The Bitter Cry of the Children

In the middle of the room was a large round furnace with a number of small doors, three or four feet from the ground, forming a sort of belt around the furnace. In front of these doors the glass-blowers were working. With long wrought-iron blowpipes the blowers deftly took from the furnace little wads of waxlike molten “metal” which they blew into balls and then rolled on their rolling boards. These elongated rolls they dropped into moulds and then blew again, harder than before, to force the half-shaped mass into its proper form. With a sharp, clicking sound they broke their pipes away and repeated the whole process. There was not, of course, the fascination about their work that the more artistic forms of glass-blowing possess. There was none of that twirling of the blowpipes till they looked like so many magic wands which for centuries has made the glass-blower’s art a delightful, half-mysterious thing to watch. But it was still wonderful to see the exactness of each man’s “dip,” and the deftness with which they manipulated the balls before casting them into the moulds.

Then began the work of the boys. By the side of each mould sat a “take-out boy,” who, with tongs, took the half-finished bottles—not yet provided with necks—out of the moulds. Then other boys, called “snapper-ups,” took these bodies of bottles in their tongs and put the small ends into gas-heated moulds till they were red hot. Then the boys took them out with almost incredible quickness and passed them to other men, “finishers,” who shaped the necks of the bottles into their final form. Then the “carrying-in boys,” sometimes called “carrier pigeons,” took the red-hot bottles from the benches, three or four at a time, upon big asbestos shovels to the annealing oven, where they are gradually cooled off to insure even contraction and to prevent breaking in consequence of too rapid cooling. The work of these “carrying-in boys,” several of whom were less than twelve years old, was by far the hardest of all. They were kept on a slow run all the time from the benches to the annealing oven and back again. I can readily believe what many manufacturers assert, that it is difficult to get men to do this work, because men cannot stand the pace and get tired too quickly. It is a fact, however, that in many factories men are employed to do this work, especially at night. In other, more up-to-date factories it is done by automatic machinery. I did not measure the distance from the benches to the annealing oven, nor did I count the number of trips made by the boys, but my friend, Mr. Owen R. Lovejoy, has done so in a typical factory and very kindly furnished me with the results of his calculation.^[118] The distance to the annealing oven in the factory in question was one hundred feet, and the boys made seventy-two trips per hour, making the distance travelled in eight hours nearly twenty-two miles. Over half of this distance the boys were carrying their hot loads to the oven. The pay of these boys varies from sixty cents to a dollar for eight hours’ work. About a year ago I gathered particulars of the pay of 257 boys in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; the lowest pay was forty cents per night and the highest a dollar and ten cents, while the average was seventy-two cents.

In New Jersey, since 1903, the employment of boys under fourteen years of age is forbidden, but there is no restriction as to night work for boys of that age. In Pennsylvania boys of fourteen may work by night. In Ohio night work is prohibited for all under sixteen years of age, but so far as my personal observations, and the testimony of competent and reliable observers, enable me to judge, the law is not very effectively enforced in this respect in the glass factories. In Indiana the employment of children under fourteen in factories is forbidden. Women and girls are not permitted to work between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M., but there is no restriction placed upon the employment of boys fourteen years of age or over by night.^[119]

The effects of the employment of young boys in glass factories, especially by night, are injurious from every possible point of view. The constant facing of the glare of the furnaces and the red-hot bottles causes serious injury to the sight; minor accidents from burning are common. “Severe burns and the loss of sight are regular risks of the trade in glass-bottle making,” says Mrs. Florence Kelley.^[120] Even more serious than the accidents are those physical disorders induced by the conditions of employment. Boys who work at night do not as a rule get sufficient or satisfactory rest by day. Very often they cannot sleep because of the noises made by younger children in and around the house; more often, perhaps, they prefer to play rather than to sleep. Indeed, most boys seem to prefer night work, for the reason that it gives them the chance to play during the daytime. Even where the mothers are careful and solicitous, they find it practically impossible to control boys who are wage-earners and feel themselves to be independent. This lack of proper rest, added to the heat and strain of their work, produces nervous dyspepsia. From working in draughty sheds where they are often, as one boy said to me in Zanesville, O., “burning on the side against the furnace and pretty near freezing on the other,” they are frequently subject to rheumatism. Going from the heated factories to their homes, often a mile or so distant, perspiring and improperly clad, with their vitality at its lowest ebb, they fall ready victims to pneumonia and to its heir, the Great White Plague. In almost every instance when I have asked local physicians for their experience, they have named these as the commonest physical results. Of the fearful moral consequences there can be no question. The glass-blowers themselves realize this and, even more than the physical deterioration, it prevents them from taking their own children into the glass houses. One practically never finds the son of a glass-blower employed as a “snapper-up,” or “carrying-in boy,” unless the father is dead or incapacitated by reason of sickness. “I’d sooner see my boy dead than working here. You might as well give a boy to the devil at once as send him to a glass factory,” said one blower to me in Glassborough, N.J.; and that is the spirit in which most of the men regard the matter.

