It is not true that such organizations as the Child-labor Committee can rest content with accomplished tasks and disband.
The exemption of agricultural labor from the legal protection of children given in many states in the field of manufacture, and the total lack of realization by the general public of the newer conditions which specialized and scientific farming make for the tenant hands, make this particular form of child-protection in farming a question of supreme importance.
As this book goes to press the Supreme Court decision which declares the Federal Child-labor Law unconstitutional places upon those working through state channels a still heavier burden of effort at child-protection.

This decision of the Supreme Court may well be understood as indicating no indifference to child-welfare but rather as a call to clear the method of child-labor reform from any entanglements of taxation or doubtful alliance with Federal officialism.

The principle of child-protection, whether by national or state laws, holds the moral devotion of our citizenship more firmly than ever before.
=Children Must be Protected in Recreation.=--The need for the protection of children from commercialized recreation with its centres set near all manner of vicious influences has aroused the conscience of the nation.

The investigations of social conditions near the Camps of Training for our army in the Great War and many forms of social service carried on by men and women in connection with the Red Cross have given impetus to the general movement to "clean up the cities" to make the rural communities and village centres more helpful to moral living, and to make the streets safer for "the spirit of youth." Yet the rural schoolhouses are so many of them lacking in provisions of decency and of playground supervision, and the village lounging-places are so often the scenes of vicious association, and the absence everywhere of sufficient provision for healthful and safeguarded recreation is so obvious, that we know we have still a long and heavy task before us to accord children their admitted right to social protection from moral evils against which even the best of parents can not adequately stand alone.
=Standards of and Aids to Health.=--Health standards in the community, fixed by experts and maintained, at least in minimum essentials, by public provision, is the seventh right of children which society should insure to each one.
The difficulties and dangers which inhere in any form of financial payment to parents, either fathers or mothers, in aid of their parental tasks, are not so clearly present, if present at all, in special aids given to all the population in matters of public sanitation, personal hygiene and the care of the sick.

If we make our public aid topical rather than by classes, and to all citizens alike in definite aid, we avoid much of the taint of charity.