tion of unskilled labor by skilled workers in the war industries, but it warns the public that allowance should be made for a temporary reduction of the average output caused by the inefficiency of the unskilled worker and the loss of time of the skilled worker who is doing the instructing.

9. A League of Nations. From an early stage of the European war, and before America entered into it, the American Federation of Labor indorsed the league of nations. At the Baltimore Convention of 1916 the report of the Executive Council was adopted advocating "a voluntary union of nations, a league for peace." American labor fully indorses the plan for a league of nations as formulated by President Wilson on January 22, 1917:

If the peace presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organized force of mankind. Upon America's entrance into the war the President proceeded to a still more definite statement of the principles of American labor and democracy in regard to the proposed league of nations. In his address to Congress April 2, 1917, the President made it clear that the concert of power proposed is not a concert of autocracies but a league of free peoples, declaring that America is fighting "for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free."

Finally, the President still more clearly defined the attitude of American labor and democracy in his statement of America's war aims on January 8 of this year. In this address the last

and most important of the fourteen points formulated was as follows:

A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small States alike.

In two of the other points of this address the President took up the economic phase of the problem-recognized as vital by the labor of all countries-declaring that the international guarantees secured by international covenants should assure the economic independence both of Poland and of the Balkan States. 10. International Labor Conferences in War Time. American labor favors and has always favored conferences with the organized labor of all other countries in times of peace. In times of war we oppose conferences with the subjects of enemy countries for any purpose connected with war or peace. In America, as in all other democracies at war, the Government speaks for the entire Nation in all negotiations or conferences with enemy subjects or governments in relation to foreign affairs; this function, furthermore, belongs exclusively to each democratic government; private conferences cannot speak for the nation. All persons or groups of persons who in open or private collusion with persons in enemy countries attempt to cause to be initiated or to influence peace negotiations or the conduct of the war independently of the Government are guilty of violating the fundamental principles of democratic government, based upon the consent of the people.

I

F one could be some sort of an Arabian Nights' Thomas Cook & Son and personally conduct the British and American nations on a tour among the American troops in France, one would do a rare service to the Allied cause. "If our people only knew!" one exclaims, day after day, as one moves from the coast to the trenches.

Recently I have followed the course of the American Army in France from one of the great new ports of debarkation to the firing line in Lorraine, where I arrived in time to see the most important fight the American troops have conducted independently in France. To speak of the last first, it is enough to say that when eight hundred Prussian shock troops tried to break through the line at a point where all the topographical advantages lay with them, and where, the French say, they have never been able to withstand, the Germans, although they have frequently retaken the positions from them, the American line did not give an inch. On the contrary, a considerable number of German prisoners were taken (I saw two truck-loads brought in), and the German casualties were three or four times as heavy as the American. Not a single American prisoner was taken, and during four days of incessant fighting the American battalion performed many brilliant deeds of gallantry. Twice these same Americans, while still carrying on their own action, responded to the appeals of the French on their left and cleared the Germans out of the trenches of their allies. The chivalrous French officers have bestowed the highest praise on the American fighters.

That is only a sample of how the ore assays. More portentous is the magnitude of the American preparations in the rear. The thing is on a scale that surprises even the best informed. Instead of rushing a huge army of troops to the front, somehow, anyhow, with the inevitable disorganization and weakness in the rear, the Americans have taken the advice of their allies and made fullest preparations for a long, hard pull. It looks as if they had come over for a permanent war. Everything is on a vast scale, and constructed as if to stay. The bequest in material improvements which will be left to France will compensate for more than a little of the devastation wrought by the Germans in the north.

In the city where many of the troop ships are unloading, great docks have been built to handle them. Miles of steel-framed warehouses fill the reclaimed lowlands behind the port. Refrigerating plants, machine shops, stables, garages, barracks, hospitals,

railway termini, and construction works have created a new, huge community.

Up along the American railway, where run also the American telegraph and telephone lines, may be found evidences on a large scale of the resolution of the Republic of the West. Troops, slowly moving northward, are billeted in almost every town. The traffic on these French highways is chiefly American; the very signboards are in English. At important crossroads the American military police regulate the traffic. I never knew there were so many motor trucks in existence as the American Army keeps lumbering along the roads over here. As for the fawncolored automobiles and motor cycles with side-cars, they are more ubiquitous than farm carts.

