Chapter V: Blossoms and Babies 263 (4)

More conclusive still is the testimony of experience in cases where school meals have been introduced. In 1883 Mr. Mundella, M.P., introducing the education estimates in the House of Commons, described an experiment which was being carried on in the elementary schools at Rousden by Sir Henry Peek in the way of providing a cheap, wholesome, and nutritious midday meal for the children. The cost of the meals was, according to Mr. Mundella, who spoke from a statement furnished by Sir Henry Peek himself, less than two and a half cents per meal, five meals costing twelve cents. The school inspectors testified that the results had been eminently satisfactory “both from a physical and educational point of view.” The meals proved to be an incentive to more regular attendance and, by providing the children with the requisite stamina, increased their mental efficiency, the result being an increased average of passes in the government examination upon which the governmental grants-in-aid were based.[75] In the following year, 1884, Mr. Jonathan Taylor, a prominent member of the Social Democratic Federation, induced the Sheffield School Board to introduce a system of providing cheap school dinners. It was found that a good, substantial meal, which Mr. Taylor describes as “sufficient in quantity and excellent in quality, and forming such a dinner as satisfies myself, and which the teachers in the schools are in the habit of partaking of along with the children,” could be provided at a cost of less than two cents per capita, that sum including the cost of fuel, cook’s wages, and other working expenses. While, as the committee in charge reported to the school board, it was soon found that there were a large number of children who could not afford even two cents for a meal, the results of the experiment speedily manifested themselves in a marked physical and mental improvement in the children. It was particularly demonstrated that children who were formerly dull and backward showed much improvement in their work after they had partaken regularly of the school dinners for a short time.[76] During the twenty years which have elapsed since these initial experiments were made, many similar schemes have been introduced in British schools, and in every case so far as I have been able to ascertain the facts, there has been a marked improvement in the physical and mental condition of the children affected.

Mrs. Humphry Ward has given a most interesting account of an experiment in a “Special School for Defectives” at Tavistock Place, London, the pioneer school of its kind in London. That it is a special school for physically defective children does not detract from the importance of the results noted. For some time there had been an arrangement whereby the children were provided with a midday meal for which their parents were charged three cents a day, the deficit being met by the managers from the school fund. Complaint was made by some of the visitors interested in the experiment that the meals were not good enough, not sufficiently nourishing for children of that class, and the managers were prevailed upon to improve the dietary to a considerable extent. Mrs. Ward says: “The experiment of a more liberal and varied diet was tried. More hot meat, more eggs, milk, cream, vegetables, and fruit were given. In consequence the children’s appetites largely increased, and the expense naturally increased with them. The children’s pence in May amounted to £3 13_s._ 6_d._ ($17.64), and the cost of the food was £4 7_s._ 2_d._ ($20.92); in June, after the more liberal scale had been adopted, the children’s payments were still £3 13_s._ 10_d._ ($17.72), but the expenses had risen to £5 7_s._ 8_d._ ($25.84). Meanwhile the physical and mental results of the increased expenditure are already unmistakable. Partially paralyzed children have been recovering strength in hands and limbs with greater rapidity than before.... The effect, indeed, is startling to those who have watched the experiment. Meanwhile, the teachers have entered in the log-book of the school their testimony to the increased power of work that the children have been showing since the new feeding has been adopted. Hardly any child now wants to lie down during school time, whereas applications to lie down used to be common; and the children _both learn and remember better_.”[77]

In Birmingham, England, a voluntary organization started by the chairman of the School Board, Mr. George Dixon, provides meals during the winter months for something like 2500 children. This committee provides a dinner, absolutely free of cost to the child, consisting principally of lentil soup and bread and jam. The cost to the organization, according to Dr. Airy, H.M.I., who gave testimony before the Inter-Departmental Committee,[78] is less than one cent per meal inclusive, the manager’s present salary being $500 per year. Formerly it was $750, but he voluntarily accepted the reduction to $500 when subscriptions began to fall off. Dr. Airy explained to the committee that the 2500 children thus fed by this charity constitute about 2½ per cent of the child population of the entire city. No attempt whatever is made to deal with any children except those who are known to be “practically starving,” the far larger number of children who, while being underfed and seriously so, still get some sort of food, enough to keep them from absolute destitution, being in no way provided for. One reason for the low standard of meals given is the desire of the committee to make them as unattractive as possible, so that few children will eat the dinners except absolutely forced by sheer hunger. Another reason I give in full from the “minutes of evidence” because of its bearing upon a phase of the problem already noted. Dr. Airy was asked concerning the lentil soup, “Is there any animal stock in it?” and replied: “Yes, there is a certain amount, but not very much. It has been found by incessant experiment—because this is an experimental business year by year—that lentil soup was the best. _A starving child cannot take anything good; its stomach rejects it at once. We gave far too good soup at first. It had to be found out by experiment what they would stand._”[79] There is another charity in Birmingham which provides breakfasts of bread and cocoa and milk to practically the same class of destitute children. Several teachers and others connected with educational work in Birmingham have, in response to my inquiries, assured me that notwithstanding the fact that the quality of meals given is so poor, and that only the very lowest class of children is touched by the charity, there has been a marked improvement in the mental capacity of the children. One of the teachers, in a personal letter, says: “Of course, I have no means of proving it statistically for you; our facilities for child study do not include any system of individual record books, by which method alone, it seems to me, could statistical data be gathered. But I know personally several children who have been in my own class in whom the mental improvement consequent upon their improved diet has been most marked. If observation counts for anything at all, and I suppose it does, I have no hesitation in saying that the mental improvement in a large number of children has been simply marvellous.”

