bureau for a permit, and, after conference with the director-in-chief, she will in due time get an order from that potentate, duly witnessed and acknowledged, granting or refusing her request.

I am speaking seriously. I am quite familiar with bureaucracy. Take our forestry bureau as an illustration, one with which we come in frequent contact here in Colorado. Ask the miner or the old prospector who has been regulated out of existence by that all-powerful institution. It is said that the forestry bureau is essential to the preservation of our forests. Possibly. But it is not essential to forest protection that our mining industry should have been strangled. Yet that is one result of its operation. It is the fruit of red tape, which is the ripe fruit of bureaucracy.

Suppose a prospector wants to hunt for mineral deposits upon one of our numerous reserves. He must file his application with the local chief, who will order a staff of inspectors to make a survey and report to Division No. 1, we will say, which, in turn, will report to Commissioner No. 2, who passes the subject on to Board of Review No. 3, which in the course of a few years will report to the Lord High Commissioner himself. Finally, after the applicant has paid the debt of nature and been laid away, the order may or may not be granted.

That is bureaucracy. It is the dry rot in the structure of government, and always pressing for increase of power and patronage. Every bureaucrat in the city of Washington is organized and affiliates with the American Federation of Labor. All of them joined hands with Mr. Lovejoy to help him put his amendment through. He tells us that we can rely upon the integrity of Congress and the statesmanship of its members for such legislation as may be needed fairly and justly to enforce this amendment. How assuring and how innocent Mr. Lovejoy is. Why, the average modern congressman is a man who has long since learned to keep both ears to the ground at the same time. His main concern is for his job. And that explains how and why this amendment was jammed through both houses. Of course, there are congressmen and congressmen. I am dealing with those who have been concerned with their seats, and who do what seems essential to their retention. I know a former senator whom I like immensely-I won't name him—who has always been opposed to bureaucracy and has said so in season and out of season; yet he voted for Mr. Lovejoy's amendment, assigning as a reason that otherwise the women of his state would not support him for re-election. That would seem to be a case of stultification. He was mistaken, for the women helped to defeat him and elected his competitor by a 28,000 majority. This would seem to be a loss of self-respect, of integrity, of conviction, coupled with the loss of a job.

Another and a very large class of people behind this amendment, and residing all over the country, are aspirants for public office. They hope to be rewarded with positions in the bureau after it has been created. A friend of mine overheard a young lady say in Washington last summer, before this corpse

was mangled, that she was then working for the Haugen-McNary bill, and that she had been assured of a job in the bureau of child labor just as soon as the amendment was ratified. The girl really seemed to think that the amendment was designed for just that purpose. And she was perfectly right. Had the amendment been accepted, a bill for a bureau to administer it would have been promptly introduced, and Mr. Lovejoy, with his association, would have been as promptly on hand to urge its passage. It would have proven enormously expensive in its administration, but what is expense when eighteen-year-old children exhibit symptoms of wanting to go to work and engage in gainful pursuits?

Take the child welfare bureau. It started with an appropriation of $25,000 a few years ago. We were then told that that sum was sufficient for its purposes. Now we are paying a small army of welfare workers, permanently attached to their jobs in this bureau, $1,154,000 a year, and child welfare is no better off than when the bureau was organized. In fact, that is true of about every bureau with which I am familiar, except the bureau of standards. They grow larger and worse with the passage of time. They are inspired by two prime ambitions-increase of jurisdiction and of personnel.

The Interstate Commerce Commission is an outstanding bureau, and nearly always referred to as an example of what a bureau should be. It was organized in 1887, to regulate and equalize transportation. Yet complaining merchants and communities, however summary their need for relief, find it impossible to secure action in less than three years; and when they obtain a decision from that tribunal, they are frequently unable to understand it. Our railroad rates are higher, and charges of discrimination are quite as numerous as when the Commission was created to relieve us of both. It began its mission in one floor of a small building. It now fills a huge modern skyscraper, and has more employees than the state of Kansas. Senator La Follette, in 1912, provided a basis for its operation by a national scheme of railroad valuation. He assured the public that its entire cost would not exceed $2,500,000. It has cost, to date, more than $95,000,000, and it will not be completed for three or four years, and its ultimate cost will perhaps be twice the sum already expended. And then the work will prove worthless for any purpose. It is as true as it ever was that liberty and bureaucracy cannot long coexist. One or the other must ultimately retire.

A few more words and I must give way to Mr. Lovejoy, although I have scarcely scratched the surface of things. It is your duty, ladies and gentlemen, as citizens of this great country, to study both sides, not only of this, but of every other proposed political change in our form of government which may be submitted for your approval. Do this before you commit yourself for or against it. Goethe says that the most terrible thing in the world is energetic ignorance. I have encountered more energetic ignorance regarding political and economic conditions to the square mile in the United States than I supposed could have

been found in any country enjoying the blessings of free speech and a free press. Thinking has become a lost art. Years ago Mary Taylor said:

How few think justly of the thinking few;

How many never think who think they do.