So great is the demand for boys that it is possible at almost any time for a boy to get employment for a single night. Indeed, “one shifters” are so common in some districts that the employers have found it necessary to institute a system of bonuses for those boys who work every night in a week. Out of this readiness to employ boys for a single night has grown a terrible evil,—boys attending school all day and then working in the factories by night. Many such cases have been reported to me, and Mrs. Van Der Vaart declares that “it is customary in Indiana for the school boys to work Thursday and Friday nights and attend school during the day.”^[121] Mr. Lovejoy found the same practice in Steubenville, O., and other places.^[122] Teachers in glass-manufacturing centres have repeatedly told me that among the older boys were some who, because of their employment by night in the factories, were drowsy and unable to receive any benefits from their attendance at school.

In some districts, especially in New Jersey, it has long been the custom to import boys from certain orphan asylums and “reformatories” to supply the demand of the manufacturers. These boys are placed in laborers’ families, and their board paid for by the employers, who deduct it from the boys’ wages. Thus a veritable system of child slavery has developed, remarkably like the old English pauper-apprentice system. “These imported boys are under no restraint by day or night,” says Mrs. Kelley, “and are wholly without control during the idle hours. They are in the streets in gangs, in and out of the police courts and the jails, a burden to themselves and to the community imposed by the demand of this boy-destroying industry.”^[123] It is perhaps only indicative of the universal readiness of men to concern themselves with the mote in their brothers’ eyes without considering the beam in their own, that I should have attended a meeting in New Jersey where the child labor of the South was bitterly condemned, but no word was said of the appalling nature of the problem in the state of New Jersey itself.

According to the census of 1900, there were 25,000 boys under sixteen years of age employed in and around the mines and quarries of the United States. In the state of Pennsylvania alone,—the state which enslaves more children than any other,—there are thousands of little “breaker boys” employed, many of them not more than nine or ten years old. The law forbids the employment of children under fourteen, and the records of the mines generally show that the law is “obeyed.” Yet in May, 1905, an investigation by the National Child Labor Committee showed that in one small borough of 7000 population, among the boys employed in breakers 35 were nine years old, 40 were ten, 45 were eleven, and 45 were twelve—over 150 boys illegally employed in one section of boy labor in one small town! During the anthracite coal strike of 1902, I attended the Labor Day demonstration at Pittston and witnessed the parade of another at Wilkesbarre. In each case there were hundreds of boys marching, all of them wearing their “working buttons,” testifying to the fact that they were bona fide workers. Scores of them were less than ten years of age, others were eleven or twelve.

Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that “He’s got his boy to carry round wherever he goes.” The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead.^[124] Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners’ consumption. I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid, and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed.

I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day. Some of them had never been inside of a school; few of them could read a child’s primer. True, some of them attended the night schools, but after working ten hours in the breaker the educational results from attending school were practically nil. “We goes fer a good time, an’ we keeps de guys wots dere hoppin’ all de time,” said little Owen Jones, whose work I had been trying to do. How strange that barbaric patois sounded to me as I remembered the rich, musical language I had so often heard other little Owen Joneses speak in far-away Wales. As I stood in that breaker I thought of the reply of the small boy to Robert Owen. Visiting an English coal-mine one day, Owen asked a twelve-year-old lad if he knew God. The boy stared vacantly at his questioner: “God?” he said, “God? No, I don’t. He must work in some other mine.” It was hard to realize amid the danger and din and blackness of that Pennsylvania breaker that such a thing as belief in a great All-good God existed.

