Chapter VI: Child Labour

The half-time system is dying. The age of the full-timer in the mill or factory is being steadily raised. But as long as poverty exists children must feel the pinch of it. They must help also to bear the burdens of their parents, and share their anxieties and cares. One would be very wrong, however, in supposing that the most anxious and harassed parents and children are to be found at the bottom of the social ladder. At the bottom of the social ladder will be found little care and much movement--a _tourbillon_ of change--marriages, accidents, tragedies, crimes, all succeeding each other pell-mell, and obliterating one another. The parents and the children of the slums are occupied, not with thoughts of to-morrow, but with thoughts of to-day. Here, for example, is a large Board School in a slum district of a big northern city. It is difficult for the head teacher to keep the register, for large numbers of children are always flowing through the school like a shoal of mackerel on a tide. Families arrive, and encamp in the fair ground close by, or find shelter in the poor lodging houses of the neighbourhood. The children attend school for a short time, pick up a smattering of the three R’s., and then disappear. There are of course regular residents, and the children of such people are much better attenders. But they have this in common with their migratory neighbours, that their lives are varied by exciting and gruesome events, which they do not take to heart too seriously. A certain unfortunate mother of ten loses several of her children in succession. Then suddenly her husband, who is a drunkard, falls down some steps and is killed. There is a tragic gathering of friends at the house on the eve of the funeral. A few months later the widow marries again. But the second husband turns out to be a scamp. She leaves him and takes refuge with a married daughter. The children change homes, take the ups and downs of their rocky life, and attend school pretty regularly. Some children are deserted, and go into neighbours’ homes. The strong ties of kinship are dispensed with; and other ties, equally strong, for the hour at least, take their place.

Apart from the family drama, the children have their own struggles and adventures. They have to help to earn the living. In some families a child is the breadwinner. In many, children are important co-helpers with the parents. How does a child earn money? In provincial towns, also in London, the newspaper offices are responsible for a great deal of out-of-door child labour. A crowd of boys rush every afternoon to the “offices.” Some of these children are already employers of labour. They engage a smaller or less lucky comrade to deliver some of the papers, and pay him twopence or threepence, according to his success. They--the small employers--may earn 6s. per week and even more at times. Besides the newsboys there are the errand boys, and those who help shopkeepers. These form a large contingent of the children’s army of labour. And so, alas! do the vagrant sellers of chips, flowers, etc., who have to cultivate the beggar’s as well as the vendor’s art. At a Conference in April 1900 between the School Board and Board of Guardians of Bradford, a return was presented showing that 91 children--84 of whom were of school age--were found begging and hawking in the streets in the course of three evenings of December 1899.

The domestic toilers in such a district as that which we are now considering would be mainly nurses. Little cooking and less washing is done in some of the homes. There are no regular meals, no regular duties, and the elder children are useful therefore mainly in taking charge of the younger ones, or earning pence in the street. Taking their roving habits into account, it is strange to learn that such children suffer from lack of proper exercise. Yet such is the case. About a year ago Dr Kerr, the medical adviser of the Bradford School Board, made an examination of the children attending a school situated in an “insanitary area.” He found that nearly all the children were ill-nourished. And this ill-nutrition was not simply the result of insufficient food. “Lack of exercise,” he writes, “has a very large share in it. And the exercise required is not careful gymnastics, but coarse work, such as running round the playground.”

There are many kinds of physical exercise, just as there are many kinds of food, and one order of exercise does not take the place of another. Moreover, the same kinds of movements, executed under different conditions, have quite different effects. This is the important fact which is lost sight of by those who declare that the child can rest from the labours of the school by engaging in the labours of the mill. It is ignored also, or forgotten, by those rural educationists who believe that six hours of weeding or potato-picking mean the same thing for a child as six hours of free play. But the fact remains that work does not take the place of play, not even when that work is very easy, and involves walking or running. Here in this school of the slum, “careful gymnastics” are not required. And we may safely add that running about the streets, and the carrying of milk-cans and babies, are not required. For the children have had a good deal of this kind of physical exercise, and are suffering, nevertheless, from defective circulation and want of muscular tone. Only movements that imply the removal of tension from the nervous system are required. There is no real substitute for such free, natural movements in any factory, schoolroom, nor even we may add in any gymnasium in the world.

Let us turn from those whom we may call the “casuals” of the child-labour world, to the State-recognised little toilers who work in factories or mills. These form still a large contingent of the child-labour world, numbering as they do over a hundred thousand children, one-third of whom work in Lancashire cotton-mills. A goodly proportion, too, work in Yorkshire, the seat of the woollen and worsted trades. The rate of decline of the half-time system among factory and non-factory child-workers may be seen from the following figures, compiled in Bradford.