In Norway it has been for several years the custom of the school authorities in several municipalities to provide, free of charge, a good dinner for all school children who care to avail themselves of it. The dinners are prepared in a central kitchen-station and sent out in boxes to the various schools, special appliances being used to keep the meals hot. The dinners consist usually of soup, porridge, meat, vegetables, and bread for the ordinary children, and a special dietary for weak, sick, or defective children.[80] This system of free dinners was introduced as a result of a series of experiments made in Christiania. It was found that the number of backward, dull children who came from the poorer districts was much higher than elsewhere, and that they were, as a rule, inferior in physical development. So great was the progress made by the children in several classes in which the experiment of giving them one good meal each day was tried that the school authorities were induced to introduce the system generally into the schools. A member of the Municipal Council of Trondhjem says, speaking of the free school dinner system, “Norway now interprets civilization to mean that society must conspire to save its children from the hostile forces of unequal economic conditions, and to secure for them equal opportunities and helpful conditions for the development of their highest and best gifts.”

As a result of a careful study of the problem of how best to deal with the backward child, and a comparison of her own observations with those of teachers and others in Norway and France (where the _cantines scolaires_ have been attended with results very similar to those attained in Norway), a New York teacher in charge of a large class of such children decided to try the experiment of feeding them.[81] “To build up their intellects is the task we have to accomplish,” she said to the writer, “and I have found that that can best be done through building up their bodies first and so securing a decent physical basis to work upon.” The children contribute a cent each per day to a fund administered by the teacher, who provides each child with a cup of warm milk every morning in the middle of the session. Should any child for any reason be unable to contribute its share, it is not deprived of the milk on that account, the small deficit being made up out of the teacher’s own purse. In addition to the milk the children get such of the products of the cooking classes as are suitable for them, three days a week. It is a small experiment, too small indeed to justify any sweeping generalization from it, but it is nevertheless important in that it confirms fully the experience of foreign investigators that a very large proportion of the children who are mentally dull need only to be properly fed in order to enable their minds to develop normally.

“FRESH AIR FUND” CHILDREN FROM CITY TENEMENTS ENJOYING LIFE IN THE
COUNTRY
]

A somewhat similar method of feeding the children has been tried for three years at Speyer School, the practice and experimental school of Teachers College, Columbia University.[82] The children of the lower grades are supplied with milk and crackers at ten o’clock in the morning, and “the teachers are unanimous in the statement that the children are all happier and more able to work” in consequence of being fed. These various experiments demonstrate beyond question that underfeeding is responsible for much of the mental degeneracy among school children and the resulting failure of so many of them to profit by the education which we provide for them. More than that, they point unerringly to the remedy.

XI

Summarizing, briefly, the results of this investigation, the problem of poverty as it affects school children may be stated in a few lines. All the data available tend to show that not less than 2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are the victims of poverty which denies them common necessities, particularly adequate nourishment. As a result of this privation they are far inferior in physical development to their more fortunate fellows. This inferiority of physique, in turn, is responsible for much mental and moral degeneration. Such children are in very many cases incapable of successful mental effort, and much of our national expenditure for education is in consequence an absolute waste. With their enfeebled bodies and minds we turn these children adrift unfitted for the struggle of life, which tends to become keener with every advance in our industrial development, and because of their lack of physical and mental training they are found to be inefficient industrially and dangerous socially. They become dependent, paupers, and the procreators of a pauper and dependent race.

Here, then, is a problem of awful magnitude. In the richest country on earth hundreds of thousands of children are literally damned to lifelong, helpless, and debasing poverty. They are plunged in the earliest and most important years of character formation into that terrible maelstrom of poverty which casts so many thousands, ay, millions, of physical, mental, and moral wrecks upon the shores of our social life. For them there is little or no hope of escape from the blight and curse of pauperism unless the nation, pursuing a policy of enlightened self-interest and protection, decides to save them. In the main, this vast sum of poverty is due to causes of a purely impersonal nature which the victims cannot control, such as sickness, accident, low wages, and unemployment. Personal causes, such as ignorance, thriftlessness, gambling, intemperance, indolence, wife-desertion, and other vices or weaknesses, are also responsible for a good deal of poverty, though by no means most of it as is sometimes urged by superficial observers. There are many thousands of temperate and industrious workers who are miserably poor, and many of those who are thriftless or intemperate are the victims of poverty’s degenerating influences.[83] But whether a child’s hunger and privation is due to some fault of its parents or to causes beyond their control, the fact of its suffering remains, and its impaired physical and mental strength tends almost irresistibly to make it inefficient as a citizen. Whatever the cause, therefore, of its privation, society must, as a measure of self-protection, take upon itself the responsibility of caring for the child.

