In the coal mines of the United States boys are employed at two kinds of labor: to attend the doors on the traveling roads, and to drive the mules. This is known as inside work. Their outside work consists in picking slate at the breaker, and in driving the mules that draw mine cars on the surface. No one of these different kinds of employment is such as to overtax the physical strength of boys of a proper age, but they are all confining, some are dangerous, and some are laborious. Yet the system of child labor in the coal mines of America has never been comparable to that which was formerly in vogue in Great Britain. The British “Coal Mines Regulation Act” of 1872 remedied the then existing evils to a considerable extent; but the hardships still to be endured by children in the British mines are greater than those which their American brothers must suffer. The act of 1872, just referred to, provides that boys under ten years of age shall not be employed under ground, and that boys between ten and twelve years of age shall be allowed to work only in thin mines. It is the duty of these children to push the cars, or trams as they are called, from the working faces to the main road and back. Boys who are thus employed are called “hurriers” or “putters.” They are often obliged to crawl on their hands and knees, pushing the car ahead of them, because the roof of the excavation is so low. That is why boys who are so young are allowed to work here; because, being small, they can the more readily crawl through the passages cut in these thin seams, which often do not have a vertical measurement of more than from twenty to twenty-eight inches. The act of 1872 forbids the employment of females in the British mines; but formerly not only boys but girls and women also worked underground. There was then no restriction as to age, and girls were sent into the mines to labor at an earlier age than were boys, because they were credited with being smarter and more obedient. It was common to find children of both sexes not more than six years old working underground; and girls of five years were employed at the same tasks as boys of six or eight. They took the coal from the working faces in the thin mines to the foot of the pit. Sometimes they carried it, sometimes they drew it in little carts. The older children and young women had a sort of sledge, called a “corve,” on which they dragged the coal, but sometimes they preferred to carry it in baskets on their backs. They were called “pannier women.” The girls tucked their hair up under their caps, dressed like their brothers, and in the darkness of the mine could scarcely be distinguished from boys. And the girls and boys not only dressed alike, but worked alike, lived alike, and were treated alike at their tasks, and that treatment was rough and harsh at the very best. As the girls grew they were given harder work to do. On one occasion Mr. William Hunter, the mine foreman at Ormiston Colliery said that in the mines women always did the lifting or heavy part of the work, and that neither they nor the children were treated like human beings. “Females,” he said, “submit to work in places in which no man nor lad could be got to labor. They work on bad roads, up to their knees in water, and bent nearly double. The consequence of this is that they are attacked with disease, drag out a miserable existence, or are brought prematurely to the grave.” Says Robert Bold, the eminent miner: “In surveying the workings of an extensive colliery underground a married woman came forward, groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up she said in a plaintive, melancholy voice: ‘Oh, sir! this is sore, sore, sore work. I would to God that the first woman who tried to bear coals had broken her back and none ever tried it again.’”

One cannot read of such things as these, of a slavery that condemned even the babes to a life of wretched toil in the blackness of the mines, and then wonder that the great heart of Mrs. Browning should have been wrenched by the contemplation of such sorrow until she gave voice to her feeling in that most pathetic and wonderful of all her poems, “The Cry of the Children.”

In the United States neither girls nor women have ever been employed in or about the mines. The legislative prohibition of such employment, enacted in Pennsylvania in 1885, was therefore unnecessary but not inappropriate.

The general mine law of Pennsylvania of 1870, which was the first to limit the employment of boys in the mines according to their age, fixed twelve years as the age under which a boy might not work underground; but maintained silence as to the age at which he might work at a colliery outside. This provision was amended and enlarged by the act of 1885, which prohibited the employment of boys under fourteen years of age inside the mines, and of boys under twelve years of age in or about the outside structures or workings of a colliery.