From the breakers the boys graduate to the mine depths, where they become door tenders, switch-boys, or mule-drivers. Here, far below the surface work is still more dangerous. At fourteen or fifteen the boys assume the same risks as the men, and are surrounded by the same perils. Nor is it in Pennsylvania only that these conditions exist. In the bituminous mines of West Virginia, boys of nine or ten are frequently employed. I met one little fellow ten years old in Mt. Carbon, W. Va., last year, who was employed as a “trap boy.” Think of what it means to be a trap boy at ten years of age. It means to sit alone in a dark mine passage hour after hour, with no human soul near; to see no living creature except the mules as they pass with their loads, or a rat or two seeking to share one’s meal; to stand in water or mud that covers the ankles, chilled to the marrow by the cold draughts that rush in when you open the trap-door for the mules to pass through; to work for fourteen hours—waiting—opening and shutting a door—then waiting again—for sixty cents; to reach the surface when all is wrapped in the mantle of night, and to fall to the earth exhausted and have to be carried away to the nearest “shack” to be revived before it is possible to walk to the farther shack called “home.”

Boys twelve years of age may be legally employed in the mines of West Virginia, by day or by night, and for as many hours as the employers care to make them toil or their bodies will stand the strain. Where the disregard of child life is such that this may be done openly and with legal sanction, it is easy to believe what miners have again and again told me—that there are hundreds of little boys of nine and ten years of age employed in the coal-mines of this state.

VII

It is not my purpose to deal specifically with all the various forms of child labor. That would require a much larger volume than this to be devoted exclusively to the subject. Children are employed at a tender age in hundreds of occupations. In addition to those already enumerated, there were in 1900, according to the census, nearly 12,000 workers under sixteen years of age employed in the manufacture of tobacco and cigars, and it is certain that the number actually employed in that most unhealthful occupation was much greater. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I have seen hundreds of children, boys and girls, between the ages of ten and twelve years, at work in the factories belonging to the “Cigar Trust.” Some of these factories are known as “kindergartens” on account of the large number of small children employed in them.^[125] It is by no means a rare occurrence for children in these factories to faint or to fall asleep over their work, and I have heard a foreman in one of them say that it was “enough for one man to do just to keep the kids awake.” In the domestic manufacture of cheap cigars, many very young children are employed. Often the “factories” are poorly lighted, ill-ventilated tenements in which work, whether for children or adults, ought to be absolutely prohibited. Children work often as many as fourteen or even sixteen hours in these little “home factories,” and in cities like Pittsburg, Pa., it is not unusual for them, after attending school all day, to work from 4 P.M. to 12.30 A.M., making “tobies” or “stogies,” for which they receive from eight to ten cents per hundred.

In the wood-working industries, more than 10,000 children were reported to be employed in the census year, almost half of them in saw-mills, where accidents are of almost daily occurrence, and where clouds of fine sawdust fill the lungs of the workers. Of the remaining 50 per cent, it is probable that more than half were working at or near dangerous machines, such as steam planers and lathes. Over 7000 children, mostly girls, were employed in laundries; 2000 in bakeries; 138,000 as servants and waiters in restaurants and hotels; 42,000 boys as messengers; and 20,000 boys and girls in stores. In all these instances there is every reason to suppose that the actual number employed was much larger than the official figures show.

In the canning and preservation of fish, fruit, and vegetables mere babies are employed during the busy season. In more than one canning factory in New York State, I have seen children of six and seven years of age working at two o’clock in the morning. In Oneida, Mr. William English Walling, formerly a factory inspector of Illinois, found one child four years old, who earned nineteen cents in an afternoon stringing beans, and other children from seven to ten years of age.^[126] There are over 500 canning factories in New York State, but the census of 1900 gives the number of children employed under sixteen years of age as 219. This is merely another illustration of the deceptiveness of the statistics which are gathered at so much expense. The agent of the New York Child Labor Committee was told by the foreman of one factory that there were 300 children under fourteen years of age in that one factory! In Syracuse it was a matter of complaint, in the season of 1904, on the part of the children, that “The factories will not take you unless you are eight years old.”^[127]

In Maryland there are absolutely no restrictions placed upon the employment of children in canneries. They may be employed at any age, by day or night, for as many hours as the employers choose, or the children can stand and keep awake. In Oxford, Md., I saw a tiny girl, seven years old, who had worked for twelve hours in an oyster-canning factory, and I was told that such cases were common. There were 290 canning establishments in the state of Maryland in 1900, all of them employing young children absolutely without legal restriction. And I fear that it must be added with little or no moral restriction either. Where regard for child life does not express itself in humane laws for its preservation, it may generally be presumed to be non-existent.

