ABSTRACT

The entire population of the factory town and of the enormous districts in every large city in which the children live who most need the protection of child labor legislation consists of people who have come together in response to the demands of modern industry. Educators have ceased to mourn the changed industrial conditions in which children were taught agricultural and industrial arts by natural co-operation with their parent. Factory life depends upon groups of people working together, and yet it is content with the morphology of the group, as it were, paying no attention to its psychology to the interaction of its members. "The fear of starvation," of which the old economists made so much, is, after all, but a poor incentive to work, and the appeal to cupidity by which a man is induced to "speed up" in the various devices of piecework is very little better.