Indeed, Hutchins and Harrison, in their _History of Factory Legislation_, declare that "it is not easy to say whether children were really worked harder in the early factories than under the domestic system which they replaced." Edith Abbott, in her excellent summary of _The Early History of Child Labor in America_, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work, constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil.

"Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact.

This feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages between seven and twelve years.
We are now able to see and remedy some evils of child-labor in the factory system which passed unnoticed and for which no prohibitive law was in existence in the handicraft stage.

It is true, however, as all must recognize, that the modern specialization of labor and modern use of machines allows a wholesale exploitation of youth and of physical weakness impossible in older forms of industry.

Hence the facts of modern industry justify and make necessary the "Child Labor Movement." Yet vital and strong as that movement is, we have to-day, as has been stated in another connection, a misuse of children by millions in industry.