In Maine the age limit for employment is twelve years. Children of that age may be employed by day or night, provided that girls under eighteen and boys under sixteen are not permitted to work more than ten hours in the twenty-four or sixty hours in a week. In 1900 there were 117 establishments engaged in the preservation and canning of fish. Small herrings are canned and placed upon the market as “sardines.”^[128] This industry is principally confined to the Atlantic coast towns,—Lubec and Eastport, in Washington County, being the main centres. I cannot speak of this industry from personal investigation, but information received from competent and trustworthy sources gives me the impression that child slavery nowhere assumes a worse form than in the “sardine” canneries of Maine. Says one of my correspondents in a private letter: “In the rush season, fathers, mothers, older children, and babies work from early morn till night—from dawn till dark, in fact. You will scarcely believe me, perhaps, when I say ‘and babies,’ but it is literally true. I’ve seen them in the present season, no more than four or five years old, working hard and beaten when they lagged. As you may suppose, being out here, far away from the centre of the state, we are not much troubled by factory inspection. I have read about the conditions in the Southern mills, but nothing I have read equals for sheer brutality what I see right here in Washington County.”

In the sweatshops and, more particularly, the poorly paid home industries, the kindergartens are robbed to provide baby slaves. I am perfectly well aware that many persons will smile incredulously at the thought of infants from three to five years old working. “What can such little babies do?” they ask. Well, take the case of little Anetta Fachini, for example. The work she was doing when I saw her, wrapping paper around pieces of wire, was very similar to the play of better-favored children. As play, to be put aside whenever her childish fancy wandered to something else, it would have been a very good thing for little Anetta to do. She was compelled, however, to do it from early morning till late at night and even denied the right to sleep. For her, therefore, what might be play for some other child became the most awful bondage and cruelty. What can four-year-old babies do? Go into the nursery and watch the rich man’s four-year-old child, seated upon the rug, sorting many-colored beads and fascinated by the occupation for half an hour or so. That is play—good and wholesome for the child. In the public kindergarten, other four-year-old children are doing the same thing with zest and laughing delight. But go into the dim tenement yonder; another four-year-old child is sorting beads, but not in play. Her eyes do not sparkle with childish glee; she does not shout with delight at finding a prize among the beads. With tragic seriousness she picks out the beads and lays them before her mother, who is a slipper-beader—that is, she sews the beaded designs upon ladies’ fancy slippers. She works from morn till night, and all the while the child is seated by her side, straining her little eyes in the dim light, sorting the beads or stringing them on pieces of thread.

In the “Help Wanted” columns of the morning papers, advertisements frequently appear such as the following, taken from one of the leading New York dailies:—

WANTED.—Beaders on slippers; good pay; steady home work. M. B——, West —— Street.

In the tenement districts women may be seen staggering along with sack loads of slippers to be trimmed with beadwork, and children of four years of age and upward are pressed into service to provide cheap, dainty slippers for dainty ladies. What can four-year-old babies do? A hundred things, when they are driven to it. “They are pulling basting threads so that you and I may wear cheap garments; they are arranging the petals of artificial flowers; they are sorting beads; they are pasting boxes. They do more than that. I know of a room where a dozen or more little children are seated on the floor, surrounded by barrels, and in those barrels is found human hair, matted, tangled, and blood-stained—you can imagine the condition, for it is not my hair or yours that is cut off in the hour of death.”^[129]

There are more than 23,000 licensed “home factories” in New York City alone, 23,000 groups of workers in the tenements licensed to manufacture goods. How difficult it is to protect children employed in these tenement factories can best be judged by the following incident: Two small Italian children, a boy of five and his sister aged four, left a West-side kindergarten and were promptly followed up by their kindergartner, who found that the children were working and could not, in the opinion of their mother, be spared to attend the kindergarten. They were both helping to make artificial flowers. The truant officer was first applied to and asked whether the compulsory education law could not be used to free them, part of the time at least, from their unnatural toil. But attendance at school is not compulsory before the eighth year, so that was a useless appeal. Then the factory inspector was applied to, and he showed that the work of the children was entirely legal; they received no wages and were, therefore, not “employed” in the technical sense of that term. They were working in their own family. The room was not dirty or excessively overcrowded. No law was broken, and there was no legal means whereby the enslavement of those little children might be prevented.^[130]

This kind of child labor, be it remembered, is very different from that wholesome employment of children in the domestic industry which preceded the advent of the system of machine production. Then there was hope in the work and joy in the leisure which followed the work. Then competition was based on human qualities; man against man, hand against hand, eye against eye, brain against brain. To-day the competition is between man and the machine, the child and the man,—and even the child and the machine. Children are employed in the textile mills because their labor is cheaper than that of adults; boys are employed in the glass factories at night because their labor is cheaper to buy than machinery; children in the tenements paste the fancy boxes in which we get our candies and chocolate bonbons for the same reason. Such child labor has no other objective than the increase of employers’ profits; it has nothing to do with training the child for the work of life. On the contrary, it saps the constitution of the child, robs it of hope, and unfits it for life’s struggle. Such child labor is not educative or wholesome, but blighting to body, mind, and spirit.

