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.”

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

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.”

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:—

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.

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.”)

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.

The textile industries rank first in the enslavement of children. In the cotton trade, for example, 13.3 per cent of all persons employed throughout the United States are under sixteen years of age.^[109] In the Southern states, where the evil appears at its worst, so far as the textile trades are concerned, the proportion of employees under sixteen years of age in 1900 was 25.1 per cent, in Alabama the proportion was nearly 30 per cent. A careful estimate made in 1902 placed the number of cotton-mill operatives under sixteen years of age in the Southern states at 50,000. At the beginning of 1903 a very conservative estimate placed the number of children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the South at 30,000, no less than 20,000 of them being under twelve.^[110] If this latter estimate of 20,000 children under twelve is to be relied upon, it is evident that the total number under fourteen must have been much larger than 30,000. According to Mr. McKelway, one of the most competent authorities in the country, there are at the present time not less than 60,000 children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the Southern states.^[111] Miss Jane Addams tells of finding a child of five years working by night in a South Carolina mill;^[112] Mr. Edward Gardner Murphy has photographed little children of six and seven years who were at work for twelve and thirteen hours a day in Alabama mills.^[113] In Columbia, S.C., and Montgomery, Ala., I have seen hundreds of children, who did not appear to be more than nine or ten years of age, at work in the mills, by night as well as by day.

The industrial revival in the South from the stagnation consequent upon the Civil War has been attended by the growth of a system of child slavery almost as bad as that which attended the industrial revolution in England a century ago. From 1880 to 1900 the value of the products of Southern manufactures increased from less than $458,000,000 to $1,463,000,000—an increase of 220 per cent. Many factors contributed to that immense industrial development of the South, but, according to a well-known expert,^[114] it is due “chiefly to her supplies of tractable and cheap labor.” During the same period of twenty years in the cotton mills outside of the South, the proportion of workers under sixteen years of age decreased from 15.6 per cent to 7.7 per cent, but in the South it remained at approximately 25 per cent. It is true that the terrible pauper apprentice system which forms such a tragic chapter in the history of the English factory movement has not been introduced; yet the fate of the children of the poor families from the hill districts who have been drawn into the vortex of this industrial development is almost as bad as that of the English pauper children. These “poor whites,” as they are expressively called, even by their negro neighbors, have for many years eked out a scanty living upon their farms, all the members of the family uniting in the struggle against niggardly nature. Drawn into the current of the new industrial order, they do not realize that, even though the children worked harder upon the farms than they do in the mills, there is an immense difference between the dust-laden air of a factory and the pure air of a farm; between the varied tasks of farm life with the endless opportunities for change and individual initiative, and the strained attention and monotonous tasks of mill life. The lot of the pauper children driven into the mills by the ignorance and avarice of British Bumbledom was little worse than that of these poor children, who work while their fathers loaf. During the long, weary nights many children have to be kept awake by having cold water dashed on their faces, and when morning comes they throw themselves upon their beds—often still warm from the bodies of their brothers and sisters—without taking off their clothing. “When I works nights, I’se too tired to undress when I gits home, an’ so I goes to bed wif me clo’s on me,” lisped one little girl in Augusta, Ga.

There are more than 80,000 children employed in the textile industries of the United States, according to the very incomplete census returns, most of them being little girls. In these industries conditions are undoubtedly worse in the Southern states than elsewhere, though I have witnessed many pitiable cases of child slavery in Northern mills which equalled almost anything I have ever seen in the South. During the Philadelphia textile workers’ strike in 1903, I saw at least a score of children ranging from eight to ten years of age who had been working in the mills prior to the strike. One little girl of nine I saw in the Kensington Labor Lyceum. She had been working for almost a year before the strike began, she said, and careful inquiry proved her story to be true. When “Mother” Mary Jones started with her little “army” of child toilers to march to Oyster Bay, in order that the President of the United States might see for himself some of the little ones who had actually been employed in the mills of Philadelphia, I happened to be engaged in assisting the strikers. For two days I accompanied the little “army” on its march, and thus had an excellent opportunity of studying the children. Amongst them were several from eight to eleven years of age, and I remember one little girl who was not quite eleven telling me with pride that she had “worked two years and never missed a day.”