At one railway center, where an American railway official from civil life rules with the rank of general, there is piled more equipment for transportation purposes than a layman can imagine as usable for a decade. The walls of the largest hospital in the world, designed to contain twenty thousand beds, are rising rapidly about the building, which already houses fourteen hundred beds. Schools for officers and privates, and for special branches of service, are frequent. One may not tell tales, but if the Kaiser could have overheard what the officer in command of one of the chemical stations, or gas plants, told me, he surely would have needed resuscitation. Flying stations, lumbering camps, engineering and construction centers, bakeries, camouflage works-but why enumerate? All the branches of the service are here, and in working garb.

Personnel is the ultimate factor in war. So one studies carefully these big, jaunty, self-assured Americans. Fitness is written all over them. They are in good health and spirits; one does not need the reassuring statistics to know that fact. The morals of the men are as high as their morale. All classes of authorities-officers, chaplains, Y. M. C. A. workers, and pestiferous "investigators"-agree that the men are better behaved, as well as in better health and spirits, than when they were at home in civilian life. Among all the thousands I have been meeting during these weeks I have not seen an intoxicated soldier.

Our famous American boastfulness and bluster, however much it may appear in this little article, is absent from the forces in France. A strange, new sense of teachableness has come over them. They speak respectfully of the skill of their British and French allies; there is none of the spirit of "Watch us go to Berlin and kick the pants off the Kaiser." Instead, there is the

quiet resolution that is far more formidable. These men.mean to see the thing through. They say: "It does not matter how long it takes, or how hard the job, we are in this war until the Germans are beaten. There are millions more of Americans where we come from, and they are on the way. Our present Army is only a pledge, and what you see here is merely preparation. We were slow to get into this war, but we will be slower still in getting out of it.'

My pen is unequal to a portrayal of the sense of ominousness, of relentlessness, of terrible potentiality, which is written in the nature of the American men and preparations over here. They

have gone at this thing in a big, patient way. They feel that they represent the eternal and unconquerable forces of right and liberty. One thinks of the stars in their courses as he beholds these unillusioned, unaffrighted sons of to-morrow in the act of facing Prussianism. These countless constructions and contrivances with which they are armed may be easily imagined as the lightnings of Justice for the smiting of iniquity.

If America and Great Britain could see the preparations and progress and purpose of the Americans in France, they would, to quote the Scripture, "Thank God and take courage." At the American Front in France, April 16, 1918.

N the 1st of September, 1917, the Federal Child Labor Law came into force. While this law does not, as many people are inclined to think, do away altogether with the work of young children in the mines, mills, and factories of the United States, it does prohibit the work of children under fourteen years of age in industries the product of which is shipped from one State to another or to foreign countries; it also raises the age limit to sixteen years in certain dangerous employments, for night work, and for the over-long work-day, namely, the work-day of more than eight hours.

It is one thing to pass a child labor law, and quite another thing to enforce it. If this has proved true of State laws, it has proved even more true with the Federal law, for the machinery for its enforcement has had to be especially created. The enforcement has been in the hands of the Children's Bureau. In the States which rejoice in the adequate enforcement of adequate child labor laws the inspection of factories, mills, mines, and workshops has been left to the State authorities; in the many States where either the law or its enforcement is inadequate Uncle Sam himself has stepped in, in the person of Miss Grace Abbott of the Children's Bureau and her staff, to do the inspecting and issue certificates to the young workers over fourteen.

The consequence is that, notwithstanding the limited appropriation and too few inspectors, the law is being successfully enforced, as evidenced by six or seven favorable judgments against violators in various States.

In the western district of North Carolina, however, the law is at present void. Here Reuben and John Dagenhart, minors, through their "next friend," Roland Dagenhart, are challenging the right of the Federal Government to take them out of the cotton-mill where they work and by implication to set their young feet on the road leading to healthy, educated citizenship. When the case was pleaded in the Supreme Court at Washington, on April 15 and 16, the court-room was filled with more than the ordinary casual crowd of sightseers. Many of the distinguished men and women who are temporary residents of the capital on war missions dropped in to hear the pleading of the children's case.

