Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/301

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 287

Health and Marine Hospital Service, and Bureau of Education, all have certain limited and fragmentary responsibilities for the welfare of the nation's children.

"Even these responsibilities, however, might be discharged far more com- pletely if they were concentrated. The labor of children enters into the relations between employer and employee, and into the general question of the condition of labor with which the Federal Bureau of Labor deals, but this very fact is anomal- ous and deplorable. There should be no such thing as child labor, and while it exists it should have the serious attention of the government, not as a normal con- dition to be investigated and regulated like adult labor in mines and factories, but as an abnormal and temporary condition to be eliminated as speedily as possible. It should be investigated and dealt with not as an industrial or commercial problem, but as one affecting the very life and well-being of the race, as a problem of health, education, morals, and social economy. With all recognition of the useful- ness of such partial and sporadic attention as the Labor Bureau has been able to give the subject, it is obvious that the interests of children are literally of vital national concern and that they should be approached from quite another point of view than that from which strikes, wages, and the conditions of adult labor are appropriately treated. Nor does the Census Bureau serve the purpose which a bureau of children would serve. The collection of certain very limited, statistical information at stated periods is of value. Unfortunately we have not much of it, and what we have is out of date when it appears. The handbook repeats the strictures often made in its earlier editions on the federal and state governments, that they should leave to a private agency the collection and dis- semination of this information concerning the statutes now in force prohibiting or restricting child labor, either directly or through provisions for compulsory school attendance. Slow and antiquated methods of making available the results of investigations of the Census Bureau in this field go far to destroy what value they might otherwise have, and the scope of such inquiries as have been made is so narrow as to leave us in helpless and humiliating ignorance. Quantitive investigations may be made by the Census Bureau, but we need a children's bureau to determine what information is desirable and to consider what to do after it has been obtained.

"The rudimentary Bureau of Public Health in the Treasury Department com- mands constantly increasing respect for its work in controlling epidemics and its scientific inquiries in various directions, notably, for example, in its current investigation of the hook worm. If this bureau should eventually outgrow the limitations imposed by its origin in the Marine Hospital service, and should become in reality a bureau of public health, it would naturally include within its activities the investigation of many problems connected with epidemic and infectious diseases of children and other dangers to their health.

"But a children's bureau would seek to promote the health, vigor, physical well-being, and efficiency of children, and would thus begin where a health bureau ends. It would utilize the results of all investigations by Labor Bureau, Census Bureau, and Health Bureau, so far as they bear upon the welfare of children. It would directly concern itself with the improvement of the human race by the improvement of its physical and mental stock. Even the Bureau of Education, however active and efficient it may become, cannot cover the wide range of activities which would naturally devolve upon the children's bureau. Orphanage, illiteracy, illegitimacy, infant mortality, race suicide and race degen- eracy, child dependency, juvenile delinquency with all its attendant issues of children's courts, reformatory, probation and parental schools, and the more complete socializing of the public-school system, with the broad issues which this involves, are among the problems which we now neglect entirely or in part, but which are of national importance, and which in the degree and manner proposed are clearly within the constitutional province of the federal government.

"It is not suggested that the national government should take up all or perhaps any of these subjects for direct remedial or preventive legislation. Re- search and publicity, on lines strictly analogous to the well-established activities of many existing bureaus, is the aim of those who advocate the children's bureau.