One evening, not long ago, I stood outside of a large flax mill in Paterson, N.J., while it disgorged its crowd of men, women, and children employees. All the afternoon, as I lingered in the tenement district near the mills, the comparative silence of the streets oppressed me. There were many babies and very small children, but the older children, whose boisterous play one expects in such streets, were wanting. “If thow’lt bide till th’ mills shut for th’ day, thow’lt see plenty on ’em—big kids as plenty as small taties,” said one old woman to whom I spoke about it. She was right. At six o’clock the whistles shrieked, and the streets were suddenly filled with people, many of them mere children. Of all the crowd of tired, pallid, and languid-looking children I could only get speech with one, a little girl who claimed thirteen years, though she was smaller than many a child of ten. Indeed, as I think of her now, I doubt whether she would have come up to the standard of normal physical development either in weight or stature for a child of ten. One learns, however, not to judge the ages of working children by their physical appearance, for they are usually behind other children in height, weight, and girth of chest,—often as much as two or three years. If my little Paterson friend was thirteen, perhaps the nature of her employment will explain her puny, stunted body. She works in the “steaming room” of the flax mill. All day long, in a room filled with clouds of steam, she has to stand barefooted in pools of water twisting coils of wet hemp. When I saw her she was dripping wet, though she said that she had worn a rubber apron all day. In the coldest evenings of winter little Marie, and hundreds of other little girls, must go out from the super-heated steaming rooms into the bitter cold in just that condition. No wonder that such children are stunted and underdeveloped!

In textile mill towns like Biddeford, Me., Manchester, N.H., Fall River and Lawrence, Mass., I have seen many such children, who, if they were twelve or fourteen according to their certificates and the companies’ registers, were not more than ten or twelve in reality. I have watched them hurrying into and away from the mills, “those receptacles, in too many instances, for living human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect,” as Robert Owen’s burning phrase describes them.^[115] I do not doubt that, upon the whole, conditions in the textile industries are better in the North than in the South, but they are nevertheless too bad to permit of self-righteous boasting and complacency. And in several other departments of industry conditions are no whit better in the North than in the South. The child-labor problem is not sectional, but national.

Of the fifteen divisions of the manufacturing industries, the glass factories rank next to the textile factories in the number of children they employ. In the year 1900, according to the census returns, the average number of workers employed in glass manufacture was 52,818, of which number 3529, or 6.88 per cent, were women, and 7116, or 13.45 per cent, were children under sixteen years of age. It will be noticed that the percentage of children employed is about the same as in the textile trades. There are glass factories in many states, but the bulk of the industry is centred in Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Jersey, and Ohio. The total value of the products of the glass industry in the United States in 1900 was $56,539,712, of which amount the four states named contributed $46,209,918, or 82.91 per cent of the entire value.^[116] After careful investigation in a majority of the places where glass is manufactured in these four states, I am confident that the number of children employed is much larger than the census figures indicate.

Perhaps in none of the great industries is the failure to enforce the child-labor laws more general or complete than in the glass trade. There are several reasons for this, the most important, perhaps, being the distribution of the factories in small towns and rural districts, and the shifting nature of the industry itself. Fuel is the most important item in the cost of materials in the manufacture of glass, and the aim of the manufacturers is always to locate in districts where fuel is cheap and abundant. For this reason Pennsylvania has always ranked first in the list of glass-manufacturing states. Owing, mainly, to the discoveries of new supplies of natural gas in Indiana, the glass products of that state increased fourfold in value from 1890 to 1900.^[117] When the supply of gas in a certain locality becomes exhausted, it is customary to remove the factories to more favorable places. A few rough wooden sheds are hastily built in the neighborhood of some good gas supplies, only to be torn down again as soon as these fail. Hence it happens that glass factories bring new industrial life into small towns and villages, which soon become to a very large extent dependent upon them. Almost unconsciously a feeling is developed that, “for the good of the town,” it will scarcely do to antagonize the glass manufacturers. I have heard this sentiment voiced by business men and others in several places. On the other hand, the manufacturers feel the strength of their position and constantly threaten to remove their plants if they are interfered with and prevented from getting boys.

I shall never forget my first visit to a glass factory at night. It was a big wooden structure, so loosely built that it afforded little protection from draughts, surrounded by a high fence with several rows of barbed wire stretched across the top. I went with the foreman of the factory and he explained to me the reason for the stockade-like fence. “It keeps the young imps inside once we’ve got ’em for the night shift,” he said. The “young imps” were, of course, the boys employed, about forty in number, at least ten of whom were less than twelve years of age. It was a cheap bottle factory, and the proportion of boys to men was larger than is usual in the higher grades of manufacture. Cheapness and child labor go together,—the cheaper the grade of manufacture, as a rule, the cheaper the labor employed. The hours of labor for the “night shift” were from 5.30 P.M. to 3.30 A.M. I stayed and watched the boys at their work for several hours, and when their tasks were done saw them disappear into the darkness and storm of the night. That night, for the first time, I realized the tragic significance of cheap bottles. One might well paraphrase Hood’s lines and say:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

SILK MILL GIRLS AFTER TWO YEARS OF FACTORY LIFE