Number of half-time cases in Bradford in each year for the past twelve years:--

+-------+----------+-----------------+------------------+--------------+
| | | Non-Factory. | | |
| Year. | Factory. | Domestic Errand | Total granted in | Number on |
| | | Boys, etc. | each year. | School Roll. |
+-------+----------+-----------------+------------------+--------------+
| 1889 | 3.194 | 679 | 3.873 | 7.046 |
| 1890 | 2.567 | 575 | 3.142 | 6.490 |
| 1891 | 2.129 | 708 | 2.837 | 6.151 |
| 1892 | 1.838 | 728 | 2.566 | 5.624 |
| 1893 | 1.653 | 540 | 2.193 | 5.097 |
| 1894 | 1.434 | 655 | 2.089 | 4.178 |
| 1895 | 1.887 | 580 | 2.467 | 4.309 |
| 1896 | 1.509 | 306 | 1.815 | 3.276 |
| 1897 | 1.451 | 250 | 1.701 | 2.564 |
| 1898 | 1.329 | 314 | 1.643 | 2.211 |
| 1899 | 1.187 | 193 | 1.380 | 1.869 |
| 1900 | 1.444 | 129 | 1.573 | 2.198 |
+-------+----------+-----------------+------------------+--------------+

The half-time system is dying fast in some towns, more slowly in others--but it is passing away even in Lancashire. No one appears to be more indifferent than the masters. It is not even fair to say that the masters are indifferent, for many of them have tried to hasten the end. And yet forty or fifty years ago the masters, as a class (there were, of course, honourable exceptions) opposed the raising of the age. Even ten years ago some masters showed concern when it was proposed to raise the age of half-timers to eleven. “Younger children,” they said, “have special aptitudes which the elder ones have lost.” The wails of regret came usually from masters who could remember long bye-gone days. “Ah!” they cried, letting their thoughts drift back into the dim past, “when the children came to us very young, say at five or six years old, a great deal was possible that has since become quite impossible! It is of no use to speak of that now.” No, it is of no use to speak of it, since the age had been raised, and raised again. And with every rise the commercial value of the child in the labour world has diminished. And now you may hear a manager say, “The child who comes at twelve years old is more dexterous than the one who comes at thirteen,” but the masters are evidently of opinion that so far as they are concerned the matter is no longer worthy of discussion. That the children come a year earlier or later makes little difference when the minimum age is raised to twelve.

The masters’ claim that the younger children had special aptitude, undoubtedly rests not upon fiction but upon fact. Every physiologist knows that the various sensory centres of the brain are plastic in early childhood, and that this period of plasticity is very short. It begins to wane already in the seventh year. Previous to this age, however, every human being is in a peculiarly receptive and responsive state. So that, during the first six or seven years “a great many things,” as the silk manufacturers said, “are possible.” For example, the sense of touch may be developed within very narrow limits, and complex and specialised movements may be learned so well that they become automatic. This can be done. It can be done only at great cost. (Probably the employers did not know the actual cost.) It implies the atrophy of many cells, the impoverishment of the whole life. It is a kind of psychic mutilation. But it can be done, and it has to be done quickly, since the spring tide of opportunity soon wanes. Alas! for the old adage, “It is never too late to mend.” The mending, and making, and altering time is over for a great many people at the age of eight, and of this employers were well aware, thanks to their opportunities for observation and experiment. So as the age of the half-timer was raised the masters’ interest in him declined, and the latter-day champion of the half-time system stepped forward in the person of _the half-timer’s own father_,--his father, not his widowed mother. For the “poor widow,” who looms so large in the consciousness of controversialists on the half-time question, is seen and known wonderfully little in the school attendance rooms, where applications for half-time are considered. The applicants belong very largely to the better class of working people. Mechanics, engineers, railwaymen, overlookers, and, now and again, a mill operative. Of course these various trades represent a great variety of wages. Some applicants earn but £1 per week, or even less, and out of this support a large family. But many earn from 30s. to £2 or £3 per week. Indeed, men with £4 and upwards per week coming in have been known to apply, though these are exceptional cases. It is certain that the average working-man champion of child-labour to-day is not a thriftless, irresponsible person. He is, very often, a man with money in the bank, with ambitions and views of his own, also with a will of his own, and a strong Trades organisation behind him, through which he can express that will. Neither is he a person lacking in parental susceptibility and ambition. It is almost impossible to overrate the influence which custom has on sentient beings. The caterpillars of the Bombyx Hesperus feed in a state of nature on the leaves of the _café diable_. Yet Darwin found that certain caterpillars of the Bombyx family, having been reared on another variety, refused to touch the leaves of _café diable_. They preferred to die of hunger. Thus caterpillars can become, in a sense, unnatural. Kindhearted people, too, may follow a course of conduct with their own offspring which appears monstrous to the stranger. In certain districts where child-labour is a tradition and custom, the very idea of associating it with inhumanity does not occur to the people. “Why, they mun be all clean off their heads,” cried a Yorkshireman, who had been hearing of poor parents who sent their sons to school till they were fifteen or sixteen years old. He had gone to “t’ miln” at seven, and it seemed to him that all “workin’ foaks” children should do the same.