Since the decision in the North Carolina court had gone against the law, the case was opened by Solicitor-General Davis, the appellant. He maintained that child labor, once regarded as harmless, even beneficial, has of recent years come to be regarded as immoral and injurious. To illustrate the old attitude, as seen by a man more discerning than his contemporaries, he quoted from Dickens's "Hard Times" the calamity in Coketown when the working children were sent to school:

Surely there never was such fragile chinaware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. . . . They were ruined when they were required to send laboring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill used that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of his acts-he was sure to come out with the awful menace that he would “ sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic."

of

any

...

The appellant based his argument on the changed attitude of the public towards child labor, seeking to show that, because modern-minded people regard child labor as an unmitigated evil, the use of the powers of Congress over inter-State commerce in this case is made in good faith and not in order to do indirectly what it has no power to do directly. He stated that there is at present an unfair discrimination in inter-State commerce against States with good child labor laws, and cited cases to show that the lack of such laws in some States was an actual deterrent to the passage of them in others where competing industries might be put at a disadvantage. Thus he showed that the lack of good child labor laws in certain of the Southern cotton-mill States might actually injure the children of New England cotton-mill States where better laws that were contemplated were abandoned.

He further showed that, since child labor is repugnant to our higher standards of morality, citizens in other States have a right to be protected against being made unwilling parties to practices deemed immoral.

The opponents of the law in the lower court had claimed that it contravened the "due process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The Solicitor-General pointed out, however, that this guarantee that no one should be deprived of property by the Federal Government without due process of law is just the same as the guarantee in the Fourteenth Amendment that States shall have no such summary powers. As State child labor laws affecting goods made and handled within the State have been maintained as legal, the Federal Government has exactly the same jurisdiction over inter-State and foreign shipments. He made a summary disposal of pleas that the law contravened the Tenth Amendment by quoting the decision of Mr. Justice Harlan in the lottery case:

It must not be forgotten that the power of Congress to regulate commerce among the States is plenary, is complete in itself, and is subject to no limitations except such as may be found in the Constitution. What provision in that instrument can be regarded as limiting the exercise of the power granted? We cannot think of any clause of that instrument that could possibly be invoked by those who assert their right to send lottery tickets from State to State except the one providing that no person shall be deprived of his liberty without due process of law.

...

If it be said that the Act of 1895 is inconsistent with the Tenth Amendment, reserving to the States respectively or to the people the powers not delegated to the United States, the answer is that the power to regulate commerce among the States has been expressly delegated to Congress.

Mr. Morgan O'Brien, of New York, opened the attack upon the law. He and his colleague based their arguments largely on the contention that limiting the age at which children should be allowed to work should be a matter left to the States to decide, so that legislation might be based upon variations in climate, character of industries, poverty of the population, etc.

Of all the questions asked of counsel on both sides by menbers of the Court the most interesting was the Chief Justice's penetrating query of Mr. O'Brien whether, in the passage of the amendment that freed the slaves, our lawmakers had not taken upon themselves responsibility for the establishment and maintenance of a virile citizenship.

66

TILL religion and our new army mix? To try to solve that problem in one of our larger army camps the War Commission of my denomination asked me to leave my busy church during the two busiest months of the year. A few days later I found myself wandering down the main thoroughfare of a military camp with thirty thousand khaki-clad inhabitants, unheralded, alone, and friendless. But, like any sensible homeless man, I made my way to the headquarters of the Young Men's Christian Association, where I was kindly taken in and given a night's lodging. I quickly found that an army camp is not the place for an itinerant preacher nor a mendicant monk, for the Commanding General insists that no unattached preachers shall hang around the camp. At the first opportunity I called officially on the General to explain my mission and present my credentials. With accustomed military despatch, he assigned me as "temporary chaplain" to a machine-gun battalion, and ordered me to report to the commanding officer.

Here, almost before I know it, I am articulated into Uncle Sam's monstrous military machine, and find myself moving along in orderly procession, like a cog in the wheel. Hastening over to "my" battalion, I find with no little difficulty the officers' headquarters, and present myself to the major in command. When I tell him the General has assigned me as temporary chaplain to his command, he laughs good-naturedly and tells me to make myself at home and do his men all the good I can. Unfortunately, however, his officers' quarters are crowded, and the best he can do is to quarter me in the casual officers' barracks, at the other side of the camp. Armed again with orders, I take up the march. This time I find an abiding-place in a big, bare room containing about fifty iron cots. I am instructed to help myself, but, as they are all equally bare and uninviting, I take the first one I come to, and proceed to make myself at home, if one can call an iron cot and a trunk by that dear name. At twelve o'clock I file into the mess-hall with about sixty officers and am seated at a rough pine-board table. Without further ceremony, we fall to and help ourselves from the big dishes of well-cooked, appetizing food which Uncle Sam supplies to his men.

