Speech 42
CHILD LABOR
FROM THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE AT THE OPENING OF THE THIRD SESSION OF THE FIFTY EIGHTH CONGRESS, DECEMBER 6, 1904

MUCH can be done by the Government in labor matters merely by giving publicity to certain conditions.  The Bureau of Labor has done excellent work of this kind in many different directions.  I shall shortly lay before you in a special message the full report of the investigation of the Bureau of Labor into the Colorado mining strike, as this is a strike in which certain very evil forces, which are more or less at work everywhere under the conditions of modern industrialism, became startlingly prominent.  It is greatly to be wished that the Department of Commerce and Labor, through the Labor Bureau, should compile and arrange for the Congress a list of the labor laws of the various States, and should be given the means to investigate and report to the Congress upon the labor conditions in the manufacturing and mining regions throughout the country, both as to wages, as to hours of labor, as to the labor of women and children, and as to the effect in the various labor centres of immigration from abroad.  In this investigation especial attention should be paid to the conditions of child labor and child labor legislation in the several States.  Such an investigation must necessarily take into account many of the problems with which this question of child labor is connected.  These problems can be actually met, in most cases, only by the States themselves; but the lack of proper legislation in one State in such a matter as child labor often renders it excessively difficult to establish protective restriction upon the work in another State having the same industries, so that the worst tends to drag down the better.  For this reason, it would be well for the Nation at least to endeavor to secure comprehensive information as to the conditions of labor of children in the different States.  Such investigation and publication by the National Government would tend toward the securing of approximately uniform legislation of the proper character among the several States.