iiiiiii > Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/childlaborOObullrich DEBATERS' HANDBOOK SERIES CHILD LABOR DEBATERS' HANDBOOK SERIES Enlargement of the United States Navy (3d ed. rev. and enl.) Direct Primaries Capital Punishment Commission Plan of Municipal Govern- ment (2d ed, rev. and enl.) Election of United States Senators Income Tax (2d ed. rev. and enl.) Initiative and Referendum (2d ed. rev. and enl.) Central Bank of the United States Woman Suffrage Open versus Closed Shop Child Labor Other volumes in preparation Each volume, one dollar net V Debaters' Handbook Series SELECTED ARTICLES ON CHILD LABOR COMPILED BY EDNA D. BULLOCK • : . .' • MINNEAPOLIS THE H. W. WILSON COMPANY 1911 .^0 .»,*■« . • - •« .Ufiti^ EXPLANATORY NOTE This handbook is designed especially for the student and citizen rather than for the debater. It is published in response to requests for a compilation that would give in some compact form some reliable information on the various phases of the child labor problem. No one overshadowing topic for debate has been selected. The subject is replete with topics that are under daily discussion among people who are interested in social welfare. According to Owen R. Lovejoy, Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, the unsolved problems connected with child labor resolve themselves into : — 1. What classes of children should be entirely eliminated as a factor in the industrial problem? 2. From what industries should all children be eliminated? 3. What regulations should govern the conditions of the chil- dren who may wisely be employed? 4. What is to be done with those excluded from industry? These propositions fairly cover the field of discussion. Among the questions that they bring up are these:— r 1. Should vacation permits be issued? 2. Should home labor for gain be permitted? 3. Is the age limit of 14 years sufficient protection for children? 4. Should industrial and vocational education be made a dom- inant feature of public school instruction? A practical form of discussion is that which undertakes to decide whether a particular state has the best possible child labor law. The literature of this subject is voluminous and is being augumented rapidly. Much that is useful has been of necessity excluded. The bibliography is also carefully selected with a view to the inclusion of more recent material. It is arranged in a roughly classified order which is also followed in the ar- rangement of the reprints. It is believed that this volume will give the general inquirer sufficient up-to-date material to meet the requirements of the average discussion. 241275 CONTENTS Bibliography Bibliographies ix Historical References ix General References a. Physical, Social and Industrial Effects of Child Labor ix b. Relation to Education xiii Descriptive References a. Special Trades and Industries xiv b. Special Sections of the United States and other Countries x y Legislation xvii lxtrodl'ction i Selected Articles ' -^'Abbott, Edith. Early History of Child Labor in America Journal of Sociology 3 ^Ellis, Leonora Beck. Movement to Restrict Child Labor Arena 9 / Adler, Felix. Child Labor in the United States and Its Great Attendant Evils. Annals of the American Academy 18 4^Folks, Homer. Poverty and Parental Dependence as an Obstacle to Child Labor Reform Annals of the American Academy 25 ^ Freiberg, Albert H. Some of the Ultimate Physical Ef- fects of Premature Toil Annals of the American Academy 34 N Lovejoy, Owen R. Unsettled Questions about Child Labor Annals of the American Academy 40 Cheney, Howell. Practical Restrictions on Child Labor in Textile Industries Annals of the American Academy 54 ^ Freiberg, Albert H*. Effects of Improper Posture in Factory Labor Annals of the American Academy 68 ^Harmon, William E. Handicaps in Later Years from Child Labor.. Annals of the American Academy 74 N Lovejoy, Owen R. Child Labor and Family Disintegra- tion Independent 78 viii CONTENTS Chesser, Elizabeth Sloan. Half-Timers in the Factories Westminster Review 83 ^Kirkland, James H. School as a Force Arrayed against Child Labor Annals of the American Academy 87 \ Lovejoy, Owen R. Will Trade Training