There has been no extensive, systematic investigation in this country of the physical condition of working children. In 1893–1894 volunteer physicians examined and made measurements of some 200 children, taken from the factories and workshops of Chicago.^[131] These records show a startling proportion of undersized, rachitic, and consumptive children, but they are too limited to be of more than suggestive value. So far as they go, however, they bear out the results obtained in more extensive investigations in European countries. It is the consensus of opinion among those having the best opportunities for careful observation that physical deterioration quickly follows a child’s employment in a factory or workshop.

It is a sorry but indisputable fact that where children are employed, the most unhealthful work is generally given them.^[132] In the spinning and carding rooms of cotton and woollen mills, where large numbers of children are employed, clouds of lint-dust fill the lungs and menace the health. The children have often a distressing cough, caused by the irritation of the throat, and many are hoarse from the same cause. In bottle factories and other branches of glass manufacture, the atmosphere is constantly charged with microscopic particles of glass. In the wood-working industries, such as the manufacture of cheap furniture and wooden boxes, and packing cases, the air is laden with fine sawdust. Children employed in soap and soap-powder factories work, many of them, in clouds of alkaline dust which inflames the eyelids and nostrils. Boys employed in filling boxes of soap-powder work all day long with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. In the coal-mines the breaker boys breathe air that is heavy and thick with particles of coal, and their lungs become black in consequence. In the manufacture of felt hats, little girls are often employed at the machines which tear the fur from the skins of rabbits and other animals. Recently, I stood and watched a young girl working at such a machine; she wore a newspaper pinned over her head and a handkerchief tied over her mouth. She was white with dust from head to feet, and when she stooped to pick anything from the floor the dust would fall from her paper head-covering in little heaps. About seven feet from the mouth of the machine was a window through which poured thick volumes of dust as it was belched out from the machine. I placed a sheet of paper on the inner sill of the window and in twenty minutes it was covered with a layer of fine dust, half an inch deep. Yet that girl works midway between the window and the machine, in the very centre of the volume of dust, sixty hours a week. These are a few of the occupations in which the dangers arise from the forced inhalation of dust.

In some occupations, such as silk-winding, flax-spinning, and various processes in the manufacture of felt hats, it is necessary, or believed to be necessary, to keep the atmosphere quite moist. The result of working in a close, heated factory, where the air is artificially moistened, in summer time, can be better imagined than described. So long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed. The children who work in the dye rooms and print-shops of textile factories, and the color rooms of factories where the materials for making artificial flowers are manufactured, are subject to contact with poisonous dyes, and the results are often terrible. Very frequently they are dyed in parts of their bodies as literally as the fabrics are dyed. One little fellow, who was employed in a Pennsylvania carpet factory, opened his shirt one day and showed me his chest and stomach dyed a deep, rich crimson. I mentioned the incident to a local physician, and was told that such cases were common. “They are simply saturated with the dye,” he said. “The results are extremely severe, though very often slow and, for a long time, almost imperceptible. If they should cut or scratch themselves where they are so thoroughly dyed, it might mean death.” In Yonkers, N.Y., are some of the largest carpet factories in the United States, and many children are employed in them. Some of the smallest children are employed in the “drum room,” or print-shop, where the yarns are “printed” or dyed. Small boys, mostly Slavs and Hungarians, push the trucks containing boxes of liquid dye from place to place, and get it all over their clothing. They can be seen coming out of the mills at night literally soaked to the skin with dye of various colors. In the winter time, after a fall of snow, it is possible to track them to their homes, not only by their colored footprints, but by the drippings from their clothing. The snow becomes dotted with red, blue, and green, as though some one had sprinkled the colors for the sake of the variegated effect.