There can be no compromise upon this vital point. Those who say that society should refuse to do anything for those children who are the victims of their parents’ vices or weaknesses adopt a singularly indefensible attitude. In the first place it is barbarously unjust to allow the sins of the parents to bring punishment and suffering upon the child, to damn the innocent and unoffending. No more vicious doctrine than this, which so many excellent and well-intentioned persons are fond of preaching, has ever been formulated by human perversity. Carried to its logical end, it would destroy all legislation for the protection of children from cruel parents or guardians. It is strange that the doctrinaire advocates of this brutal gospel should overlook its practical consequences. If discrimination were to be made at all, it should be in favor of, rather than against, the children of drunken and profligate parents. For these children have a special claim upon society for protection from wrongs in the shape of influences injurious to their physical and moral well-being, and tending to lead them into evil and degrading ways. The half-starved child of the inebriate is not less entitled to the protection of society than the victim of inhuman physical torture.

Should these children be excluded from any system of feeding adopted by the state upon the ground that their parents have not fulfilled their parental responsibilities, society joins in a conspiracy against their very lives. And that conspiracy ultimately and inevitably involves retribution. In the interests and name of a beguiling economy, fearful that if it assumes responsibility for the care of the child of inebriate parents, it will foster and encourage their inebriety and neglect, society leaves the children surrounded by circumstances which practically force them to become drunkards, physical and moral wrecks, and procreators of a like degenerate progeny. _Then_ it is forced to accept the responsibility of their support, either as paupers or criminals. That is the stern Nemesis of retribution. Where an enlightened system of child saving has been followed, this principle has been clearly recognized. In Minnesota, for example, the state assumes the responsibility for the care of such children as a matter of self-protection. To quote the language of a report of the State Public School at Owatonna: “It is for economic as well as for humane reasons that this work is done. The state is thus protecting itself from dangers to which it would be exposed in a very few years if these children were reared in the conditions which so injuriously affect them.”[84] Whatever steps may be taken to punish, or make responsible to the state, those parents who by their vice and neglect bring suffering and want upon their children, the children themselves should be saved.

To the contention that society, having assumed the responsibility of insisting that every child shall be educated, and providing the means of education, is necessarily bound to assume the responsibility of seeing that they are made fit to receive that education, so far as possible, there does not seem to be any convincing answer. It will be objected that for society to do this would mean the destruction of the responsibility of the parents. That is obviously true. But it is equally true of education itself, the responsibility for which society has assumed. Some individualists there are who contend that society is wrong in doing this, and their opposition to the proposal that it should undertake to provide the children with food is far more logical than that of those who believe that society should assume the responsibility of educating the child, but not that of equipping it with the necessary physical basis for that education. The fact is that society insists upon the education of the children, not, primarily, in their interests nor in the interests of the parents, but in its own. All legislation upon child labor, education, child guardianship in general, is based upon a denial of proprietary rights to children by their parents. The child belongs to society rather than to its parents.

Further, private charity, which is the only alternative suggestion offered for the solution of this problem, equally removes responsibility from the parents and is open to other weightier objections. In the first place, where it succeeds, it is far more demoralizing than such a system of public support provided at the public cost, as the child’s birthright, could possibly be. Still more important is the fact that private charity does not succeed in the vast majority of instances. To their credit, it must be remembered that the poor as a class refuse to beg or to parade their poverty. They suffer in silence and never seek alms. Pride and the shame of begging seal their lips. Here, too, the question of the children of inebriate, dissolute, worthless parents enters. Every one who has had the least experience of charitable work knows that these are the persons who are most relieved by charity. They do not hesitate to plead for charity. “I have not strength to dig; to beg I am ashamed,” is the motto of the self-respecting, silent, suffering poor. The failure of charity is incontestable. As some witty Frenchman has well said, “Charity creates one-half the misery she relieves, but cannot relieve one-half the misery she creates.”

