larity than ever before, in order that they may not miss the required promotions and thus be detained in school after the fourteenth birthday. The laws of Colorado and New York by this means place a premium upon regularity in attending school from the day of entrance at the age of six years, saying virtually to the parent: "Your child must go to school until the sixteenth birthday. If, however, you keep him up to his work so well that he completes a certain portion of the curriculum by the time the fourteenth birthday arrives, he may then leave school and begin to work." Both states enforce fines and imprisonment upon parents who disobey the compulsory-attendance law. The parent is thus treated in both these states according to the methods of the best modern pedagogy — the reward of virtue and the penalty of evil-doing following rationally upon the line of conduct selected by the parent.
Illinois, on the other hand, ends the term of compulsory school attendance at the age of fourteen years for all who can read and write, and requires beyond that merely attendance at night school. Thus, although parents are punished by fine or imprisonment if pupils play truant, exactly as in New York and Colorado, they have none of the stimulus, such as fathers in those states enjoy, for getting the pupils forward through a required amount of school work. While Illinois punished three hundred parents in one year for the truancy of their children, New York and Colorado (while they, too, punished parents of truants) were stimulating thousands of fathers, mothers, and children to regular school attendance on the part of the children in order that these might complete the allotted task by the arrival of the fourteenth birthday.
One of the proverbial difficulties in the way of the perfect enforcement of child-labor and compulsory-education laws is that of proving the age of the child which is alleged to be fourteen or sixteen years old, and therefore exempt from further school requirements or restrictions upon its work, while in truth the child may be but eleven or twelve years old. The demand that the child must, in addition to being fourteen years old, have completed a certain amount of school work is found, in practice, to
