500 1HE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCfOLOu }
must interlock, and the children must be offered abundant school facilities, and compelled to avail themselves of them ; or evasion of the child-labor law will be inevitable. For active boys will seem to anxious mothers, unacquainted with the temptations of factory, store, and messenger service, to be safer at work than at play. And where there are not sufficient school accommodations, and vigorous punishment of truancy, this will always seem to be the alternative.
The ideal toward which the great manufacturing states of the Union are slowly moving has already been attained in Switzer- land, where the employment of children under sixteen years of age has long been prohibited, manual and technical education is systematically provided, and compulsory attendance at school is rigidly enforced.
In the light of the experience of the past four years the obstacles to social amelioration by constitutional methods in Illinois appear fundamental, but not insurmountable. Foremost among them is the undermining effect of the spoils system upon all remedial legislation.
The second serious obstacle to the amelioration of social conditions by constitutional methods is the state constitution, under which it is difficult to frame a statute not palpably uncon- stitutional. This state constitution, and the precedents accumu- lated under it, were the reasons assigned for the annulment by the state Supreme Court in 1895 f the eight-hours' clause of the factory law. The problem for the immediate present is, there- fore, to draft needed statutes so skillfully that they may contain no flaw of unconstitutionality. It is easier to do this with regard to children and minors than with regard to the labor of adults ; and it is in the search for the line of least resistance that those who are following the difficult path of social amelioration by constitutional methods have arrived at the policy of pushing child-labor measures only, until the constitution which has not been adapted to the changing conditions since 1870 can be modernized by a constitutional convention.
A third difficulty in the way of ameliorating social condi-