Solve the Child- Labor Problem ? North American Review 89 Adams, Myron E. Children in American Street Trades. .Annals of the American Academy 9? Van der Vaart, Mrs. Harriet. Children in the Glass Works of Illinois Annals of the American Academy 106 NHutchinson, Woods. Overworked Children on the Farm and in the School J Annals of the American Academy 1 12 Van Kleeck, Mary. Child Labor in Home Industries Annals of the American Academy 1 16 Goldmark, Pauline. Child Labor in Canneries Annals of the American Academy 120 Van Kleeck, Mary. Child Labor in New York City Tenements Charities and the Commons 123 Nichols, Francis H. Children of the Coal Shadow .... McClure 133 Lord, Everett W. Child Labor in the Textile Industries and Canneries of New England Annals of the American Academy 141 Parker, Lewis W. Condition of Labor in Southern Cot- ton Mills Annals of the American Academy 148 Roberts, Peter. Child Labor in Eastern Pennsylvania Outlook 152 Kelley, Florence. Has Illinois the Best Laws in the Country for the Protection of Children ? , American Journal of Sociology 158 ^IvOvejoy, Owen R. Test of Effective Child-Labor Legis- lation Annals of the American Academy 168 Beveridge, Albert J. Child Labor and the Nation Annals of the American Academy 175 '^hat Constitutes Effective Child Labor Laws Annals of the American Academy 185 NStandard Child Labor Law. Annals of the American Academy 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY An asterisk (♦) preceding a reference indicates that the entire article or a part of it has been reprinted in this volume. Bibliographies Kansas City. Public Library Quarterly. 8: 29-32. Ap. '08. Bibliog- raphy of Municipal Betterment. United States. Library of Congress — Division of Bibliography. List of Books with References to Periodicals Relating to Child Labor. For sale by the Superintendent of Documents. 15 cents. Historical References ♦American Journal of Sociology. 14: 15-37. Jl- '08. Early His- tory of Child Labor in^ America. Edith Abbott. Annals of the American Academy. 27: 312-26. Mr. '06. Child Labor Problem^a Study in Degeneracy. A. J. McKelway. Brief history of factory and child labor legislation in England. Arena. 28: 305-17. S. '02. Cry of the Children. B. O. Flower. Historical description of English conditions. ♦Arena. 28: 370-8. O. '02. Movement to Restrict Child Labor. L. B. Ellis. General References a. Physical, Social and Industrial Effects of Child Labor. Books, Pamphlets and Documents Adams, Thomas Sewall, and Sumner, Helen L. Labor Problems. Chap. n. Woman and Child Labor. Macmillan, New York. 1905. Addams, Jane. Newer Ideals of Peace. Chap. VI. Protection of Children for Industrial Efficiency. Macmillan, New York. 1907. American Economic Association. Publications. 3d. Series. 6: 880- 903. 1906. Employment of Women and Minors. F. R. Fair- child. n/ v/ X BIBLIOGRAPHY Clark, Davis Wasgatt. American Child and Moloch of Today. Jennings and Graham. Cincinnati. 1907. Bibliography, pp. 75-81. Conference of Charities and Corrections, Minneapolis. 1907. Pro- ceedings, pp. 196-209. Child Labor and Philanthropy. Owen R. Love joy. Conference of Charities and Corrections, Richmond. 1908. Pro- ceedings, pp. 351-63. Child Labor and Citizenship. A. J. Mc- Kelway. Conference of Charities and Corrections, Richmond. 1908. Pro- ceedings, pp. 346-51. Why the Children are in the Factory. Jean M. Gordon. Gibbins, Henry de Beltgens. Economic and Industrial Progress of the Century, pp. 315-37. Factory Workers of Great Britain. Linscott, Toronto. 1903. Kelley, Florence. Some Ethical Gains through Legislation. Chap. I. Right to Childhood. Chap. II. The Child, the State and the Nation. Macmillan, New York. 1905, Mangold, George B. Child Problems, pp. 159-217- Child Labor. Macmillan, New York. 1910, Massachusetts. Commission on Industrial and Technical Educa- tion. Report. 1906. (Senate Document. 349-) Mitchell, John. Organized Labor. Chap. XVI. Work of Women and Children. 1903. National Education Association. Proceedings. 1909: 726-33. Child in Industry. Owen R. Lovejoy. Reprinted by the National Child Labor Committee. Nearing, Scott. Solution of the Child Labor Problem. Moffat. 