were the only textile cities. Lynn and Worcester were the only other places where the problem was of any size. By March these places had adjusted their difficulties pretty completely.

The law required the reissuance of employment certificates, thereby affording an opportunity to count the children at work under the new law. An employment certificate is issued only when the child has actually secured his job. On December 24, 1913, 28,011 different children between 14 and 16 had been given employment certificates and were at work eight hours a day under the new law; 28,011 children between 14 and 16 are enough to have at work in Massachusetts. Before the law went into effect statistics show that there were between 28,000 and 31,000 at work in the occupations for which children are required to have certificates.

An investigation of the amount of hardship caused was made by the board of labor and industries by sending a blank to all known relief agencies in the State, public and private, on February 27, 1914. This investigation had revealed, on March 20, as the result of the eight-hour law, only 5 cases where permanent aid had been given and 11 cases of temporary aid. A study of cases of mothers applying for relief under the provisions of the mothers' aid law of 1913 showed that of 1,182 cases only 35 were cases where the child-labor law was apparently some part of the reason for the application. A further analysis of the 35 cases showed that by April 1, in 27 of the cases, this cause had been removed by the fact that the child had found work.

The law has now been tried in Massachusetts and has been found practical. The children have not been displaced; they are at work 8 hours instead of 10 hours. The investigations made by our committee show that under the law the children are happier, brighter, and more healthy. They are getting more time for play, more time to read, and more time to rest. Those who are now at work are, for the most part, properly cared for in school. There is no perceptible increase in idleness or crime. The cases of hardship caused by the law were few in number and of a temporary nature.

The law has worked as well as any of us could possibly have hoped. It has accomplished just what it was intended to accomplish, the lightening of the burden of over 20,000 children in the mills from 10 hours a day to 8 hours a day.

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Mr. Chairman, the spinning room makes the yarn for the weaving room. Now, a good many mills in North Carolina are small mills, when there was insufficient capital, I suppose, to build, and some larger ones were organized on this basis; and that has been the reason I think for the cause of night work in North Carolina, there were only half enough spinning frames to provide for the weaving room, so the spinning room was run night and day, the very room the children were employed in-in order to make enough yarn for the weaving room. Now, it may cost the employers something to put in some extra spindles for the spinning room and it would take more children between 14 and 16 years of age to run an eight-hour day than an eleven-hour day to do the same work. But that can be absolutely adjusted. I am not sufficiently familiar with the situation to know just how much it would cost, but it can be done, just as a good many of these mills in North Carolina have put in enough spindles to take care of the weaving room and have stopped night work.

Mr. Swift read you some of the testimony concerning tuberculosis in the cotton mills and the mills that had been represented as having good ventilation, etc. One of the witnesses from Alabama referred to Dr. U. H. Oates, and quoted with approval from something he said. I would like to quote something from the same man. He is the chief factory inspector for Alabama and has been for some years-a very able man and a very superior man. He says:

Picture a little child, a girl just 12 years of age-and the data in this office show that in numerous cases they are started to work the day they reach the age of 12. Imagine this little girl, in the winter months, arising at 5 o'clock in the morning, eating a poorly cooked meal (and in most instances their food is hastily and improperly prepared) wending her way in the darkness to a mill, working not for one hour or two hours, but for six hours steadily at one continuous task (a task which does not in any way elevate), a monotonous, invariable, nearly incessant, grind before two or three machines, amid the rattle of spindles and the roar of pulleys; surrounded by the incessant deafening noise and constant motion of machinery; deprived of the pleasure of conversation on account of the noise and oftentimes breathing an atmosphere vitiated by lack of ventilation and by artificial humidity and the presence of dust and cotton fiber. Fancy this child, with only half an hour for dinner, continuing at her labor until the 11 hours of required toil are completed. Tired and worn out she goes home in the darkness to such a home as she has, rarely seeing the sunshine. This picture causes me to wonder, as a phyician, what kind of a mother can this child make; what kind of offspring can she bring forth? Has this child no rights? Is it humane to make a machine out of this illiterate, helpless, maltreated human? Is it not entitled to the same consideration the farmer gives his colt or his calf? The idea of working a colt or a calf in harness would seem preposterous to the average farmer. Can we not put our children of the laboring classes in the same category as the farmer puts his beasts of burden?

This is a plea for the children between the ages of 12 and 14; that vital period in a girl's life when she changes from girlhood to womanhood.

Sixty hours' application a week at any vocation is certainly not conducive to good health, particularly during this period of life, and I want to go unqualifiedly on record as being heartily in favor of changing the age limit in Alabama to 14 in the case of boys and 16 in the case of girls.

Ventilation, or rather lack of ventilation, is to me one of the most noticeable conditions in cotton mills. The architects have almost invariably ignored the rudimentary principles of ventilation. No means of ingress or egress of air is provided, other than the windows, and in a vast majority of cases these windows are closed and at times nailed down.

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In cotton-mill villages the operators frequently furnish nice houses, adequate drinking water-and stop at that, thinking that they have furnished modern homes for these people. They have, however, ignored the most vital of all sanitary problems, namely, the disposal of sewage.

Mr. KITCHIN. Who is Dr. Oates?

Mr. McKELWAY. Dr. Oates is the factory inspector of Alabama. Mr. KITCHEN. He has generally been referred to in the testimony of Mr. Roberts, has he not?

Mr. McKELWAY. Yes, sir; he is the same gentleman.

Mr. KITCHIN. What was the date of the article that you have just read?