At last I am settled in my new "pastorate." But I feel strangely out of place. Only a cot and a trunk for home and study; no pulpit, no Ladies' Aid, no deacons, no chorister, no ushers. Indeed, I begin to have a warm fellow-feeling for the proverbial strange cat in a garret. But I am in the midst of thirty thousand young, virile men who are away from home and friends and are perplexed and bewildered by their sudden transition from the vocations of peaceful industry to the rigorous and monotonous routine of military training. Where can a minister find a richer field in which to ply his vocation as an under shepherd than right here? But where shall I begin? How can I establish a point of contact? All of these men are being intensively trained and are kept at the hardest kind of work all day long, and in the evening large numbers of them are attending military classes of one sort or another. At nine o'clock lights go out and the streets become deserted except for the lonely sentinels. There is little time left for anything else, and not much inclination except to rest weary muscles.

But a tour of inspection through the Y. M. C. A. huts and Knights of Columbus halls any evening reveals most interesting scenes of throngs of young men busily writing letters home, enjoying a few reels of "movies," playing basket-ball, or indulging in a boxing match. But even here there is a noticeable lack of mirth and joviality. Their sport and laughter seem forced

and lacking in spontaneity. One feels that these men fully realize the seriousness of their business and are sobered by the weight of responsibility.

My first Sunday finds me at 9:45 o'clock in the morning at one of the church services conducted in every Y. M. C. A. hut. It is made as nearly like a similar service at home as circumstances and conditions will permit. At eleven o'clock I conduct one of nineteen simultaneous services held in the barracks of the colored regiment, who are in quarantine for mumps and measles. The service is held in the mess-hall. A dozen volunteers come to the front to serve as choir. Nearly all of these men are from the South, and we have an old-time darky meetin'. How they do sing the old plantation melodies! At seven o'clock I conduct one of the Y. M. C. A. meetings, and speak a Gospel message to several hundred young men who sit on rough wooden benches without backs.

During the week I find my way to the base hospital, where a thousand of the men are sick, lonely, and sad. Here at least the minister is left in no doubt as to his welcome. In visits to the barracks, in chats on trains, everywhere, one finds men hungry for friendship and ready to talk of the deeper things of life.

After having lived with the casual officers long enough to become somewhat acquainted with them, and yet with a good deal of trepidation, I decide to test them out religiously. So one evening at mess I distribute blank cards and request the officers to remain a few minutes after supper. I then ask them if they will kindly write down answers to a few simple questions. To my surprise and gratification, they enter heartily into the spirit of the questionnaire and answer the questions readily and seriously. More than that, this started a discussion of the relation of religion to army life that continued through the evening. When I gather up the cards, I find fifty-six out of the sixty officers have answered the questions, giving the following information: Forty of the fifty-six officers are church members, and all but two express some church preference, but widely scattered. Forty are in the habit of praying. Thirty-five have Bibles or Testaments with them. As to whether army life tends to make them more religious or less, eleven thought it made no difference, six were more religious and four less. As to what particular service they felt a chaplain could render them personally, twenty-eight made specific suggestions, nearly all being some form of personal service, such as conversation, advice, etc.

Six weeks' sojourn in the most intimate contact with one of our Army camps has made some very definite impressions on my mind and heart.

1. The fellowship and co-operation among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in religious and welfare work for our soldiers are most delightful and earnest. It is a new experience to attend a weekly conference of chaplains of all faiths to discuss sympathetically the religious needs of the camp. Religious divisions find exceedingly barren soil in which to grow in our camps. What the men seem to crave is vital contact with God and the ministry that nourishes and sustains the soul.

2. I am convinced that the soldiers in our Army camps are the cleanest, strongest, and best-living group of men to be found in our whole country. Unquestionably our soldiers are living up to a higher moral standard of conduct than was ever thought possible before.

3. At heart our men are religious, and will come out of the war better men and with a deeper conviction concerning the great spiritual realities of life.

4. Our Army camps are vast melting-pots for American democracy. Creeds and casts are being broken down. Uncle