1911. New York (State). Labor Bureau. Annual Report. 1904: 265-87. Commissioner McMackin's Answer to the Child Labor Com- mittee. Riis, Jacob. Children of the Poor. pp. 181 -8. Scribners, New York. 1892. Spargo, John. Bitter Cry of the Children. Macmillan, New York. 1906. United States. Census, Bureau of the. Child Labor in the United States. Bulletin 69, 1907. May be obtained from the Census Bureau. BIBLIOGRAPHY xi United States. Labor, Bureau of. Report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in the United States. Vol. i-date. 1910-date. Senate Doc. 645, 61 st Cong. 2d Sess. United States. Industrial Commission. Report. 19 vols. 1900-1902. Vols, 5, 7, 9, 12-17, 19 contain evidence &c on child labor. Magazine Articles Annals of the American Academy. 25: 554-7- ^h- '05. Child Labor in the United States and its Great Attendant Evils. Felix Adler. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 516-21. My. '05. Work of the General Federation of Women's Clubs against Child Labor. Mrs. A. O. Granger. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 542-50. My. '05. Child Labor Legislation— a Requisite for Industrial Efficiency. Jane Addams. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 554-7. ^ly. 05. Child Labor from the Employer's Point of View. Emil G. Hirsch. *Annals of the American Academy. 29 : 1-8. Ja. '07. Poverty and Parental Dependence as an Obstacle to Child Labor Reform. . Homer Folks. ^♦Annals of the American Academy. 29: 19-25. Ja. '07. Some of the Ultimate Physical Effects of Premature Toil. A. H. Frei- burg. Annals of the American Academy. 32: Sup. 19-30. Jl. '08. Leader- ship of the Child. A. J. McKelway. V Annals of the American Academy. 32: Sup. 92-6. Jl. '08. Ethical and Religious Aspects of Child Labor. J. H. Kirkland. Annals of the American Academy. 32: Sup. 108-12. Jl. '08. Re- sponsibility of the Consumer. Florence Kelley. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 49-62. Mr. '09. Un- settled Questions about Child Labor. Owen R. Lovejoy. V^ *Annals of the American Academy. 33 : Sup. 86-99. Mr. '09. Prac- tical Restrictions on Child Labor in Textile Industries ; High- er Educational and Physical Qualifications. Howell Cheney. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 100-3. Mr. '09. Scholarships for Working Children. Florence Kelley. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 104-10. Mr. '09. Effects of Improper Posture in Factory Labor. A. H. Frei- burg. xii BIBLIOGRAPHY Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 11 1-5. Mr. '09. Child \ Labor and the Juvenile Court. J. A. Britton. ■♦Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 122-30. Mr. '09. Handicaps in Later Years from Child Labor. William E. Harmon. ^^ Annals of the American Academy, 33: Sup. 131-43. Mr. '09. Accidents to Working Children. E. W. DeLeon. Annals of the American Academy. 34: Sup. 90-6. Jl. '09. In- vasion of Family Life by Industry. Florence Kelley. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 23-32, Mr. '10. In- difference of the Church to Child Labor Reform. J. H. Holmes. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 35-41. Mt. 'id. Justice to the Child. S. S. Wise. Reprinted by the National Child Labor Committee. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 61-72. Mr. '10. Federal Children's Bureau. Owen R. Lovejoy. ^/'^jK.nnals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 1-7. Jl. '11. Child Labor a Menace to Civilization. Felix Adler. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 8-16. Jl. '11. Con- servation of Childhood. Theodore Roosevelt. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 77-89. Jl. '11. Poverty and Parental Dependence in Relation to Child Labor Reform. Symposium, v^ Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 90-4. Jl. '11. Ex- clusion of Children from Dangerous Trades. W: C. Hanson. Charities. 11: 224-8. S. 5, '03. After School Hours — What? F. S. Hall. Charities and the Commons. 15: 434-5. Ja. 6, '06. Human View of Child Labor. Graham Taylor. Charities and the Commons. 17: 591-8. Ja. 5, '07. Holding the Mirror up to Industry; the Philadelphia Industrial Exhibit. Mabel H. B. Mussey. Charities and the Commons. 