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37 growth of the large factories in which the child forms but one of the cogs in the machinery, where the very essence of the work is monotony. As industries are standardized, there are more and more places created where a machine, guided by a child, or an unskilled adult, does the work formerly performed by skilled men. If the child were learning to manufacture paper boxes, that would be, in itself, an education; but the child who spends its days turning in the edges of box covers, neither learns nor grows. The task is standardized and, from its very nature, hopelessly monotonous and deadening.

Child labor is a process of mind stunting. First the child is removed from the possibility of an education, taken from the school and placed in the factory where he no longer has an opportunity to learn; and then he is subjected to monotonous toil, for long hours, often all night, in unwholesome places, until his body and mind harden into the familiar form of the unskilled workman.

When the child drops from the ideal of play and joy to the misery of work and pain,