The duties of a driver boy are more laborious than those of a door-tender, but less monotonous and tiresome than those of a slate picker or breaker-boy. When the mules are kept in the mines night and day, as they frequently are in deep workings, the driver must go down the shaft before seven o’clock, get his mule from the mine stable, bring him to the foot of the shaft, and hitch him to a trip of empty cars. He usually takes in to the working faces four empty cars and brings out four loaded ones. When he is ready to start in with his trip, he climbs into the forward car, cracks his whip about the beast’s head, and goes off shouting. His whip is a long, braided leather lash, attached to a short stout stick for a handle. He may have a journey of a mile or more before reaching the foot of the first chamber he is to supply; but when he comes to it he unfastens the first car from the others and drives the mule up the chamber with it, leaving it at a convenient distance from the face. He continues this process at each of the chambers in succession, until his supply of empty cars is exhausted. At the foot of the last chamber which he visits he finds a loaded car to which he attaches his mule, and picking up other loaded cars on his way back, he makes up his return trip, and is soon on the long, unbroken journey to the shaft. There are sidings at intervals along the heading, where trips going in the opposite direction are met and passed, and where there is opportunity to stop for a moment and talk with or chaff some other driver boy. If there be a plane on the main road, either ascending or descending from the first level, two sets of driver boys and mules are necessary, one set to draw cars between the breasts and the plane, and the other set to draw them between the plane and the shaft. Of course, in steep pitching seams, all cars are left at the foot of the chamber and are loaded there. There are two dangers to which driver boys are chiefly subjected; one is that of being crushed between cars, or between cars and pillars or props, and the other is that of being kicked or bitten by vicious mules. The boy must not only learn to drive, but he must learn to govern his beast and keep out of harm’s way. He is generally sufficiently skillful and agile to do this, but it is not unusual to read of severe injuries to boys, given by kicking, bucking, or biting mules.

If the mine in which the boy works is entered by drift or tunnel, his duties lie partly outside of it, since he must bring every trip of cars not only to the mouth of the opening but to the breaker or other dumping place, which may be located at a considerable distance from the entrance to the mine. So that for a greater or less number of times each day he has from ten minutes to half an hour in the open air. In the summer time, when the weather is pleasant, this occasional glimpse of out-of-doors is very gratifying to him. He likes to be in the sunlight, to look out over the woods and fields, to feel the fresh wind blowing in his face, and to breathe an unpolluted atmosphere. But in the winter time, when it is cold, when the storms are raging, when the snow and sleet are whirled savagely into his face, then the outside portion of his trip is not pleasant. In the mine he finds a uniform temperature of about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. To go from this, within ten minutes, without additional clothing, into an atmosphere in which the mercury stands at zero, and where the wind is blowing a hurricane, is necessarily to suffer. It cannot be otherwise. So there is no lagging outside on winter days; the driver boy delivers his loads, gets his empty cars, and hastens back to the friendly shelter of the mine. At such openings as these the mine stable is outside, and the boy must go there in the morning to get his mule, and must leave him there when he quits work at night. Sometimes, when the mining is done by shaft or slope, there is a separate entrance for men and mules, a narrow tunnel or slope, not too steep, and in this case, though his duties lie entirely in the mine, the driver boy must take the mule in from the outside stable in the morning and bring him back at night.

One afternoon I chanced to be in a certain mine in the Wyoming district, in company with the fire boss. We were standing in a passage that led to one of these mule ways. In the distance we heard a clattering of hoofs, growing louder as it came nearer, and, as we stepped aside, a mule went dashing by with a boy lying close on his back, the flame from the little lamp in the boy’s cap just a tiny backward streak of blue that gave no light. They had appeared from the intense darkness and had disappeared into it again almost while one could draw a breath. I looked at the fire boss inquiringly.

“Oh! that’s all right,” he said, “they’ve got through work and they’re going out, and the mule is in just as much of a hurry as the boy is.”

“But the danger,” I suggested, “of racing at such speed through narrow, winding passages, in almost total darkness!”

“Oh!” he replied, “that beast knows the way out just as well as I do, and he can find it as easy as if he could see every inch of it, and I don’t know but what he can. Anyway the boy ain’t afraid if the mule ain’t.”

In deep mines, as has already been said, it is customary to build stables not far from the foot of the shaft, and to keep the mules there except when for any reason there is a long suspension of work. At many mines, however, the greater convenience of having the stables on the surface induces the operators to have the mules hoisted from the shaft every night and taken down every morning. They step on the carriage very demurely, and ascend or descend without making trouble. They are especially glad to go up to their stables at night. Where mules are fed in the mine, and especially in those mines that have stables in them, rats are usually found. How they get down a shaft is a mystery. The common explanation is that they go with the hay. But they take up their quarters in the mine, live, thrive, increase rapidly, and grow to an enormous size. They are much like the wharf rats that infest the wharves of great cities, both in size and ugliness. They are very bold and aggressive, and when attacked will turn on their enemy, whether man or beast, and fight to the death. There is a superstition among miners to the effect that when the rats leave a mine some great disaster is about to take place in it; probably an extensive fall. Rats are hardly to be credited, however, with an instinct that would lead them to forecast such an event with more certainty than human experience and skill can do.

But it is not improbable that the driver boy and his mule will be superseded, at no distant day, by electricity. In one instance at least this new motive power has already been put into use. This is at the Lykens Valley Colliery of the Lykens Valley Coal Company, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania.

