156 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



lishment of a disciplined ability to carry on useful activities, 

 which is deadly lacking in urban children. It is one of the 

 recognized defects of city life that there is nothing at which to 

 set the boys and girls outside of school hours and in vacation 

 periods. Idleness and idle habits, bad associations, and irregular 

 wayward tendencies are often directly traceable to this void in 

 the city boy life. It is not the adjusted, timely work of children 

 in the country which is the question. There is far more labor 

 of an excessive nature placed on children, particularly boys, who 

 live on farms than we would suspect. 



COLORADO BEET WORKERS * 



DR. E. N. CLOPPER 



WE have been undertaking some isolated investigations of child 

 labor in agriculture because it is a subject about which we know 

 very little although the 1910 census reports that almost 72 per 

 cent, of all the children between ten and fifteen years of age 

 engaged in gainful occupations in the United States are in agri- 

 cultural pursuits and that 18 per cent, of them or 260,000 are 

 farm laborers working for other than their own parents. 



In a recent study of the employment of children in the cultiva- 

 tion of sugar beets in Colorado we found an interesting situation. 

 There are about 5,000 children between six and fifteen working 

 in the beet fields, practically all of them with their own parents. 

 These children of course are under the compulsory education law 

 of Colorado which requires them to attend school nine months, 

 but as the local system is organized on the district plan the local 

 truant officer does not always enforce the law because he would 

 be required to prosecute his own immediate friends and neigh- 

 bors. The remedy seems to lie in a large unit of organization 

 that would remove enforcement outside the immediate locality. 



We found that the best working children were kept out of 

 school about three months in the fall and lost about three and a 

 half times as many days of school as the non-beet workers. This 

 makes it impossible for the teachers to do the same work with 



i Adapted from Child . Labor Bulletin. May, 1916. P. 38. National 

 Child Labor Committee, New York. 