Children employed as varnishers in cheap furniture factories inhale poisonous fumes all day long and suffer from a variety of intestinal troubles in consequence. The gilding of picture frames produces a stiffening of the fingers. The children who are employed in the manufacture of wall papers and poisonous paints suffer from slow poisoning. The naphtha fumes in the manufacture of rubber goods produce paralysis and premature decay. Children employed in morocco leather works are often nauseated and fall easy victims to consumption. The little boys who make matches, and the little girls who pack them in boxes, suffer from phosphorous necrosis, or “phossy-jaw,” a gangrene of the lower jaw due to phosphor poisoning. Boys employed in type foundries and stereotyping establishments are employed on the most dangerous part of the work, namely, rubbing the type and the plates, and lead poisoning is excessively prevalent among them as a result. Little girls who work in the hosiery mills and carry heavy baskets from one floor to another, and their sisters who run machines by foot-power, suffer all through their after life as a result of their employment. Girls who work in factories where caramels and other kinds of candies are made are constantly passing from the refrigerating department, where the temperature is perhaps 20 degrees Fahr., to other departments with temperatures as high as 80 or 90 degrees. As a result, they suffer from bronchial troubles.

These are only a few of the many occupations of children that are inherently unhealthful and should be prohibited entirely for children and all young persons under eighteen years of age. In a few instances it might be sufficient to fix the minimum age for employment at sixteen, if certain improvements in the conditions of employment were insisted upon. Other dangers to health, such as the quick transition from the heat of the factory to the cold outside air, have already been noted. They are highly important causes of disease, though not inherent in the occupation itself in most cases. A careful study of the child-labor problem from this largely neglected point of view would be most valuable. When to the many dangers to health are added the dangers to life and limb from accidents, far more numerous among child workers than adults,^[133] the price we pay for the altogether unnecessary and uneconomic service of children would, in the Boer patriot’s phrase, “stagger humanity,” if it could be comprehended.

No combination of figures can give any idea of that price. Statistics cannot express the withering of child lips in the poisoned air of factories; the tired, strained look of child eyes that never dance to the glad music of souls tuned to Nature’s symphonies; the binding to wheels of industry the little bodies and souls that should be free, as the stars are free to shine and the flowers are free to drink the evening dews. Statistics may be perfected to the extent of giving the number of child workers with accuracy, the number maimed by dangerous machines, and the number who die year by year, but they can never give the spiritual loss, if I may use that word in its secular, scientific sense. Who shall tally the deaths of childhood’s hopes, ambitions, and dreams? How shall figures show the silent atrophy of potential genius, the brutalizing of potential love, the corruption of potential purity? In what arithmetical terms shall we state the loss of shame, and the development of that less than brute view of life, which enables us to watch with unconcern the toil of infants side by side with the idleness of men?

IX

The moral ills resulting from child labor are numerous and far-reaching. When children become wage-earners and are thrown into constant association with adult workers, they develop prematurely an adult consciousness and view of life. About the first consequence of their employment is that they cease almost at once to be children. They lose their respect for parental authority, in many cases, and become arrogant, wayward, and defiant. There is always a tendency in their homes to regard them as men and women as soon as they become wage-earners. Discipline is at once relaxed, at the very time when it is most necessary. When children who have just entered upon that most critical period of life, adolescence, are associated with adults in factories, are driven to their tasks with curses, and hear continually the unrestrained conversation, often coarse and foul, of the adults, the psychological effect cannot be other than bad. The mothers and fathers who read this book need only to know that children, little boys and girls, in mills and factories where men and women are employed, must frequently see women at work in whom the signs of a developing life within are evident, and hear them made the butt of the coarsest taunts and jests, to realize how great the moral peril to the adolescent boy or girl must be.

No writer dare write, and no publisher dare publish, a truthful description of the moral atmosphere of hundreds of places where children are employed,—a description truthful in the sense of telling the whole truth. No publisher would dare print the language current in an average factory. Our most “realistic” writers must exercise stern artistic reticence, and tone down or evade the truth. No normal boy or girl would think of repeating to father or mother the language heard in the mill—language which the children begin before long to use occasionally, to think oftener still. I have known a girl of thirteen or fourteen, just an average American girl, whose parents, intelligent and honest folk, had given her a moral training above rather than below the average, mock a pregnant woman worker and unblushingly attempt to caricature her condition by stuffing rags beneath her apron. I do not make any charge against the tens of thousands of women who have worked and are working in factories. Heaven forbid that I should seek to brand as impure these women of my own class! But I do say that for the plastic and impressionable mind of a child the moral atmosphere of the average factory is exceedingly bad, and I know that none will more readily agree with me than the men and women who work, or who have worked, in mills and factories.