Mr. McKELWAY. May, 1913. I really do not know, Mr. Chairman, whether it is worth while to reply to the hookworm argument, that it was necessary to move these children from "soil-polluted farms" to the cotton mills in order to cure them of the hookworm, when it is well known that 65 cents' worth of medicine would do it. I have discussed this matter very thoroughly with Dr. Stiles, and with members of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, who agree with me on the subject. When I recently met Dr. Stiles at one of the clubs in Washington, he told me he had thought there ought not to be any restrictive legislation with respect to children in the cotton mills for a few years because he thought it was good to get them all together and cure them before letting them go back; that he had deliberately made opposition to such legislation for a period covering some five or six years, but that period had expired, and he had no objection to our going ahead. I think that Dr. Stiles will hear me out in saying this.

Mr. Chairman, you referred to the fact that I was not a lawyer. I have written a good many laws. Would you listen for a moment to a layman's constitutional argument on this question?

The ACTING CHAIRMAN. You may proceed.

Mr. McKELWAY. I will just read from what I put into the record before the House committee. I was referring to Gov. Kitchin's statement, which he repeated before you, that the cloth made by the labor of children was just as good, just as pure, and just as sound as that made by adults. I read as follows:

I have been fighting against this child-labor evil for almost more years than I like to confess. I was once pastor of a church in a community in which there were cotton mills. I have taught in a mill school myself. I have been into scores of cotton mills. And when I began this work there were no limitations upon the ages of the children and no limitations as to hours, at least in North Carolina. When I began to be professionally connected with it, as I may say, as secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, I was very sanguine of immediate success. Eleven years ago, when I made my first appearance before the North Carolina Legislature as a representative of the National Child Labor Committee, I used to look into the faces of 12-year-old children working in the mills and think to myself, "Little folks, this legislature is going to turn you out of the mills before another year." And yet, though I did not know it, there were hundreds, nay thousands, of children then unborn who have since been put to work in the cotton mills of these cotton-manufacturing States.

Now, for my layman's constitutional argument: Can you not forgive me, with the experience I have had, if I do not regard that piece of cloth manufactured by those little hands as pure and good and sound, but as impure, as bad, as unsound, in itself as in a sense stained with the blood of little children? My Government, the Federal Government, protects me from buying impure food; it protects me from buying misbranded goods, though they may be just as good as other goods; it protects me from buying oleomargarine when it is called butter, though I may prefer cotton butter to cow butter. But they say you can tell

about these things you can tell the difference between pure food and impure food. It is because no microscope will tell whether a piece of cotton cloth has been manufactured by adult labor or by child labor that I have all the more right to demand that the Federal Government protect me from partnership with the exploiters of childhood through purchasing child-made goods. If over 95 per cent of the people of the Nation have said, through State legislation, that they do not want goods manufactured by the labor of children under 14 years of age, have they not just as much a right to be protected against buying goods manufactured by children as against buying misbranded goods? Why should the manufacturers of North Carolina-alone now of all the manufacturing Statesbe allowed to so mingle their child-made goods, manufactured by the labor of children under 14 years of age, in the general commerce of the United States that you can not tell one piece from any other and say, "We compel you to buy our goods." Why has Congress the right to say that in this District of Columbia, controlled by Congress, no child under 14 years of age shall work in a factory, nor any child under 16 years of age at night, nor any child under 16 for more than eight hours in any one day, and yet confess that it is powerless to protect the people of the District from purchasing child-made goods manufactured in the Carolinas? Gov. Kitchin also said that the whole purpose of this bill was to protect the producers at the other end of the interstate-commerce line. I deny it. As I have said, one purpose of this bill is to protect the consumer from the purchase of goods made under conditions which are repugnant to his moral sense. And I say that there is no one whose social conscience is developed beyond the embryonic stage that does not recognize the force of that argument as soon as it is presented to him.

And now out of a hundred million people at least ninety-seven million have said through their State laws that the believe the labor of children under 14 years of age in factories to be a bad thing. It was always immoral; they have made it criminal, so far as the manufacturing of goods is concerned. Have they no right as consumers of goods to be protected by the only authority that can protect them, namely, the Government of the United States, through the interstate-commerce clause of the Constitution, against becoming, through the innocent purchase of child-made goods, partners with the exploiters of children?

Looking at this question from the point of the development of the social conscience, let me make this suggestion, namely, that at the beginning of this Government the Supreme Court, even with John Marshall as Chief Justice, would not have agreed that the transportation of lottery tickets by express companies could be controlled by Congress. That was a time when there was no such universal condemnation of the lottery as obtained afterwards. But when the lottery evil had become generally recognized throughout the Nation, and the Louisiana lottery alone reared its foul head in New Orleans in violation of the social conscience of the people, defying through its overwhelming influence the good people of Louisiana in their efforts to abolish it, the Supreme Court of the United States virtually said that it could be abolished by Congress through stopping the channels of interstate commerce to its operations.

So with the white-slave traffic. It was only when the social conscience of this country became awakened to the evils of white slavery and of prostitution generally-what Miss Jane Addams calls "a new conscience concerning an ancient evil "-a conscience that has swept the houses of prostitution from nearly all the cities of the Nation-it was only after the awakening of the social conscience concerning this evil that Congress passed, and the Supreme Court sustained, the law making it a crime for a man to pay a 2-cent fare on a ferryboat for a woman who was carried from Jersey City to New York for immoral purposes, the payment of this fare for this transportation bringing the transaction within the power of Congress under the interstate-commerce clause of the Constitution.

So I believe that with the conscience of this whole Nation active against the oppression and exploitation of children in every possible form, the present Supreme Court will sustain an act of Congress, representing as it does the will of so vast a number of people who have expressed that will through State legislation, making the products of child labor outlaws of commerce. Talk about the public health: Is there not moral health as well as physical health, and do we not all suffer in our moral health when we contribute, however innocent we may be through ignorance of the origin of the goods we buy, to the prosperity of the employers of little children, who not only persist in employing them against the common dictates of humanity, but who by defeating State legislation