17: 639-49. Ja. 5, '07. Child Labor and the Republic. S. M. Lindsay. Chautauquan. 10: 21-4. O. '89. Child Labor and Some of its Results. Helen Campbell. BIBLIOGRAPHY xiii Chautauquan. 50: 416-24. My. '08. Child Labor and Vagrancy. Philip Davis. ♦Independent. 61 : 748-50. S. 2"], '06. Child Labor and Family Disintegration. Owen R. Lovejoy. Journal of Political Economy. 13: 245-57. Mr. '05. Census Statis- tics of Child Labor. H. L. Bliss. Ladies' Home Journal. 23: 19. Mr. *o6. Mr. Roosevelt's Views on Factory Laws for Women and Children. New York Evening Post. Jl. 18, '07. Plea against Child Labor. E. G. Murphy. Outlook, -^z'- 637-41. Mr. 14, '03. Child Labor in Factories. Lillian W. Betts. Outlook. 88: 94-6. Ja. 11, '08. Burden-Bearers of Progress. Lil- lian W. Betts. Quarterly Review. 205: 29-36. Jl. '06. Cry of the Children. Describes British conditions. Same article. Eclectic Magazine. 147: 443-7. N. '06. Survey. 23: 9-1 1. O. 2, '09. What a Boy Can Risk. Owen R. Lovejoy, Survey. 23: 21-35. O. 2, '09. Our Untrained Citizens. Florence Woolston. ♦Westminster Review. 172: 406-9. O. '09. Half-Timers in the Factories. Elizabeth S. Chesser. World's Work. 11: 6991-5- D- *os. Children Who Toil. Robert Hunter. b. Relation of Child Labor to Education. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 25: 558-62. My. '05. School as a Force Arrayed against Child Labor. J. H. Kirkland. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 104-9. Ja. '07. Child Labor and the Public Schools. S. M. Lindsay. Annals of the American Academy. 32: Sup. 80-91. Jl. '08. Func- tion of Education in Abolishing Child Labor. Owen R. Love- joy. Annals of the American Academy. 35 : Sup. 33-4. Mr. *io. In- adequate Schools. E. W. Lord. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 53-9. Jl. '11. Public School and the Day's Work. Herman Schneider. Charities and the Commons. 16: 231-5. My. 12, '06. From School to Work in Chicago. Anna E. Nicholes. xiv BIBLIOGRAPHY Gunton's Magazine. 24: 459-70. My. '03. Educating Southern Factory Children. Leonora B. Ellis. ♦North American Review. 191: 773-84. Je. '10. Will Trade Train- ing Solve the Child Labor Problem? Owen R. Lovejoy. Same article condensed. Review of Reviews. 42: 95-6. Jl. '10. Survey. 22 : 650-5. Ag. 7, '09. Plea for Vocational Training. Mary Flexner. Descriptive References a. Special Trades and Industries Magazine Articles Annals of the American Academy. 20: 167-77. JI- .'02. Child Labor in the Department Store. F. N. Brewer. *Annals of the American Academy. 25: 437-58. My. '05. Children in American Street Trades. M. R Adams. Annals of the American Academy. 27: 259-69. Mr. '06. Child ^N Labor in Southern Cotton Mills. A. J. McKelway. Annals of the American Academy. 27: 293-9. Mr. '06. Child Labor in the Coal Mines. Owen R. Lovejoy. Annals of the American Academy. 27: 300-11. Mr. '06. Child Labor in the Glass Industry. Owen R. Lovejoy. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 26-34. Ja. '07. Child Labor in the Soft Coal Mines. Owen R. Lovejoy. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 35-49. Ja. '07. Child Labor in the Anthracite Coal Industry. Owen R. Lovejoy. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 29: 77-83. Ja. '07. Children in the Glass Works of Illinois. Mrs. Harriet Van der Vaart. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 116-21. Mr. '09. Overworked Children on the Farm and in the School. Woods Hutchinson. Annals of the American Academy. 35 : Sup. 137-44. Mr. '10. Child Labor in Street Trades. E : N. Clopper. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 145-9. Mr. '10. Child Labor in Home Industries. Mary Van Kleeck. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 152-4. Mr. '10. Child Labor in Canneries. Pauline Goldmark. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 39-52. Jl. '11. Cotton Mill: the Herod among Industries. A. J. McKelway. BIBLIOGRAPHY xv Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 60-76. Jl. '11. Child Labor on the Stage. Symposium. Annals of the American Academy. 38. Sup. 95-110. Jl. '11. Child Labor in Street Trades and Public Places. Symposium. