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Addams, Jane. National protection for children. New York City: National Child Labor Committee, [1907?].
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PAMPHLET No. 47. ,
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[Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the National
Child Labor Committee, Cincinnati 0., December 13-15, 1906, as published by
the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, in THE ANNALS
of the Academy, Vol XXIX, No.1, January, 1907.]

NATIONAL PROTECTION FOR CHILDREN



By JANE ADDAMS

Hull House, Chicago, 111.


It is sometimes a difficult matter to understand that the federal
government should be willing to spend time and money to establish
and maintain departments relating to the breeding, to the raising,
to the distribution and to the exportation of cattle, sheep and hogs,
and that as yet the federal government has done nothing to see to
it that the children are properly protected up to the time when they
may go to work without injury to themselves and without injury
to the nation. This can only be explained by the attitude of the
founders of our government, who, in their great desire to keep
away from oppression and to avoid reproducing the tyranny which
had driven them from Europe, came to believe that self-govern-
ernment could be secured only through decentralized or local gov-
ernment. If one would go over the early history of government in
the United States and the machinery devised to secure greater
freedom, one would find that the founders constantly distrusted
centralized power as a result of the inheritance which they had
brought with them and from which they could not escape. Only
in one direction did they assume that a centralized government
. was necessary and that was in all of those things which pertain to
international relations. As modern life developed, those things which
pertained most naturally to international relations were the exports
and imports with their tariff regulations, and so quite seriously the
national government took up all of the things connected with com-
merce and with its development in every direction.
. It seemed at last quite natural that hours and hours of discus-
sion in the Congress of the United States should be expended upon
commercial questions because they had to do with the relations of
the United States to the world outside. It seemed quite right that
millions of dollars should be spent that the best sort of grain might




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