I know a woman, and she is one of many, who has worked in textile factories for more than thirty years. She began to work as a child before she was ten years old, and is now past forty. She has never married, though many men have sought her in marriage. She is not an abnormal woman, indifferent to marriage, but just a normal, healthy, intelligent woman who has yearned hundreds of times for a man’s affection and companionship. To her more intimate friends she confesses that she chose to remain lonely and unwed, chose to stifle her longings for affection, rather than to marry and bring children into the world and live to see them enter the mills for employment before they became men and women. When I say that the moral atmosphere of factory life is contaminated and bad, and that the employment of children in mills and factories subjects them to grave moral perils, I am confident that I shall be supported, not, perhaps, by the owners of the mills and factories, but by the vast majority of intelligent men and women employed in them.

In a report upon the physical conditions of child workers in Pennsylvania, the Rev. Peter Roberts has discussed at some length the moral dangers of factory employment for children. He quotes an Allentown physician as saying, “No vice was unknown to many of the girls of fifteen working in the factories of the city;” and another physician in the same city said, “There are more unhappy homes, ruined lives, blasted hopes, and diseased bodies in Allentown than any other city of its size, because of the factories there.” Another physician, in Lancaster, is quoted as saying that he had “treated boys of ten years old and upwards for venereal affections which they had contracted.”^[134] In upwards of a score of factory towns I have had very similar testimony given to me by physicians and others. The proprietor of a large drug store in a New England factory town told me that he had never known a place where the demand for cheap remedies for venereal diseases was so great, and that many of those who bought them were boys under fifteen.

Nor is it only in factories that these grosser forms of immorality flourish. They are even more prevalent among the children of the street trades, newsboys, bootblacks, messengers, and the like. The proportion of newsboys who suffer from venereal diseases is alarmingly great. The Superintendent of the John Worthy School of Chicago, Mr. Sloan, asserts that “One-third of all the newsboys who come to the John Worthy School have venereal disease, and that 10 per cent of the remaining newsboys at present in the Bridewell are, according to the physicians’ diagnosis, suffering from similar diseases.”^[135] The newsboys who come to the school are, according to Mr. Sloan, on an average one-third below the ordinary standard of physical development, a condition which will be readily understood by those who know the ways of the newsboys of our great cities—their irregular habits, scant feeding, sexual excesses, secret vices, sleeping in hallways, basements, stables, and quiet corners. With such a low physical standard the ravages of venereal diseases are tremendously increased.

The messenger boys and the American District Telegraph boys are frequently found in the worst resorts of the “red-light” districts of our cities. In New York there are hundreds of such boys, ranging in age from twelve to fifteen, who know many of the prostitutes of the Tenderloin by name. Sad to relate, boys like to be employed in the “red-light” districts. They like it, not because they are bad or depraved, but for the very natural reason that they make more money there, receiving larger and more numerous tips. They are called upon for many services by the habitués of these haunts of the vicious and the profligate. They are sent out to place bets; to take notes to and from houses of ill-fame; or to buy liquor, cigarettes, candy, and even gloves, shoes, corsets, and other articles of wearing apparel for the “ladies.” Not only are tips abundant, but there are many opportunities for graft of which the boys avail themselves. A lad is sent, for instance, for a bottle of whiskey. He is told to get a certain brand at a neighboring hotel, but he knows where he can get the same brand for 50 per cent of the hotel price, and, naturally, he goes there for it and pockets the difference in price. That is one form of messengers’ graft. Another is overcharging for his services and pocketing the surplus, or keeping the change from a “ten-spot” or a “fiver,” when, as often happens, the “sports” are either too reckless to bother about such trifles or too drunk to remember. From sources such as these the messenger boy in a district like the Tenderloin will often make several dollars a day.^[136]

A whole series of temptations confronts the messenger boy. He smokes, drinks, gambles, and, very often, patronizes the lowest class of cheap brothels. In answering calls from houses of ill-repute messengers cannot avoid being witnesses of scenes of licentiousness more or less frequently. By presents of money, fruit, candy, cigarettes, and even liquor, the women make friends of the boys, who quickly learn all the foul slang of the brothels.^[137] The conversation of a group of messengers in such a district will often reveal the most astounding intimacy with the grossest things of the underworld. That in their adolescence, the transition from boyhood to manhood, fraught as it is with its own inherent perils, they should be thrown into such an environment and exposed to such temptations is an evil which cannot possibly be overemphasized. The penal code of New York declares the sending of minors to carry messages to or from a house of ill-fame to be a misdemeanor, but the law is a dead letter. It cannot possibly be enforced, and its repeal would probably be a good thing. While it may be urged that the mere existence of such a law has a certain moral value as a condemnation of such a dangerous employment for boys, it is exceedingly doubtful if that good is sufficient to counterbalance the harm which comes from the non-enforcement of the law.