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 118-22. Jl. '11. Child Labor in Gulf Coast Canneries. L. W. Hine. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 123-31. Jl. '11. Glass Industry and Child Labor Legislation. C: L. Chute. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 133-8. Jl. '11. Coal Mines of Pennsylvania. Owen R. Lovejoy. Charities. 11: 15-9. Jh 4. '03. Boy-destroying Trade; the Glass Bottle Industry of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Florence Kelley. Charities and the Commons. 17: 555-8. D. 29, '06. History of a Christmas Box. Scott Nearing. ♦Charities and the Commons. 19: 1405-20. Ja. 18, '08. Child Labor in New York City Tenements. Mary Van Kleeck. Cosmopolitan. 41 : 480-7. S. '06. Hoe-Man in the Making. Edwin Markham. Cosmopolitan. 41 : 567-74. O. *o6. Child-wrecking in the Glass Factories. Edwin Markham. Cosmopolitan. 42: 20-8. N. '06. Little Slaves of the Coal Mines. Edwin Markham. Cosmopolitan. 42: 327-33. Ja. '07. Sweat-Shop Inferno. Edwin Markham. Cosmopolitan. 42 : 391-7. F. '07. Smoke of Sacrifice ; Child Labor in Tobacco Manufacture. Edwin Markham. Cosmopolitan. 42: 667-73. Ap. '07. Blight on the Easter Lilies; the Cruel Demand for Child Labor. Edwin Markham. Cosmopolitan. 43: 310-4. Jl. '07. Spinners in the Dark; Child Labor in the Silk Mills. Edwin Markham. ♦McClure. 20: 435-44. F. '03. Children of the Coal Shadow. F. H. Nichols. Same article condensed. Review of Reviews. 27: 214-5. F. '03. North American Review. 189: 573-84- Ap. '09. Children and Textiles. Florence N. Sanville. Outlook. 73: 921-7. Ap, 18, '03. Child Labor in Shops and Homes. Lillian W. Betts. xvi BIBLIOGRAPHY Outlook. 79: 177-9. Ja. 21, '05. Children in the Canning Industry. E. S. Whitin. Outlook. 80: 1011-9. Ag. 26, '05. Schoolhouse or Coal-Breaker! Owen R. Love joy. Survey. 24: 31 1-7. My. 21, '10. Child Labor and the Night Mes- senger Service. Owen R. Love joy. b. Special Sections of the United States and Other Countries. Books, Pamphlets and Documents American Economic Association Quarterly. Third Series. 11 : 387-615. O. '10. Child Labor Policy of New Jersey. A. S. Field". National Child Labor Committee. Child Labor in Georgia. A. J. McKelway. Pamphlet 138. National Child Labor Committee. Child Labor in Rural Ken- tucky. E. N. Clopper. Pamphlet 120. United States. Labor, Bureau of. Bulletin. 9: 485-637. My. '04. Child Labor in the United States. Hannah R. Sewall. United States. Labor, Bureau of. Bulletin. 18: 1-85. Ja. '09. Woman and Child Wage Earners in Great Britain. V. S. Clark. Magazine Articles American Journal of Sociology. 8: 623-30. Mr. '03. Study of Southern Cotton Mill Communities. Leonora B. Ellis. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 430-6. My. '05. Child Labor in Southern Industry. A. J. McKelway. Annals of the American Academy. 32: Sup. 72-9. Jl. '08. Educa- tion of Mill Children in the South. A. E. Seddon. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 33 : Sup. 73-8. Mr. '09. Child Labor in the Textile Industries and Canneries of New Eng- land. E. W. Lord. Annals of the American Academy. 33 : Sup. 79-85. Mr. '09. Child Labor in the Ohio Valley States. E. N. Clopper. ♦Annals of the American Academy. Z2'- 278-86. Mr. '09. Condi- tion of Labor in Southern Cotton Mills. Lewis W. Parker. Arena. 37: 613-9. Je. '07. Child-Labor; a Rational Statement. E. E. Pratt. BIBLIOGRAPHY xvii Charities and the Commons. 17 : 271-3. N. 10, '06. Welfare Work and Child Labor in Southern Cotton Mills. A. J. McKelway. Charities and the Commons. 21: 743-57. Ja. 30, '09. Child Labor in the Carolinas. A J. McKelway. Reprinted by the National Child Labor Committee, Era Magazine. 12: 49-57. Jl. '03. Factory Children of Georgia. Leonora B. Ellis. McClure. 20: 661-6. Ap. '03. Who Was Her Keeper? Story. Mary A. Bacon. North American Review. 186: 245-56. O. '07. Child-Labor Prob- lem; Fact versus Sentimentality. Julia Magruder. North American Review. 189: 890-9. Je. '09. Plea of the Child Laborer. A. H. Ulm. Outlook. 74: 124-7. My. 9, '03. Child Labor in Pennsylvania. Kellogg Durland. ♦Outlook. 