It is impossible to enter here into a discussion of the question of cost, but the argument that society could not afford to undertake this further responsibility must be briefly considered. In view of our well-nigh boundless resources there is small reason for the belief that we cannot provide for the needs of all our children. If it were true that we could not provide for their necessities, then wholesale death would be merciful and desirable. At any rate, it would be far better to feed them first, neglecting their education altogether, than to waste our substance in the brutally senseless endeavor to educate them while they starve and pine for bread. There can be little doubt that the economic waste involved in fruitless charity, and the still vaster waste involved in the maintenance of the dependent and criminal classes whose degeneracy is mainly attributable to underfeeding in childhood, amount to a sum far exceeding the cost of providing adequate nutrition for every child. It is essentially a question of the proper adjustment of our means to our needs. Otherwise we must admit the utter failure of our civilization and confess that, in the language of Sophocles, it is

“Happiest beyond compare
Never to taste of life;
Happiest in order next,
Being born, with quickest speed
Thither again to turn
From whence we came.”[D]

COMMUNAL SCHOOL KITCHEN, WHERE THE SCHOOL MEALS ARE PREPARED,
CHRISTIANIA, NORWAY
]

-----

Footnote D:

_Œdipus Coloneus._

III
THE WORKING CHILD

“In this boasted land of freedom there are bonded baby slaves,
And the busy world goes by and does not heed.
They are driven to the mill, just to glut and overfill
Bursting coffers of the mighty monarch, Greed.
When they perish we are told it is God’s will,
Oh, the roaring of the mill, of the mill!”
—ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.

I

It is a startling and suggestive fact that the very force which Aristotle, the profoundest thinker of antiquity, regarded as the only agency through which the abolition of slavery might be made possible, served, when at last it was evolved, not to destroy slavery, but to extend it; to enslave in a new form of bondage those who hitherto had been free. Aristotle regarded slavery as a basic institution and saw no possible means whereby it might ever be dispensed with, “except perhaps by the aid of machines.” He said, “If every tool ... could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Dædalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephæstos went of their own accord; if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need of apprentices for the master workers, or slaves for the lords.”[85] When more than two thousand years had passed, a machine, a wonderful, complex tool, almost literally fulfilling his conditions, was invented.

We speak of the power-loom as Cartwright’s invention, but in truth it was the joint production of numberless inventors, most of them unknown to history, and some of whom lived and labored long before Aristotle sat at Plato’s feet in the great school at Athens. Looking at a modern power-loom in one of our great factories not long ago, I asked the name of the inventor, which was readily enough given. But as I watched the marvellous mechanism with its many wheels, levers, and springs, I wondered how much of it could be said to have had its origin in the brain of the inventor in question. Who invented the wheel, the lever, the spring? Who invented the first rude loom, reproduced, in principle, in the wonderful looms of the twentieth century? No man knows. We do not know the name of the inventor of the loom figured in all its details upon the tomb of the ancient Egyptian at Beni Hassan;[86] we do not know who invented the loom which the Greek vase of 400 B.C. depicts,—a loom which, so William Morris tells us, is in all respects like those in use in Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the latter half of the nineteenth century.[87] Many thousands of years ago, in the simple tribal communism of primitive man, the great bed-rock inventions were evolved. Thousands of years of human experience led up to the ribbon-loom which, in the early part of the sixteenth century, brought sentence of death upon the poor inventor of Danzig[88] whose very name has been forgotten. This ribbon-loom was a near approach to the wonderful tool of which Aristotle dreamed as the liberator of enslaved man.

The work of improvement went on, and the power-loom came; “weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves” in a well-nigh literal sense. The great machine tool became an accomplished fact. It had been forged upon the anvil of human necessity through countless centuries. But the revolution it wrought, or, rather, the revolution of which it was the expression, was not a revolution of liberation. A hundred and twenty years have elapsed since then, and still the prophecy of freedom has not been fulfilled; there are still “slaves for the lords.”

“Fast and faster, our iron master,
The thing we made, for ever drives,
Bids us grind treasure and fashion pleasure,
For other hopes and other lives.”

Children have always worked, but it is only since the reign of the machine that their work has been synonymous with slavery. Under the old form of simple, domestic industry even the very young children were assigned their share of the work in the family. But this form of child labor was a good and wholesome thing. There may have been abuses; children may have suffered from the ignorance, cupidity, and brutality of fathers and mothers, but in the main the child’s share in the work of the family was a good thing. In the first place, the child was associated in its work with one or both of its parents, and thus kept under all those influences which we deem of most worth, the influences of home and parental care. Secondly, the work of the child constituted a major part of its education. And it was no mean education, either, which gave the world generation after generation of glorious craftsmen. The seventeenth-century glass-blower of Venice or Murano, for instance, learned his craft from his father in this manner, and in turn taught it to his son. There was a bond of interest between them; a parental pride and interest on the part of the father infinitely greater and more potent for good than any commercial relation would have allowed. On the part of the child, too, there was a filial pride and devotion which found its expression in a spirit of emulation, the spirit out of which all the rich glory of that wonderfully rich craft was born. So, too, it was with the potters of ancient Greece, and with the tapestry weavers of fourteenth-century France. In the golden age of the craftsman, child labor was child training in the noblest and best sense. The training of hand and heart and brain was the end achieved, even where it was not the sole purpose of the child’s labor.

But with the coming of the machine age all this was changed. The craftsman was supplanted by the tireless, soulless machine. The child still worked, but in a great factory throbbing with the vibration of swift, intricate machines. In place of parental interest and affection there was the harsh, pitiless authority of an employer or his agent, looking, not to the child’s well-being and skill as an artificer, but to the supplying of a great, ever widening market for cash gain.