I have dwelt mainly upon the grosser vices associated with street employment, as with employment in factories and mines, because it is a phase of the subject about which too little is known. I need scarcely say, however, that these vices are not the only ones to which serious attention should be given. Crime naturally results from such conditions. Of 600 boys committed to the New York Juvenile Asylum by the courts, 125 were newsboys who had been committed for various offences ranging from ungovernableness and disorderly conduct to grand larceny.^[138] Mr. Nibecker, Superintendent of the House of Refuge at Glen Mills, near Philadelphia, was asked, “Have you, in disproportionate numbers, boys who formerly were engaged in some one particular occupation?” He replied promptly, “Yes, district messengers.”^[139] It seems to be the almost unanimous opinion of probation officers and other competent authorities in our large cities that messenger boys and newsboys furnish an exceedingly large proportion of cases of juvenile delinquency. I wrote to six probation officers in as many large cities asking them to give me their opinions as to the classes of occupation which seem to have the largest number of juvenile delinquents. Their replies are summarized in the following schedule:—

In six smaller cities, where the number of factory workers is much larger in proportion than in the great cities, and the number of newsboys and messengers is much smaller, the results were somewhat different. The following schedule is interesting as a summary of the replies received from these towns:—

These facts, and other facts of a like nature, are only indicative of the ill effects of child labor upon the morals of the children. In some cases the moral peril lies in the nature of the work itself, while in others it lies, not in the work, but in the conditions by which it is surrounded. In the Chicago Stock Yards, for example, judging by what I saw there, I should say that in most, if not all, of the departments the work itself is degrading and brutalizing, and that no person under eighteen years of age ought to be permitted to work in them. In large laundries little girls are very commonly employed as “sorters.” Their work is to sort out the soiled clothes as they come in and to classify them. While such work must be disagreeable and unwholesome for a young girl, there is nothing necessarily demoralizing about it. But when such little girls are compelled to work with men and women of the coarsest and most illiterate type, as they frequently are, and to listen to constant conversation charged with foul suggestions, it becomes a soul-destroying occupation. At its best, even when all possible efforts are made to keep the place of employment pure and above reproach—and I know that there are many such places—still the whole tendency of child labor is in the direction of a lower moral standard. The feeling of independence caused by the ability to earn wages, the relaxation of parental authority, with the result that the children roam the streets at night or frequent places of amusement of questionable character; the ruthless destruction of the bloom of youthful innocence and the forced consciousness of life properly belonging to adult years—these are inevitably associated with child labor.

X

These are some of the ills which child labor inflicts upon the children themselves, ills which do not end with their childhood days but curse and blight all their after years. The child who is forced to be a man too soon, forced too early to enter the industrial strife of the world, ceases to be a man too soon, ceases to be fit for the industrial strife. When the strength is sapped in childhood there is an absence of strength in manhood and womanhood; Ruskin’s words are profoundly true, that “to be a man too soon is to be a small man.” We are to-day using up the vitality of children; soon they will be men and women, without the vitality and strength necessary to maintain themselves and their dependants. When we exploit the immature strength of little children, we prepare recruits for the miserable army of the unfit and unemployable, whose lot is a shameful and debasing poverty.

This wrong to helpless childhood carries with it, therefore, a certain and dreadful retribution. It is not possible to injure a child without injuring society. Whatever burden society lays, or permits to be laid, upon the shoulders of its children, it must ultimately bear upon its own. Society’s interest in the child may be well expressed in a slight paraphrase of the words of Jesus, “Whatsoever is done to one of the least of these little ones is done unto me.” It is in that spirit that the advocates of child-labor legislation would have the nation forbid the exploitation, literally the exhaustion, of children by self-interested employers. For the abuse of childhood by individual antisocial interests, society as a whole must pay the penalty. If we neglect the children of to-day, and sap their strength so that they become weaklings, we must bear the burden of their failures when they fail and fall:—