78: 982-5. D. 17, '04. Child Labor in Eastern Penn- sylvania. Peter Roberts. Legislation Books, Pamphlets and Documents American Association for Labor Legislation. Legislative Review. No. 5. Child Labor, Summaries of Laws in Force, 1910. Laura Scott. Address the Association at Metropolitan Tower, New York for its publications. American Association for Labor Legislation. Legislative Review. No. 6. Review of Labor Legislation of 1910. Irene O. An- drews. Barnard, J, Lynn. Factory Legislation in Pennsylvania. Chap. VII. Child Labor Campaign, 1903-1905. Chap. X and XL Child Labor Code. pp. 138-9. Vacation Permits. University of Penn- sylvania. Publications. Series in Political Economy and Pub- lic Law. No. 19. 1907. Beveridge, Albert J. Employment of Child Labor; Speech in the Senate of the United States, January 23, 28 and 29, 1907. 170P. United States. Labor, Bureau of. Bulletin. 12: 197-285. Ja. '06. Laws Relating to the Employment of Children in the United States in Force, December, 1905. xviii BIBLIOGRAPHY United States. Labor, Bureau of. Bulletin. 15: 685-816. N. '07. Laws Relating to the Employment of Women and Children. United States. Labor, Bureau of. Bulletin. 21: 1-413. Jl. '10. Child Labor Legislation in Europe. C. W. A. Veditz. Magazine Articles American Journal of Sociology. 3: 490-501. Ja. '98. Illinois Child Labor Law. Florence Kelley. ♦American Journal of Sociolog}-. 10: 299-314. X. '04. Has Illinois the Best Laws in the Country for the Protection of Children? Florence Kelley. ♦Annals of the American Academy. 25: 459-66. My. '05. Test of Effective Child-Labor Legislation. Owen R. Lovejoy. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 467-79. My. '05. Child Labor Legislation and Methods of Enforcement in Northern Central States. Hal ford Erickson. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 480-90. My. '05. Child Labor Legislation in the New England States. Florence Kelley. Annals of the American Academy. 25 : 491-507. My. '05. Child Labor Legislation in the South." N. L. Anderson. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 508-15. My. '05. Child Labor Legislation and Methods of Enforcement in the West- ern States. B. B. Lindsey. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 522-41. My. '05. Opera- tion of the New Child Labor Law in New Jersey. Hugh H. Fox. Annals of the American Academy. 27: 331-6. Mr. '06. Child Labor a National Problem. S. M. Lindsay. Annals of the American Academy. 27: 364-70. Mr. '06. Essentials of a Child Labor Law for the District of Columbia. H. J. Harris. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 50-6. Ja. '07. Obstacles to the Enforcement of Child Labor Legislation. Florence Kelley. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 57-60. Ja. '07. National Protection for Children. Jane Addams. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 61-70. Ja. '07. Child Labor Laws of the Ohio Valley. J. H. Morgan. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 93-103. Ja. '07. Enforce- ment of Child Labor Legislation in Illinois. E. T. Davies. BIBLIOGRAPHY xix ♦Annals of the American Academy. 29: 115-24. Ja. 07. Child Labor and the Nation. A. J. Beveridge. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 135-41. Ja. '07. Attitude of Society toward the Child as an Index of Civilization. Felix Adler. Annals of the American Academy. 29: Sup. 1-64. Ja. '07. 31 : Sup. 1-68. My. '08. Child Labor Handbook of the National Con- sumers' League. Classified comparison of legislation in the various states. *Annals of the American Academy. 31: Sup. 44-6. Ja. '07; Sup. 56-8. My. '08. What Constitutes Effective Child Labor Laws? ♦Annals of the American Academy. 31: Sup. 47-8. Ja. '07. Sup. 59-62. My. '08. Standard Child Labor Law. Annals of the American Academy. 32: Sup. 31-9. Jl. '08. Child Labor in New England. E. W. Lord. Annals of the American Academy. 33: 287-300. Mr. '09. Recent Massachusetts Labor Legislation. F. S. Baldwin. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 63-72. Mr. '09. Child and the Law. A. J. McKelway. Report on child labor legislation in the South. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 153-61. Mr. '09. Present Situation in Illinois, E. T. Davies. