Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1907-01-22
FEDERAL INQUIRY IS SOUGHT
This Country Placed on a Par With
Russia.
FAILURE TO SAFEGUARD MINORS
President Said to Be in Error l., Re-
gard to National Legislation
on the Subject.

NEW YORK, January 22.-The govern
ment Of the United States was criticised
last night at a mass meeting in Carnegie
Lyceum as ranking with that of Russia in
the matter Of failing to extend protection to
Its wage-earning women and children. AS
compared with England, it was said by one
Of the speakers that the United States
stood today at point in the development
of protection to wage earners that was
passed by Great Britain in 1874.
1t was declared further that this nation
had been steadily retrograding for the last
eleven years, rather than improving, in
the matter of enacting laws calculated to
protect weak and minor wage earners and
resolution was proposed and passed call
ing upon Congress to appropriate the sum
Of OO,000 to be used in defraying the ex-
penses incident to a thorough investigation
of the circumstances connected with woman
and child labor within the boundaries of
the United States.
The mass meeting was held under the
combined direction of various charitable,
union labor and sociological organizations.
Among those represented were the Wo-
mems Trade Union League, the Charity
Organization Society, the Consumers
League the Association for Improving the
Condition Of the Poor, the Working Girls
Association, the Federation Of Women's
Clubs, the national child labor committee,
the Central Federated Union, the Neighbor-
hood Workers Association, the Manhattan
Trade School for Girls. the Public Educa-
ton Association and the Jewish Woman's
Clubs.
DR.. Devine Presided
DR.. E. T. Devine Of Columbia University
presided. He read a telegram from Rep
resentative Herbert Parsons, which was to
the effect that the Senate bill providing
for an investigation by the Department of
Commerce and Labor of the conditions Of
woman and child labor in the United
States had passed the House of Repre-
sentatives, but without carrying any ap-
preparation with it. DR.. Devine said that
Representative Parsons was greatly inter-
ested in the movement for better. condi-
tons In the Industrial field occupied for
the wards of the state. and would have
presided at the meeting had it not been
for pressing business at Washington.
The chairman of the meeting then read
an extract from one of President Roose-
velts recent messages, in which he spoke
of the necessity of such an investigation as
that desired by the leaders of the move
ment here.
President Mistaken.
1.-THE President says in his message that
1t is practically impossible for the federal
government to enact laws that will improve
conditions said Dr. Devine but since he
penned those words he and others have
learned that he was mistaken when they
were written. For it is known now that
the federal government can act through
the interstate commerce commission which,
if it deems best, can exclude any goods or
produce handled unlawfully by women or
children from transportation out of the
boundaries Of the state where they were
manufactured or produced
Mrs. Florence Kelly, secretary of the
National Consumers League, condemned a
bill which she said had recently been pre-
sented to the New York legislature by AS
semblyman Prentice of New York city,
This bill, she said, would legalize a twelve
hour day and a siXty-six-hour week for
girls more than eighteen years old and
boys more than sixteen. Such a law she
declared would be shameful. Girls and
boys should not be permitted to work more
than eight hours a day, and employers
should be prohibited from making them toll
at night.
DR.. A jacob read paper which treated
upon the physical aspect of child labor"
He said that hundreds of thousands of girls
and women between the ages of eighteen
and twenty-five years. who worked in man.
ufactories where tobacco was handled were
being killed by the nsanitary conditions
and the long hours.
Other speakers We're Homer Folks, Sec
rotary of the State Charities Aid Associa-
ton; Rabbi Stephen Wise of Oregon and A.
j. Bolton.