Thousands of men and women have committed themselves to this amendment who know nothing about it. They have assumed that the American child is exposed to some vague but terrible danger; that he is, or is about to become, the helpless victim of a heartless industrialism; that his parents are exploiting him, and the states are wholly indifferent; that he is doomed to horrors of perpetual servitude unless the general government be clothed with power to extend its shield of protection above him. These good people are afflicted with political nightmare. Let me assure them that every state in this Union has an effective child labor law which is being properly observed and enforced. While they differ in minor details, because of local industrial conditions, they are substantially alike. They are designed to regulate, without prohibiting, honest, conscientious effort. As a matter of course, if the states having supervision of the persons and property of its citizens, possessing all the powers not delegated to the federal government, have in the past demonstrated their incapacity to solve the child labor problem-if there be one-within their respective jurisdictions, the advocates of this amendment might claim some justification of their conduct. But this is not, and never was, so. If it were, will you tell me what can be accomplished by the agency which represents collectively the identical people who are thus derelict? That the national Congress, away off in Washington, can cure the terrible evil by a system of uniform legislation, which is the most unjust and indefensible sort of legislation in the world? We cannot ignore the fact that there is no uniformity in nature. Despotisms endeavor at times to impose it. They succeed transiently, and then comes the explosion. Your boy of ten years will develop certain tendencies. His brother of eleven will display other and different ones. Uniformity is contrary to nature. Diversity is the universal condition-diversity of soil, climate, people, institutions, pursuits. These require diversity of treatment and of legislation. The best laws are those which recognize and adapt themselves to these eternal and ineradicable differences. No two men or women are equal. The mountains are different in elevation, and so are the plains. Mankind, though one in the mass, is composed of its many units, and each unit is distinct from all the others.

"The same law for the lion and the ox is tyranny," said an old philosopher. When you place thirty-odd millions of children under uniform bureaucratic regulation and influence, administered under an inflexible statute of continental dimensions, which neither takes nor permits cognizance of their diverse nature, their physical or mental characteristics or conditions, you bind them with chains of steel which will crush them in body and spirit beyond redemption. Verily, the greatest curse of legislation is uniformity. We have avoided its application

thus far by preserving the integrity of the states, leaving each to the government and regulation of its own affairs in its own way.

Uniformity! Beware of it. Uniformity is stagnation, whether in man or nature, in philosophy or in religion. Life is variety. Death is uniform, because uniformity is death. There is no uniformity in the politics of the same organization. Just now there are more sorts of democracy than there are democrats; and yet, with diversity staring them in the face, numbers of good men and women come before you with quivering voice and tearful eyes, reciting nameless horrors which a distorted imagination convinces them are menacing their children and yours. They clamor for federal authority to enact uniform legislation to be rigidly applied to thirty-five millions of people distributed over a continent of infinitely varied resources, varied climate, and varied population. I fear they will never perceive that the remedy is worse than the disease, were the latter many times worse than they believe it to be.

If we credit a small percentage of rumor and assertion, men and women are also being exploited by hard-boiled employers. Why not bureaus for them as well, and others to care for the ills and to soothe the woes of the Jews, the gentiles, the Catholics, and the unbelievers? Why not? Our sovereign government, as Mr. Lovejoy describes it, should play no favorites in this policy of universal regulation. Are not our women as precious as our children? The Negro justly complains that the constitutional amendments designed for his social and political equality are flouted and ignored. Let us create a bureau and give it jurisdiction, under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, over the person and politics of the Negro. Are we not theoretically free and equal? And if a bureau will convert theory into fact for white children, surely it can do as much for the black men.

In all seriousness, let me ask, When will the tides of legislative invasion and control of individual conduct cease? Not, I fear, until people, goaded beyond endurance, turn upon their reforming tormentors, demand a halt, and then enforce it. We are gorged with nostrums, experimental legislation, welfare legislation, mandatory legislation, prohibitory legislation, regulatory legislation, bureaus, commissions, and boards; invasions here, and invasions there, until law has become synonymous with tyranny in its most searching and sinister forms.

Voltaire said that every lover of liberty seems determined to destroy her. It is as true now as ever. If we would preserve its remaining fragments, we would do well to recall and observe the precept of the Hebrew prophet: "Stand upon the old paths, walk in the ancient ways, observe them well, and be not driven unto change."

RESOLVED THAT THE PROPOSED TWENTIETH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES SHOULD BE RATIFIED

(DEBATE: REBUTTAL) ·

Owen R. Lovejoy

There are just a few points to touch upon. I had hoped Senator Thomas, somewhere in his address, would tell us what kind of protection he thought the working child should have. I was disappointed that he seemed to avoid doing so. But at least he has favored us with his position on this whole question. If I understand him, he does not believe in any kind of child labor legislation whatever. He does not believe in compulsory school attendance laws. He deplores the efforts that have been made to protect children against exploitation. I can hardly believe that Senator Thomas is so ignorant of the efforts made in recent years in this and other countries as not to know that the condition of working children is far superior today to what it was in the old days in England, or in that stronghold of labor legislation today, Massachusetts. I think that what he said was for oratorical effect.

Those of you who are familiar with efforts to improve conditions of working children know that anyone who has any interest in the matter distinguishes between child labor and children's work. If the Senator knows anything about the activities of the National Child Labor Committee, he knows that its membership is made up of Americans of average common sense, many of them prominent business men, many prominent business women, and that they have always made it clear that what we seek to do is so to safeguard the surroundings of children during their early, helpless years that when they get to the point where they may reasonably bear their share of the burden of life, they may go into life's work with their eyes open instead of being blindly chucked into the first job that offers. I must flatly contradict the Senator's statement that children do not want to work. But there is a real difference between working and being worked. I have yet to find my first adult who did not want to work when he was a boy, provided the work was interesting. And if children are ignorant enough, the worse the conditions the more tenaciously they cling to their jobs. It is a matter of information, that is all. We have constantly to distinguish between children's work and child labor.

If I interpret the Senator correctly, he believes that the old days were better, when children were allowed to work all night at the ages of ten and twelve years, when little boys worked nine hours at a stretch cleaning coal, when in the textile industry in the New England states as well as in southern states, they worked at practically any age from eight years up for as many hours a day as the factory ran. I do not believe the Senator believes those industrial conditions were better than the present, nor that he believes there is such a difference in the make-up of human beings in the various sections of the country that it