Page:Solution of the Child Labor Problem.djvu/14

7 sentiment. Should this attitude persist, a point will eventually be reached where the indifference to all child labor legislation, so prevalent in the past, will have been replaced by a stratum of prejudice in favor of fourteen, harder to penetrate than the original indifference.

A dozen years ago, such child labor laws as were in existence, were based on a twelve-year minimum. Twenty-five years before that, children of ten might legally go to work. As wealth increased and the necessity for the work of the child diminished, the standard has been gradually pushed upward, until in 1910 it has reached fourteen. Is there any reason to believe that by 1930 it should not in the normal condition of social legislation have risen to sixteen or seventeen or even eighteen?

An eighteen- or nineteen-year minimum, with protection to twenty-one, would be far more rational than the present fourteen-year minimum with protection to sixteen. At eighteen or nineteen the body is usually mature, while twenty-one is the legal limit of maturity. If this standard were adopted,