It is not then to the parent you must go in order to learn what the effect of half-time is on the young. Nor need you turn with very confident hopes to the statistician. It is, indeed, a little discouraging to reflect how little the statistician can help us in establishing the most obvious ill effects of child-labour. The effect of half-time exemption a little while ago was to filter off a number of mentally sharp children who passed their standards rapidly and were ready to go to work at eleven. These bright children were a continual stumbling-block to the statistician. For example, it was proposed to test the vision of the half-timers and other children with a view to finding out the effect of the mill life on this important sense. Now the stupidest boys and girls are those who have most defective visual acuity. They are also the deafest.[40] And the bright children who went to the mill at eleven, are, of course, the children gifted with the keenest senses. By the time these bright young half-timers had got to full time, the duller ones came on as half-timers, and by their transference appeared to increase the percentage of defective vision with age in half-timers and diminish it among the non-half-timers. Thus defective vision apparently increased with the age of half-timers, only because those kept back by defective brain or eyes alone were half-timers at the age of twelve. This is but one example of the great difficulty of collecting reliable evidence to establish even the most reasonable assumption.

But it is hardly an “assumption” that children suffer in England through half-time labour, and unregulated toil out of school hours. You cannot put tired eyes, pallid cheeks, and languid little limbs into statistics, and yet when you see them they are more convincing than figures. And in many schools you can receive this kind of evidence. The younger children who work out of school hours have undoubtedly the worst time of it. They come to school looking dull and heavy-eyed. Some are irritable and restless, others so languid that they appear almost oblivious of everything around them. “It seems as if they haven’t the force to work through the school day,” said a young master in a school of very poor children. “They may be bright enough children, but they haven’t the strength to show it.”

The factory half-timers are doubtless more fortunate than the younger casuals; for the former have arrived at an age when many of the critical turnings of child life have been passed. And yet the child of twelve no sooner enters a mill than the teacher begins to see a deplorable change in him. He loses interest in his school work, his manners become rougher. Manners are forms of mental expression, so the teacher may presage from this fact alone a certain decline of brain power. But there are many other indications of decline. The other day a teacher showed me the copy-books of children who had been at the mill _for one week_, and allowed me to compare these with the work done by the same children while they were whole-day scholars. As full-day scholars they all did creditable work. Their sums were correct, their writing good, and books were kept perfectly clean. Yet in the course of one week the progress of months seemed to be cancelled: for the half-timers’ sums were all marked with a “W.” The writing was careless, the pages soiled and blotted. The children had changed and their work had changed. Their achievements had slipped from their grasp as a waggon slips back when driver and horse are arrested suddenly on a steep hill.

Indeed, though the factory child suffers less in some ways than the “casual,” he appears to be under certain great disadvantages from which the latter is exempt. Ask any master of an elementary school and he will tell you that the characteristic of the factory child is _dulness_. The casual is not dull. Not at all, he is glad to talk to-you about his “business,” and the chances of his work-a-day life in the street. Not so the young factory hand. After the first fortnight in the mill he is a disillusioned person. He does not want to talk about his work or his prospects. He loses interest not only in others but in himself.

What is the secret of this subtle change? Why does the factory boy of twelve become so torpid? It is because in the mill growth and development are _arrested_. At the age of twelve a boy or girl is still a child, not an adult. It is true he has passed already through certain stages of growth, but the whole period of growth and development has not come to an end. His sensory organs are as acute, rather more acute, indeed, than a full-grown man’s, and yet in the matter of sight and hearing he is inferior. It is through _psychic_ development that the full harvest of the sensory and motor powers is reaped. This is why, at the age of twelve, if growth is to continue, the boy or girl should enter an atmosphere of varied mental interests and activities. The richer the forces of human life the more intricate will be the means by which they can be put into operation. The mill does not provide an atmosphere in which the new order of human development _due_ at this hour can take place. “Still the mill-child is not always dull,” you will say, “sometimes he is very noisy.” Yes, at “loosing time” the mill-yard and streets ring with loud talk and laughter. But the noise itself proves the same thing as the torpor of the mill child. In the jostling and shouting of the youth or mill girl the scientist sees not a vice but a reaction. In the desire for alcohol, the feverish love of betting and gambling, we behold the revolt of nascent human powers. These human powers, so varied and so subtle, are dammed up all day long, without possibility of exercise or escape. So the wild torrent of life surges free at last round the mill-gates, and escapes in the voice and glance of the excited lads who learn to love gambling and betting to the despair of good people. “A weak or insensible limb is certain of rough usage,” said Donaldson, for, obeying a natural instinct, its owner will insist on having a sensation through it. If the whole nature is dwarfed or blunted, only violent pleasures can be appreciated.

It is said that the poor “have no room to live”; what is even as serious--they have no time to grow. As long as such is the case we may be sure that, despite all the efforts of educationists and philanthropists, there will be a great many undeveloped persons. Meantime the scientist advances, taking account of all, and stating all fearlessly. Year by year the processes of growth and development become clearer, and the conditions of human progress more defined. And although we cannot at once remove even the more obvious causes of arrested development and weakness, yet it must be evident to all that the future belongs to the nations who permit and enable their children to come to full human stature.

MARGARET M’MILLAN.