It is not without its significance that the ribbon-loom which in the latter part of the seventeenth century caused the workmen of England to riot, the same machine which, later, was publicly burnt in Hamburg by order of the Senate, should have been described as “enabling a totally inexperienced boy” to set the whole loom with all its shuttles in motion, “by simply moving a rod backwards and forwards.”[89] It was as though the new mechanical invention had been designed with the express purpose of laying the burden of the world’s work upon child shoulders; as though some evil genius had deliberately contrived that the nation of progress should

“—Stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart.”

II

There is no more terrible page in history than that which records the enslavement of mere babies by the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century in England. Not even the crucifixion of twenty thousand slaves along the highways by Scipio excels it in horror.

Writing in 1795, Dr. Aikin gives a vivid account of the evils which had already been introduced in the factory districts by the new system of manufacture.[90] He mentions the destruction of the best features of home life, the spread of filth, thriftlessness, poverty, and disease, and says that the demand for “children for the cotton mills” had become very great. To get children for the cotton mills was not easy at first. Parental love and pride were ranged against the new system, denying its demands. Accustomed to the old domestic system, the association of all the members of the family in manufacture as part of the domestic life, they regarded the new industrial forms with repugnance. It was considered a degradation for a child to be sent into the factories, especially for a girl, whose whole life would be blasted thereby. The term “factory girl” was an insulting epithet, and the young woman who bore it could not hope for other, better employment, nor yet for marriage with any but the very lowest and despised of men. Not till they were forced by sheer hunger and misery, through the reduction of wages to the level of starvation, could the respectable workers be induced to send their children into the factories. In the meantime they made war upon the “iron men,” as the machines were called, but of course in vain. To such a conflict there could be only one end,—human beings of flesh and blood could not prevail against the iron monsters, their competitors.

But the manufacturers wanted children, and they got them from the workhouses. It was not difficult to persuade Bumbledom to get rid of its pauper children, especially when its conscience was salved by the specious pretext that the children were to be taught new trades, as apprentices. “Alfred,” the anonymous author of the _History of the Factory Movement_,[91] gives a thrilling description of the horrible inhumanity and wickedness of this practice of sending parish apprentices, “without remorse or inquiry, to be _used up_ as the cheapest raw material in the market.” The mill owners would first communicate with the overseers of the poor, and the latter would fix suitable dates for the manufacturers or their agents to examine the children. Those chosen were then conveyed to their destination, closely packed in wagons or canal-boats. Thenceforth they were doomed to the most miserable slavery. A class of “traffickers” in child slaves arose. These men made a profitable business of supplying children to the manufacturers. They deposited their victims in dark, dank cellars, where the sales to the manufacturers or their agents were made. “The mill owners, by the light of lanterns being able to examine the children, their limbs and stature having undergone the necessary scrutiny, the bargain was struck, and these poor innocents were conveyed to the mills.” Their plight was appalling. They received no wages, and they were so cheap, their places so easily filled, that the mill owners did not even take the trouble to give them decent food or clothing. “In stench, in heated rooms, amid the whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.”

NEW YORK CELLAR PRISONERS

These children were found by Settlement Workers in New York City.
Illegally employed, they were never
allowed to go out of doors, their only recreation being taken in a
dark, filthy cellar.
]

Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice who, at seven years of age, was sent from a London workhouse to a cotton mill near Nottingham, gives a harrowing but well-authenticated account of actual experience.[92] He tells how the apprentices used to be fed upon the same coarse food as that given to the master’s pigs, and how he and his fellow-victims used joyfully to say when they saw the swine being fed, “The pigs are served; it will be our turn next.” ... “When the swine were hungry,” he says, “they used to grunt so loud, they obtained the wash first to quiet them. The apprentices could be intimidated, and made to keep still.” Blincoe describes how, for fattening, the pigs were often given meat balls, or dumplings, in their wash, and how he and the other apprentices who were kept near the pigsties used to slip away and slyly steal as many of these dumplings from the pigs as possible, hastening away with them to a hiding-place, where they were greedily devoured. “The pigs ... learned from experience to guard their food by various expedients. Made wise by repeated losses, they kept a sharp lookout, and the moment they ascertained the approach of the half-famished apprentices, they set up so loud a chorus of snorts and grunts, it was heard in the kitchen, when out rushed the swineherd, armed with a whip, from which combined means of protection for the swine this accidental source of obtaining a good dinner was soon lost. Such was the contest carried on for some time at Litton Mill between the half-famished apprentices and the well-fed swine.”

