Twin city review. [volume] (Champaign, Ill.) 19??-1929, 1922-09-01
CHILD LABOR
RESPONSIBLE FOR
WEAKENED RACE

We" the sovereign people enact a
law to protect the young ones of our
species from being worked to death
in shop and mill. For we are the only
animals who live off our young. All
other creatures feed them until they
can shift for themselves.
However, some of us, made in the
counterfeit of God, can not live with
out the wages of our children. SO the
thinking, feeling portion of our kind
has pushed laws for the protection of
our children.
The effect has been like that of
many other well intentioned reform
measures. Ii did not abolish the evil,
but only made it move to greener
pastures.
When child labor was partly abol-
| ished in the north il tracked to sunny
Dixie, where free factory sites and
poor babies are as numerous as stars
in heaven or cinders in hell.
So, in order to catch the lowest,
foulest and meanest of all cannibals,
federal child labor law was finally
enacted.
But, bless your heart, 1t isn't con-
sttutional. The greatest document
conveived by mortal man does not
allow US to protect our babies from
cannlbals.
The state may pass such leglsla-
ton. The nation can not. And If the
state won't, then it's too bad, sorry,
but it can't be helped-under the
constitution.
The protection and, what amounts
to the same thing, the education of
the youth of this nation is purely
the business of the state. Ii does not
concern the nation. Not in the least.
During the late unpleasantness, il
leaked out that as high as 40 per cent
of the drafted men from some OF the
southern child labor strongholds could
not write a letter nor read news
paper.
And, mind you, it was a SELECT
ED draft that rounded up this choice
selection of stunted minds. The
downright imieciles, morons and de-
generates had already been eliminated
BY the draft boards. This was the
cream of the manhood of those states
and from this cream 40 per cent could
not write a letter to mother or spell
out newspaper item.
And, remember, these twentieth
century forty-niners were not re-
cruited from the Ignorant foreign
ers" we love to pirate about. There
are precious few foreigners in these
afflicted states. For, while some of
these foreigners may be ignorant,
they still possess sufficient intelli-
gence to dodge the living and social
conditions of Sunny Dixie.
The human stock down there is
about as purely Anglo-SaXon as they
per cent American as can be hoped
for.
Then when We come to the indus
trial centers of the north, what do we
find?
In Pennsylvania, the highest. indus
tralized state of the union, 81 per cent
of the drafted men were physically
unfit for military service. In other
words, they did not have enough
bodily strength to tote a gun.
And here again it is necessary to
point out the fact that this human
wreckage was not supplied by the
foreign element. The out-landers who
slave in the mines and iron mills of
the Keystone state are recruited from
the Pleasantly Of Europe. And what
ever we may think Of this class, one
thing is sure: they are physically SUI
perior to the Anglo-Saxon hill-billies
of the native southern white stock.
However, one generation in the min
ing and mill towns of Pennsylvania
was enough TO reduce this sturdy
peasant stock to the moral, mental
and bodily level Of White-Chapel
Hooligans.
The wealth of a nation does not
consist of per capita circulation, but
in the strength and intelligence Of its
manhood and womanhood. Germany,
for instance, contained less territory
than the state of Texas. Moreover,
it is a poor country as compared with
rich agricultural, mining and manu-
featuring states such as Illinois. Yet
this country fed nearlv seventy mil
lion souls and it required the whole