Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/509

 THE ILLINOIS CHILD-LABOR LAW 495

are so great, and their employment is so irregular and shifting, that no store succeeded in complying exactly with the require- ments of the statute. The work of enforcing the law in the five department stores, which employ from I 50 to 500 children each, requires a monthly inspection by two experienced and skillful deputy-inspectors, devoting an entire day to each store and fol- lowing each inspection with prompt prosecution. On no easier terms can exact compliance with the complicated requirements of the law be obtained.

There is reason to believe that the persistent enforcement of the requirements that affidavits must be filed before the children are set at work, and records and registers revised daily, would have the same gradually deterrent effect in commercial occupa- tions which has been observed in the manufacturing industries, in which there was a steady, though slow, reduction of the num- ber of young employes, accompanied by a corresponding steady, though slow, improvement in the stature and physique of the children found at work.

The most marked departure in the new law, after the exten- sion of the factory provisions to the children engaged in com- merce, is the prohibition of the employment of children under sixteen years of age in extra-hazardous occupations. This pro- vision has not yet been tested in court. We construed the words " extra-hazardous occupation " to mean any occupation in which the insurance companies are loath to insure working- men. To begin with, there are the woodworking machines, which seem all to come under this head. The employment of children in the manufacture of explosives has hitherto gone on, unchecked ; this can now certainly be stopped outright and should be stopped at once. There is no tale more hideous in the history of manufacture than that of the little boy who was turned out of a fireworks factory by order of Inspector Jensen, because the child was under the legal age for work, and, having waited for his four- teenth birthday to come, returned to work at once, only to blow up the works, killing himself and his sister. Such a horror need never again disgrace Illinois if the new child-labor law is enforced.