The duty of an outside driver boy is to take the loaded cars from the head of the shaft or slope to the breaker, and to bring the empty ones back; his work being all done in the open air. Of late this service, especially where the distance is considerable, is performed by a small locomotive, which draws trains of as many cars as can well be held together. The wages paid to inside driver boys by the Pennsylvania Coal Company in 1888 were from one dollar to one dollar and ten cents a day, and to outside driver boys eighty-eight cents a day.

The door boys are usually younger and smaller than the driver boys, and though their duty is not so laborious as that of the latter class, it is far more monotonous and tiresome. The door boy must be at his post when the first trip goes in in the morning, and must remain there till the last one comes out at night. He is alone all day, save when other boys and men pass back and forth through his door, and he has but little opportunity for companionship. He fashions for himself a rude bench to sit on; sometimes he has a rope or other contrivance attached to his door by which he can open it without rising; but usually he is glad to move about a little to break the monotony of his task. There is little he can do to entertain himself, except perhaps to whittle. He seldom tries to read; indeed, the light given forth by a miner’s lamp is too feeble to read by. In rare cases the door boy extinguishes his light, on the score of economy, and sits in darkness, performing his duties by the light of the lamps of those who pass. But there are few who can endure this. It is hard enough to bear the oppressive silence that settles down on the neighborhood when no cars are passing; if darkness be added to this the strain becomes too great, the effect too depressing, a child cannot bear it. The wages of the door boy are about sixty-five cents per day.

Although the duties of the breaker boy or slate picker are more laborious and more monotonous than those of either driver boy or door tender, he does not receive so high a rate of wages as either of them. His daily compensation is only from fifty to sixty-five cents, and he works ten hours a day. At seven o’clock in the morning he must have climbed the dark and dusty stairway to the screen room, and taken his place on the little bench across the long shute. The whistle screams, the ponderous machinery is set in motion, the iron-teethed rollers begin to revolve heavily, crunching the big lumps of coal as they turn, the deafening noise breaks forth, and then the black, shallow streams of broken coal start on their journey down the iron-sheathed shutes, to be screened and cleaned, and picked and loaded.

At first glance it would not seem to be a difficult task to pick slate, but there are several things to be taken into consideration before a judgment can properly be made up in the matter. To begin with, the work is confining and monotonous. The boy must sit on his bench all day, bending over constantly to look down at the coal that is passing beneath him. His tender hands must become toughened by long and harsh contact with sharp pieces of slate and coal, and after many cuts and bruises have left marks and scars on them for a lifetime. He must breathe an atmosphere thick with the dust of coal, so thick that one can barely see across the screen room when the boys are sitting at their tasks. It is no wonder that a person long subjected to the irritating presence of this dust in his bronchial tubes and on his lungs is liable to suffer from the disease known as “miner’s consumption.” In the hot days of summer the screen-room is a stifling place. The sun pours its rays upon the broad, sloping roof of the breaker, just overhead; the dust-laden atmosphere is never cleared or freshened by so much as a breath of pure sweet air, and the very thought of green fields and blossoming flowers and the swaying branches of trees renders the task here to be performed more burdensome. Yet even this is not so bad as it is to work here in the cold days of winter. It is almost impossible to heat satisfactorily by any ordinary method so rambling a structure as a breaker necessarily is, and it is quite impossible to divide the portion devoted to screening and picking into closed rooms. The screen-rooms are, therefore, always cold. Stoves are often set up in them, but they radiate heat through only a limited space, and cannot be said to make the room warm. Notwithstanding the presence of stoves, the boys on the benches shiver at their tasks, and pick slate with numb fingers, and suffer from the extreme cold through many a winter day. But science and the progress of ideas are coming to their aid. In some breakers, recently erected, steam-heating pipes have been introduced into the screen-rooms with great success; the warmth and comfort given by them to the little workers is beyond measurement. Fans have been put into the breakers, also, to collect and carry away the dust and keep the air of the picking-room clean and fresh, and electric lamps have been swung from the beams to be lighted in the early mornings and late afternoons, that the young toilers may see to do their work. Indeed, such improvements as these pass beyond the domain of science and progress into that of humanitarianism.

When night comes no laborer is more rejoiced at leaving his task than is the breaker boy. One can see his eyes shine and his white teeth gleam as he starts out into the open air, while all else, hands, face, clothing, are thickly covered with coal dust, are black and unrecognizable. But he is happy because his day’s work is done and he is free, for a few hours at least, from the tyranny of the “cracker boss.” For, in the estimation of the picker boys, the cracker boss is indeed the most tyrannical of masters. How else could they regard a man whose sole duty it is to be constantly in their midst, to keep them at their tasks, to urge them to greater zeal and care, to repress all boyish freaks, to rule over them almost literally with a rod of iron? But, alas! the best commentary on the severity of his government is that it is necessary.

