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physicians may accept, secret commissions for "steering" patients to the operating-room, and lawyers may conduct suits for personal injury for a percentage of the amount obtained.

ETHICS AND STATUTE LAW.

Many men seem to no longer remember that ethics and morals are older than statute law, and that even boys have been punished for an unsatisfactory answer to the question, "Where did you get it?" It is at least possible that a lawyer who has packed one jury to acquit a political offender may pack an

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ABOVE THE DAM AT CORALVILLE, IOWA.

Courtesy Cedar Rapids & Iowa City Interurban Railway.

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THE REAL CAUSE IS CORPORATE BRIBERY.

The real cause of political corruption, then, is corporate bribery. This is made possible by men's love of gain and power, and their desire to be business or social magnates. The standard of life seems to be not worth, but success and notoriety. The wish to imitate those with more means or more influence stimulates the lust for money. The simple life has no attractions, when our neighbors lead the high life. It takes money to do things that count in the vulgar estimate, and gold must therefore be obtained at any sacrifice of principle. The man who puts a bill through the city council or the state legislature is the man who gets results; and he is therefore successively agent, manager, secretary, director, vicepresident and president of his corporation.

The wife whose husband is successful in the financial sense becomes a local magnate in many feminine circles. His standard of business and professional ethics need not concern her any more than it does him. He is a captain of industry, of finance or of transportation. She and her daughters in ball costume

have their photographs reproduced in the newspapers for the accommodation of any vulgar reader. What matters it if the husband's name is a by-word for chicanery; and the portrait of his daughter adorns the wall of a student's room or of a saloon, hanging between that of the popular dancer and the last champion of the prize-ring?

It is this indifference to the finer sensibilities and this love of money with its coincident vulgar display that are back of the struggle for success. Worldly success is often the sole key to financial and social advancement. Hence corporate success must be obtained, even by bribery. Bribes by corporations make political rottenness. Political rottenness makes for most of us taxes high, streets unclean, water unfit to drink, disease rife, death common, and condemnation in the next world fairly certain.

Political liberty must therefore be obtained by attacking bribery and graft in its high seats. We must bring down the big game; and at the same time inculcate in ourselves a respect for honesty and a disregard for the mere outward symbols of wealth and power.

CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION.

[Addresses delivered at First Annual Meeting of the National Child Labor Committee, New York City, February 14-16, 1905, and reprinted from the Proceedings as published by the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, in THE ANNALS of the Academy, Vol. XXV.. No. 3, May, 1905.]

METHODS OF ENFORCEMENT IN THE WESTERN STATES.

HON. BEN B. LINDSEY, JUDGE OF JUVENILE COURT, DENVER, COLORADO.

The child labor evil has never afflicted the West as it has the East and South. Of course I speak rather of the great mountain states. It would not do, however, to console ourselves with the assumption that the granduer of our mountains has so completely imbued the hearts of our people with high ideals that we are free from that taint in commercialism which SO often advances "business interests" at the expense of sacred childhood. In those cases where

these selfish interests might be advanced by drafts upon the strength and life of little children we have found human greed very much the same as it is in the East and South. The mines and the smelters call almost entirely for the strength of men rather than that of children. The labor unions as much as laws have kept our children from industrial slavery. The opportunities of the cotton mill and the ordinary factory in the great industrial centers of the East

for enlisting the services of the child offer greater temptations than those of the smelter and the mine. If we may credit the frightful conditions in the coal mines of Pennsylvania as to child labor, I am sure we have no such sins as theirs to answer for. And while we do not pretend superiority above our brothers of the East and South in resisting encroachments upon the childhood of the nation, we may without spirit of boasting feel proud of our laws for the protection of children. Both as to laws and the evils to be remedied by these laws the

but Kansas is waking up, and I promise you that if Kansas concedes to the women of that state the right of suffrage as it has existed among the women of the State of Colorado, it will be impossible for it to lag behind the procession.

Under the age of sixteen years no child may be employed in any mine or other dangerous occupation in the State of Colorado, and under the age of fourteen years no child may be employed in any mine in the States of Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

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BEND AT HIGHLAND PARK, IOWA.

Courtesy Cedar Rapids & Iowa City Interurban Railway.

great West is far in advance of the South, compares favorably with the states of the East and Middle West, and Colorado claims the proud distinction of being twin sister to Illinois in acknowledging superiority to no state in advanced child labor laws as well as other laws for the protection of her children. We look upon Kansas as the most benighted of the Western states, and as being most backward in keeping step in the march of progress, led by her western neighbor, the State of Colorado,

Again, the Western states have been blessed with liberal school funds, largely obtained by the reservation for that purpose of millions of their acres, which, with less knotty and difficult problems than our less fortunate sisters of the South, have made compulsory education in the West a simple problem to embody in effective laws rigidly enforced. The great West, therefore, in comparing its more fortunate condition with that of the South, may do so with satisfaction, but without exultation. On the contrary,

our more fortunate social and industrial condition reminds us that the South especially is in need of our consideration and sympathy in its less fortunate state, and this, I wish to assure you, is our attitude of mind toward this section of our beloved country.

