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Show AIMS VALIDITY OF CHILDLABQR BILL Senator Overman Wants States Individually to Vote on Question. WASHINGTON, Aug. 7. An attack on the constitutionality of the pending child 1 labor bill was made In the senate today ; by Senator Overman of North Carolina, j He insisted that the issue should be sub- mitted to the states as a constitutional amendment. "If this legislation is constitutional," declared the senator, "there will be nothing noth-ing lett of the rights of states, but there will be an absolute absorption of the po-lice po-lice powers of the forty-eight sovereign sov-ereign states, and there will he no harrier In the way of centralization of ail power in Washington, to which goal we are now rapidly drifting. "This bill is not for the purpose of regulating commerce, but Its main purpose pur-pose is, under the guise of regulating commerce, to regulate production in the mHnufactoriea and mills of the country. It is to put a state under duress and compel com-pel it to do that which some states have done, in order, as has been stated in this debate, to have uniformity." Senator Overman submitted statistics designed to show a beneficial effect upon society of child labor. Records for 1910, he said, showed that onlv fifteen children in 100,000, between 14 and 16 years of age, in North Carolina, were committed to jails or workhouses, as compared with 279 in Massachusetts, 199 in Rhode Island and 122 in Missouri. Senators Bryan and Fletcher of Florida also argued that the states, and not the federal government, should deal with the question. |