The children were worked sixteen hours at a stretch, by day and by night. They slept by turns and relays in beds that were never allowed to cool, one set being sent to bed as soon as the others had gone to their toil. Children of both sexes and all ages, from five years upward, were indiscriminately herded together, with the result that vice and disease flourished. Sometimes the unfortunate victims would try to run away, and to prevent this all who were suspected of such a tendency had irons riveted on their ankles with long links reaching up to their hips. In these chains they were compelled to work and sleep, young women and girls as well as boys. Many children contrived to commit suicide, some were unquestionably beaten to death; the death-rate became so great that it became the custom to bury the bodies at night, secretly, lest a popular uprising be provoked.[93]

Worse still, the cupidity of British Bumbledom was aroused, and it became the custom for overseers of the poor to insist that one imbecile child at least should be taken by the mill owner, or the trafficker, with every batch of twenty children. In this manner the parish got rid of the expense of maintaining its idiot children. What became of these unhappy idiots will probably never be known, but from the cruel fate of the children who were sane, we may judge how awful that of the poor imbeciles must have been.

Even in the one factory of the time which was heralded as a model for the manufacturers to copy, the mill at New Lanark, Scotland, owned by Mr. David Dale and afterward made famous by the great and good Robert Owen, his son-in-law, conditions were, from a twentieth-century point of view, simply shocking, despite the fact that it was the subject of glowing praise in the _Annual Register_ for 1792, and that, like some of our modern factories, it had become generally regarded as a semi-philanthropic establishment. Robert Owen tells us in his autobiography that “children were received as early as six years old, the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later age.” These little children worked from six in the morning till seven in the evening, _and after that they were supposed to be educated_! “The poor children hated their slavery; many absconded; ... at thirteen or fifteen years old, when their apprenticeship expired, they commonly went off to Edinburgh or Glasgow, ... altogether admirably trained for swelling the mass of vice and misery in the towns.[94] And all this while British philanthropists were agitating the question of negro emancipation, and raising funds for that object!”

Thanks, mainly, to the agitation of Owen, a movement was begun to endeavor to improve the lot of these little child slaves. This movement received a tremendous impetus from the fearful epidemic which, in 1799–1800, spread through the factory districts of Manchester and the surrounding country. An inquiry into the causes of this epidemic ascribed it to overwork, scant and poor food, wretched clothing, bad ventilation, and overcrowding, especially among the children.[95] As a result the first act for the protection of child workers was passed through the parliamentary exertions of Sir Robert Peel, himself a master manufacturer. It was a very small measure of relief which this act afforded, but it is nevertheless a most important statute to students of industrial legislation as the “first definitely in restraint of modern factory labor and in general opposition to the _laissez-faire_ policy in industry.”[96] It was the first factory act ever passed by the British Parliament. It placed no limit upon the age at which children might be employed; it applied only to apprentices, and not to children “under the supervision of their parents;” it reduced the hours of labor to twelve per day, and provided for the clothing, instruction, and religious training of the children. These provisions were clearly a survival of an industrial system based upon paternal interest and authority.

One immediate effect of the act of 1802 was the practical break-up of the pauper apprentice system. But it must be remembered that this system was already outworn, and it is extremely improbable that it would have continued to any great extent, even if the act of 1802 had not been passed. It had served its purpose, but was no longer essential to the manufacturers.[97] Notwithstanding that it introduced a revolutionary principle, as we have seen, the act excited no opposition from the manufacturers. The reason for this is not difficult to determine. Wages had been forced down to the starvation level through the competition of the pauper apprentices with free, adult labor, with the result that poverty abounded. Parents were ready now to send their children into the mills. Hunger had conquered their prejudices—the iron man had triumphed over human flesh and blood.

It is not my purpose to trace the growth of English legislation against child labor. This brief historical sketch is introduced for quite another purpose, to wit, to show the origin of our modern problem of child slavery and degradation. Suffice it to say, then, that the “free” children who went into the mills by their parents’ “consent” were almost as badly off as the pauper apprentices had been. They were treated just as brutally. Even in 1830, before a meeting of philanthropists and clergy in Bradford, Richard Oastler, the “King of the Factory Children,” could hold up an overseer’s whip, saying, “_This_ was hard at work in this town last week.”[98] And on the 16th of March, 1832, Michael Sadler, M.P., in moving the second reading of his Ten Hours Bill in the House of Commons, could say: “Sir, children are beaten with thongs prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown up, I hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage, are beaten upon the arms, face, and bosom—beaten in your ‘free market’ of labour, as you term it, like slaves.... These are the instruments!” (Here, says the report in _Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates_, the honorable member exhibited some black, heavy leathern thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when struck upon the table, resounded through the House.) “They are quite equal to breaking an arm, but the bones of the young ... are pliant. The marks, however, are long visible, and the poor wretch is flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cart-whip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling against the factory thong of England.”[99] In some memorable verses this noble parliamentary leader of the movement for factory legislation has described such a whipping scene. The poem is too long to quote in its entirety:—

“‘Father, I’m up, but weary,
I scarce can reach the door,
And long the way and dreary—
Oh, carry me once more!’