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 212-4. Mr. '09. Exemptions to Child Labor Laws. E. W. Frost. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 7-12. Mr. '10. Child Labor Legislation in Massachusetts. Curtis Guild, jr. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 91-5. Mr. '10. En- forcement of Child Labor Laws. Homer Folks. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup, 96-102. Mr. '10, Enforcement of Child Labor Laws in South Carolina, E. J. Watson. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 103-10. Mr. '10. En- forcement of Child Labor Laws in New Hampshire. H. C. Morrison. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 127-9. Mr. '10. Proof-of-Age Records. Jeanie V. Minor. Annals of the American Academy, 35: Sup. 239-74. Mr. '10, Eight-Hour Day and Prohibition of Night Work; Report of a Public Hearing before the Committee on Labor, General Court of Massachusetts, February, 1910. XX BIBLIOGRAPHY Annals of the American A<:aclemy. 38: Sup. 17-23'. Jl. '11. Stand- ards proposed by the United States Commission on Uniform Laws. A. L. Stovall. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 24-30. Jl. '11. What Should We Sacrifice to Uniformity? Florence Kelley. Annals of the American Academy. 38: Sup. 31-8. Jl. '11. Seven Years of Child Labor Reform. Owen R. Lovejoy. Charities. 12: 60-2. Ja. 9, '04. Child Labor in New Jersey. Charities. 12: 343-6. Ap. 2, '04. Foster-Children and the Shop; Placing-out Standards and Child-Labor Laws in DiflFerent States. Florence D. Dale. Charities. 13: 19-25. O. i, '04. Child Labor and the Law, Homer Folks. Charities. 13: 525-31. Mr. 4, '05. Child Labor Campaign. S. M. Lindsay. Charities. 14: 1024-6. Ag. 26, '05. Enforcement of Child Labor Legislation. Owen R. Lovejoy. Charities and the Commons. 21: 480-1. D. 26, '08. New Louis- iana Child Labor Law. Jean M. Gordon. Chautauquan. 46: 217-25. Ap, '07. Child Labor Legislation in England. Owen R. Lovejoy. Elementary School Teacher, 9: 51 1-6. Je. '09. Child-Labor Leg- islation. S. P. Breckinridge. Outlook. 85: 360-4. F. 16, '07. Evil of Child Labor. A. J. Mc- Kelway. Outlook. 90: 564-5. N. 14, '08. Recent Child Labor Legislation in Canada. Review of Reviews. 42: 593-6. N. '10. Six Years' Battle for the Working Child, Owen R. Lovejoy. Survey. 22: 321-4. My. 29, '09, Pennsylvania's Child Labor Laws. F. S, Hall. Survey. 23: 981-2, Mr, 26, '10, Ohio's Child Labor Relief Law. E. N. Clopper. Survey. 24: 570-2, Jl, 2, '10, Year's Progress in Child Labor Legislation. Owen R, Lovejoy, World To-Day, 12: 427-30, Ap. '07. Fight to Save the Children. A. J. McKelway. SELECTED ARTICLES ON CHILD LABOR INTRODUCTION Our -Pilgrim forefathers brought the child labor problem with them in the Mayflower. Combined with an earnest belief that idleness imperiled the souls, even of children, were the stern necessities of life in a rigorous wilderness. Paupers, even though of tender years, were by no means to become public charges if by incessant industry they could be made to earn enough to keep themselves in food and shelter. Literature has pictured the bound girl and boy for us. In those days the lot of all children was to work, and the primitive home afforded ample scope for the activities of many little toilers. It was a matter of moral significance as well as industrial economy to keep all hands oc- cupied, so that women and children were forced into the early factories wherever home work failed to be sufficient to occupy them. With the invention of machinery for factories, more women and children have been called to the slaughter as thfe domestic arts were supplanted by factory products. The idea of the moral necessity of incessant toil for little hands vanished along with many worthier ideals of our Pilgrim fathers. In place of it we have industrial greed calling for constant sacrifice of little bodies and growing minds. When society woke to a realization of this sacrifice and its social signif- icance, child labor laws were formulated. Most of these are aimed at factories. In many, large cities the result has been to better conditions as to age limit for employment as well as hours of labor and nature of employment for children. Sanitary and moral