As has already been said, the day is evidently not far distant when the work which the breaker boy now does will be performed almost wholly by machinery. And this will be not alone because the machine does its work better, more surely, more economically, than the breaker boy has done his, but it will be also because the requisite number of boys for breaker work will not be obtainable. Even now it is more than difficult to keep the ranks of the slate pickers full. Parents in the coal regions of to-day have too much regard for the health, the comfort, the future welfare of their children, to send them generally to such grinding tasks as these. This is one of the signs of that advancing civilization which has already lifted girls and women from this, for them, exhausting and degrading labor at the collieries; which is lessening, one by one, the hardships of the boys who still toil there; which, it is fondly hoped, will in the course of time give to all children the quiet of the school-room, the freedom of the play-ground, and the task that love sets, in place of that irksome toil that stunts the body and dwarfs the soul. It is now mainly from the homes of the very poor that the child-workers at the collieries are recruited, and the scant wages that they earn may serve to keep bread in the mouths of the younger children of their households and clothing on their own backs.

Accidents to boys employed at the mines are of frequent occurrence. Scarcely a day passes but the tender flesh of some poor little fellow is cut or bruised, or his bones, twisted and broken. It is only the more serious of these accidents that reach the notice of the mine inspector and are returned in his annual report. Yet, to the humanitarian and the lover of children, these annual returns tell a sad story. The mine inspector’s reports for 1887 show that in the anthracite region alone during that year eighteen boys fifteen years of age and under were killed while fulfilling the duties of their employment in and about the coal mines, and that seventy-three others were seriously injured, many of them doubtless maimed for life. These figures tell their own story of sorrow and of suffering.

Yet with all their hardships it cannot be said that the boys who work in the collieries are wholly unhappy. It is difficult, indeed, to so limit, confine, and gird down a boy that he will not snatch some enjoyment from his life; and these boys seek to get much.

One who has been long accustomed to them can generally tell the nature of their several occupations by the way in which they try to amuse themselves. The driver boys are inclined to be rude and boisterous in their fun, free and impertinent in their manner, and chafe greatly under restraint. The slate pickers, confined all day at their tasks, with no opportunity for sport of any kind, are inclined to bubble over when night and freedom come, but, as a rule, they are too tired to display more than a passing effort at jocularity. Door boys are quiet and contemplative. Sitting so long alone in the darkness they become thoughtful, sober, sometimes melancholy. They go silently to their homes when they leave the mine; they do not stop to play tricks or to joke with their fellows; they do not run, nor sing, nor whistle. Darkness and silence are always depressing, and so much of it in these young lives cannot help but sadden without sweetening them. We shall never see, in America, those horrors of child slavery that drew so passionate a protest from the great-hearted Mrs. Browning, but certainly, looking at the progress already made, it is not too much to hope for that the day will come when no child’s hand shall ever again be soiled by the labor of the mine.

It will be a fitting close to this chapter, and will be an act of justice to the memory of a brave and heroic boy, to relate the story of Martin Crahan’s sacrifice at the time of the disaster at the West Pittston shaft. Martin was a driver boy, of humble parentage, poor and unlearned. He was in the mine when the fire in the breaker broke out, and he ran, with others, to the foot of the shaft. But just as he was about to step on the carriage that would have taken him in safety to the surface he bethought him of the men on the other side of the shaft, who might not have heard of the fire, and his brave heart prompted him to go to them with the alarm. He asked another boy to go with him, but that boy refused. He did not stop to parley; he started at once alone. But while he ran through the dark passage on his errand of mercy, the carriage went speeding, for the last time, up the burning shaft. He gave the alarm and returned, in breathless haste, with those whom he had sought; but it was too late, the cage had already fallen. When the party was driven away from the foot of the shaft by the smoke and the gas, he, in some unexplained way, became separated from the rest, and wandered off alone. The next day a rescuing party found him in the mine-stable, dead. He lay there beside the body of his mule. Deprived of the presence of human beings in the hours of that dreadful night, he had sought the company of the beast that had long been his companion in daily labor—and they died together.

But he had thought of those who were dear to him, for on a rough board near by he had written with chalk the name of his father and of his mother, and of a little cousin who had been named for him. He was only twelve years old when he died, but the title of hero was never more fairly earned than it was by him.