“Her wasted form seemed nothing—
The load was at his heart,
The sufferer he kept soothing
Till at the mill they part.
The overlooker met her,
As to her frame she crept,
And with his thong he beat her
And cursed her as she wept.

“All night with tortured feeling,
He watched his speechless child,
While, close beside her kneeling,
She knew him not, nor smiled.
Again the factory’s ringing
Her last perceptions tried;
When, from her straw bed springing,
‘Tis time!’ she shrieked, and died!”[100]

A Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investigate the grounds of Sadler’s demand for the Ten Hours Bill. From the mass of evidence of almost unspeakable cruelty, I quote only one brief passage from the testimony of one Jonathan Downe, himself a mill hand: “Provided a child should be drowsy (there were plenty working at six years of age), the overlooker walks around the room with a stick in his hand, and he touches the child on the shoulder, and says, ‘Come here!’ In the corner of the room is an iron cistern; it is filled with water; he takes this boy, and holding him up by his legs, dips him overhead in the cistern, and sends him to his task for the remainder of the day; and that boy is to stand dripping as he is at his work—he has no chance of drying himself.”[101]

Such, then, was child labor at its worst; such the immediate effects of the introduction of great mechanical inventions which the wisest of the ancients believed would liberate men from all forms of bondage and destroy every vestige of slavery,—a hope which for many of us has not been shattered, even by a century and a quarter of disappointment. Happily, we in the United States have been practically free from some of the worst evils of England’s experience, yet it is only too true that we have to-day a child-labor problem of terrible magnitude, challenging the heart and brain of the nation to find a solution. We, too, are permitting the giant “iron men” to enslave our babies. The machine is our modern Moloch, and we feed it with precious child lives.

III

I am not unmindful of the fact that the presentation of the darkest side of England’s experience may have the effect of inducing in some minds a certain spirit of content,—a pharisaical thanksgiving that we are “not as other men” have been in a past that is not very remote. I accept, gladly, the issue implied in that attitude. It is no part of my purpose to discount the social and ethical gains which have resulted from the struggle against child labor, or to paint in unduly dark colors the problem as it presents itself to us in the United States to-day. No good purpose is served by exaggeration; progress is not quickened by denying the progress that has been made.

LITTLE TENEMENT TOILERS

With the exception of the infant in arms these are all working
children. They were called away from the
photographer to go on with their work!
]

The inferno of child torture which the records of nineteenth-century England picture so vividly has more than historical interest for us. It was the result of a policy of _laissez faire_ on the part of the government, and that policy has its advocates in the United States to-day. In our legislative assemblies, and through the press, able and earnest men—some of them earnest only in their devotion to Mammon—are advocating that policy and forever crying out, in the words of the old physiocrats, “Let alone; the world revolves of itself.” When that cry of _laissez faire_ is raised, despite the fact that children of four years are found at work in the canning factories of New York State,[102] and little girls of five and six years are found working by night in Southern cotton mills,[103] it is not too much to assume that only a vigilant and constantly protesting public conscience protects us from conditions as revolting as any of those experienced in the black night of England’s orgy of greed. Capital has neither morals nor ideals; its interests are always and everywhere expressible in terms of cash profits. Capital in the United States in the twentieth century calls for children as loudly as it called in England a century ago.

Whatever advance has been made in the direction of the legislative protection of children from the awful consequences of premature exploitation, has been made in the face of bitter opposition from the exploiters. In the New York Legislature, during the session of 1903, the owners of the canning factories of the state used their utmost power to have their industry exempted from the humane but inadequate provisions of the Child Labor Law, notwithstanding that babies four years old were known to be working in their factories. The Northern owners of Alabama cotton mills secured the _repeal_ of the law passed in that state in 1887 prohibiting the employment of children under fourteen years of age for more than eight hours in a day; and when, later, the Alabama Child Labor Committee sought to secure legislative protection for children up to twelve years of age, paid agents of the mill owners appeared before the legislature and persistently opposed their efforts.[104] Similar testimony might be given from practically every state where any attempt has been made to legislate against the evil of child labor. Even such a responsible organ of capitalist opinion as the _Manufacturers’ Record_ editorially denounces all child-labor legislation as wrong and immoral![105] There are, of course, honorable exceptions, but as a class the employers of labor are persistent in their opposition to all such legislation.

