Page:Solution of the Child Labor Problem.djvu/80

73 field, and new fields were discovered in Indiana and Illinois, when, marvelous to relate, the glass industry began to move from a state with fourteen-year minimum to a state with a sixteen-year minimum. And the boys? the "problem" over which the reformers and glass men had contended for years? They were replaced by adults or by machinery. The real crux of the situation was not the boys at all, but the natural gas supply—the cheap fuel.

This is a single instance of the effect of eliminating child labor from an industry. Is it an isolated case, or a general rule? Has the cotton industry developed in the South because of the presence of quantities of children, ready to work in the mills, or because of the proximity to the fields where the cotton is produced, to a cheap fuel supply, and to an abundance of water-power? If children under sixteen were prohibited from working in the Southern cotton mills, would the manufacturers move? Would it not be a discovery pregnant with the most far-reaching importance for the future, if it were found that