Page:Solution of the Child Labor Problem.djvu/70

63 to the proposition is impossible. Nothing can be done except to indicate some evident tendencies, and point to some apparent conclusions. Taking all of the facts into consideration, it would appear that child labor results not only in disintegrating family life, but in increasing taxes as well.

When the Superintendent of a Boys' House of Refuge was asked what proportion of the children who came to him were working children and what proportion were school children, he said that he could give no proportion, because the school child was a rare exception in his institution.

The community which allows its children to start work early in life, and in pursuit of their badly directed ideas, to learn things that result in their being committed to the House of Refuge, pays the penalty for its folly in the increasing taxes that go to support penal institutions.

The point is well illustrated by a study made recently in Chicago, of the first hundred delinquent boys who appeared before the C hicago Juvenile Court in 1909. Of this group