According to the census of 1900 there were, in the United States in that year, 1,752,187 children under sixteen years of age employed in gainful occupations. Of itself that is a terrible sum, but all authorities are agreed that it does not fully represent the magnitude of the child-labor problem. It is well known that many thousands of children are working under the protection of certificates in which they are falsely represented as being of the legal age for employment. When a child of twelve gets a certificate declaring its age to be fifteen, it needs only to work a year, to be in reality thirteen years old, in order to be classed as an adult over sixteen years of age. Such certificates have been, and in many cases still are, ridiculously easy to obtain, it being only necessary for one of the parents or guardians of a child to swear before a notary that the child has reached the minimum age required by law. The result has been the promotion of child slavery and illiteracy through the wholesale perjury of parents and guardians.[106] I have known scores of instances in which children ten or eleven years old were employed through the possession of certificates stating that they were thirteen or fourteen. I remember asking one little lad his age, in Pittston, Pennsylvania, during the anthracite coal strike of 1902. He certainly did not look more than ten years old, but he answered boldly, “I’m thirteen, sir.” When I asked him how long he had been at work, he replied, “More’n a year gone, sir.” Afterward I met his father at one of the strikers’ meetings, and he told me that the lad was only a few days over eleven years of age, and that he went to work as a “breaker boy” before he was ten. “We’m a big fam’ly,” he said in excuse. “There’s six kids an’ th’ missis an’ me. Wi’ me pay so small, I was glad to give a quarter to have the papers (certificate) filled out so’s he could bring in a trifle like other boys.” Afterward I came across several similar cases.

That is only one of many reasons for supposing that the census figures do not adequately represent the extent to which child labor prevails. Another is the tremendous number of children of school age, and below the age at which they may be legally employed, who do not attend school. In New York State, for instance, there were more than 76,000 children between the ages of ten and fourteen years who were out of school during the whole of the twelve months covered by the census of 1900, and nearly 16,000 more in the same age period who attended school less than five months in the year.[107] Careful investigation in Philadelphia showed that in one year, “after deducting those physically unable to attend school, 16,100 children, between the ages of eight and thirteen,” were out of school, and a similar condition is reported to exist throughout the whole of Pennsylvania.[108] The Child Labor Committee of Pennsylvania gives a list of nearly one hundred different kinds of work at which children between the ages of eight and thirteen were found to be employed in Philadelphia alone. In practically every industrial centre this margin of children of school age and below the legal age for employment, who do not attend school, exists. It is impossible for any one who is at all conversant with the facts to resist the conclusion that, after making all possible allowances for other causes, by far the larger part of these absentees are at work. Thousands find employment in factories and stores; others find employment in some of the many street trades, selling newspapers, peddling, running errands for small storekeepers, and the like. Many others are not “employed” in the strict sense of the word at all, because they work in their homes, assisting their parents. Their condition is generally much worse than that of the children regularly employed in factories and workshops. In excluding them the census figures omit a very large class of child workers who are the victims of the worst conditions of all. I am convinced that the number of children under _fifteen_ years of age who work is much larger than the official figures give, notwithstanding that these are supposed to give the number of all workers under _sixteen_ years of age. It would, I think, be quite within the mark to say that the number of child workers under fifteen is at least 2,250,000.

From the point of view of the sociologist an accurate statistical measure of the child-labor problem would be a most valuable gain, but to most people such figures mean very little. If they could only see the human units represented by the figures, it would be different. If they could only see in one vast, suffering throng as many children as there are men, women, and children in the state of New Jersey, they would be able to appreciate some of the meaning of the census figures. Even so, they would have only a vivid sense of the magnitude of such a number as 1,752,000; they would still have no idea of the awful physical, mental, and moral wreckage hidden in the lifeless and dumb figures. If it were only possible to take the consumptive cough of one child textile worker with lint-clogged lungs, and to multiply its volume by tens of thousands; to gather into one single compass the fevers that burn in thousands of child toilers’ bodies, so that we might visualize the Great White Plague’s relation to child labor, the nation would surely rise as one man and put an end to the destruction of children for profit. If all the people of this great republic could see little Anetta Fachini, four years old, working with her mother making artificial flowers, as I saw her in her squalid tenement home at eleven o’clock at night, I think the impression upon their hearts and minds would be far deeper and more lasting than any that whole pages of figures could make. The frail little thing was winding green paper around wires to make stems for artificial flowers to decorate ladies’ hats. Every few minutes her head would droop and her weary eyelids close, but her little fingers still kept moving—uselessly, helplessly, mechanically moving. Then the mother would shake her gently, saying: “_Non dormire, Anetta! Solamente pochi altri—solamente pochi altri._” (“Sleep not, Anetta! Only a few more—only a few more.”)

JUVENILE TEXTILE WORKERS ON STRIKE IN PHILADELPHIA
]

And the little eyes would open slowly and the tired fingers once more move with intelligent direction and purpose.

Some years ago, in one of the mean streets of Paris, I saw, in a dingy window, a picture that stamped itself indelibly upon my memory. It was not, judged by artistic canons, a great picture; on the contrary, it was crude and ill drawn and might almost have been the work of a child. Torn, I think, from the pages of the Anarchist paper _La Revolté_, it was, perchance, a protest drawn from the very soul of some indignant worker. A woman, haggard and fierce of visage, representing France, was seated upon a heap of child skulls and bones. In her gnarled and knotted hands she held the writhing form of a helpless babe whose flesh she was gnawing with her teeth. Underneath, in red ink, was written in rude characters, “The wretch! She devours her own children!” My mind goes back to that picture: it is literally true to-day, that this great nation in its commercial madness devours its babes.

IV