I might give an instance of our own experience in Denver within the last three or four years as showing that human selfishness is very much the same in every part of our country when "business interests" conflict with the children's interest. Some fifteen years ago, in the very shadow of the Rocky Mountains, there was built a great cotton mill. It was a rather peculiar thing in our industrial development that cotton mills should be built away out there, but New England people who initiated the enterprise could see the cotton fields of Texas a great deal closer to their back doors than were those of Georgia or South Carolina to the mills of Massachusetts. This was before the sudden and rapid change of the last few years when the cotton mills began to spring up in the fields of the Southern states. This transformation had not been taken into account. But when it came competition became fiercer, and the cotton miils of Colorado, to compete with those of South Carolina, must forsooth move some of South Carolina's social conditions to the foothills of Colorado. Agents were employed whose business it was to import into Colorado dozens of families from the poorer classes of Alabama and the Carolinas, and with them, of course, came the children; in fact, they were the inducement for this sort of emigration; the more children the surer the contract with the wily agent to live within sight of Pike's Peak and the snow-capped Rockies. And thus it came to pass a few years ago that you could journey by trolley car from Denver to the cotton mills in which, once enclosed, you might well imagine you had been transported two thousand miles into one of the Southern States. There were the boys and girls, ten, eleven and twelve years of age, working in violation of the laws of the state in order that "prosperity" might still flourish amidst these whirring

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tested were denounced, by those who believed in "prosperity," as mischief makers for the destruction of a great industry. Should a successful enterprise of ten years' standing be permitted to fail when all that was necessary was a duplication as far as possible of conditions which it was said accounted for its success in other sections? Of course, my friends, we accounted this as all "bluff." I think Miss Addams and Mrs. Florence Kelley have shown by the example of Illinois, especially in the glass industries, that this argument about child labor being necessary for the success of any industrial enterprise is without foundation. The reserve strength of the nation for tomorrow is with these children of today. No one living has more eloquently exemplified this truth than these two great champions of the children of this nation, and whatever the fact may have been when the men at the head of this institution said they could not compete with the South unless they could work under the conditions that obtained in the South, our people said that argument was a purely commercial one at best, and, to tell you frankly, we believed a fallacious one, since if those mills could not survive we were certain the real cause was not to be found in the sacrifice of the children, but in economic conditions for which surely the children were not responsible. In any event, we said: "You have no industrial enterprise of benefit to our people if it is to be at the sacrifice of the bodies and souls of little children, and the fact that those children are the children of South Carolina or Alabama does not alter the case-they are just as dear to us as the children of our own state, and Colorado will protect them if it means that Colorado must smash your mill;" and so we said: "You take those children out of the mills, and whether you shut down or continue to run is a matter of secondary importance." And they took the children out and the mills went to smash, and while most of us have serious doubts if it could be attributed to "the poor little kids," at the same time we were prepared to concede

that and all it cost if it meant the redemption of little children from industrial slavery. We put the child above the dollar. They are our greatest wealth. Not all the gold and silver in the depths of our great mountains are half so valuable as these little ones, and that was the reason that the president of the mill, the foreman and the superintendent were prosecuted in the courts and suffered the extreme penalty of the law.

And yet, my friends, property rights are neither depreciated or disrespected by high regard for human rights.

On

tomorrow, who refuse to see or acknowledge this truth. The future of our country depends a great deal more upon the kind of children we are rearing today, how well their little bodies are shaped and their morals directed than upon how much business we have or how much gold is yielded.

The child labor laws in most of the Western states are generally well enforced. The enforcement of the law we all realize is just as important as the law itself, and in many states having a child labor law this question presents an even more serious difficulty than that of no

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BACK IN THE WOODS AT STONY BRANCH, IOWA. Courtesy Cedar Rapids & Iowa City Interurban Railway.

the contrary, just in proportion as we strengthen and administer to the rights of body and soul do we pile up the real material wealth of the nation. It pays now, but it pays even more in the tomorrow. The highest duty of the state is to its children. Just so far as we protect them and make them the object of our solicitude, just so far are we going to increase the power, strength and wealth of the state. It is only the short-sighted and the selfish and those who live for today, thinking not of the

law at all. In fact many states which have no law or an inadequate law may have more excuse to reproach those boasting of the law upon the statute books, but which give it the lie by nonenforcement.

In Colorado we have a compulsory education law keeping every child in school until his sixteenth year unless he has completed the eighth grade of the grammar school. Our schools are in session throughout the state from September to June. The child labor law forbids

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