conditions of factories employing children have also been subjects of legislation. Hand-in-hand with factory legislation came compulsory school laws — forward movements in the protection of society through its most important asset. One obstacle to success has been the V 2 SELECTED ARTICLES _ growing difficulty, with the influx of low grade immigration, of enforcing these laws. The most thoroughgoing feature of such enforcement seems to be found in laws that fix a penalty on adult responsibility, whether that of the parent, employer, or other contributive agencies. Laws have almost entirely failed to reach home industries. Tired little children stumble home from school to be driven to an infinite variety of work too monotonous and too delicate for little hands, in unsanitary tenements and in surroundings that make for inefficient and vicious citizenship. Compulsory education laws are difficult of enforcement in rural districts, and the farm child is often overworked and under educated. Most child labor laws do not reach the farm child at all. Because of better food and air and sunshine, even though overworked, he has a better chance than the tenement child to arrive at physical maturity with a well developed body and a reasonably active and morally responsive mind; but law does not afford the farm child sufficient protection. It is plain that the tenement and the farm home must be divested of their traditional impregnability, and the child be treated as a potential citizen in spite of the time honored custom of regarding children as belonging exclusively to their , parents. Some states in their zeal for protecting children from their parents and from industrial greed, have made it nearly impossible for children under fourteen years of^ge to engage in any gain- \/^ ful occupation whatever, thus condemning them, out of school hours, to idleness and the streets. No adequate solution of the problem of child management out of school hours has been ar- rived at. Quite as problematic is the right development of public edu- cation. It is coming to be generally believed that education for efficient life involves what amounts to^ a revolution in public education. Industrial education is believed by many to be a partial solution of the child labor problem. The discussion of these problems will gcf on until nowhere » within our borders either ignorance or greed may rob childhood "^ of its birthright or society of an enlightened and efficient citizen- ship. SELECTED ARTICLES American Journal of Sociology. 14: 15-37. July, 1908. Early History of Child Labor in America. Edith Abbott. The introduction of children into our early factories was a natural consequence of the colonial attitude toward child labor, of the provisions of the early poor laws and of philanthropic efforts to prevent children from becoming a public charge, and, above all, of the Puritan belief in the virtue of industry and the sin of idleness. Industry by compulsion, if not by faith, was the gospel preached to the young as well as to the old, and quite frequently to the children of the rich as well as the poor. Thus we find Higginson rejoicing over the "New England Plantation" because "little children here by setting of corn may earne much more than their owne maintenance;" and less than a decade later Johnson was commending the industrious people of Rowley who "built a fulling mill and caused their little ones to be very diligent in spinning cotton wool." This rigorous insistence on industry was, with the New England colonists, not only a matter of conscience but of necessity. For they had seen "the grime and grisly face of povertie coming upon them," and Bradford points out with Puritan simplicity that "as necessitie was a stern task-master over them [the Puritans], so they were forced to be such, not only to their servants but in a sorte to their dearest chil- dren: the which as it did not a little wound ye tender hearts of many a loving father and mother, so it produced likewise sundrie sad and sorrowful effects. For many of their children .... haveing lernde to bear ye yoake in their youth, and wil- ling to bear parte of their parents' burden, were, oftentimes, so 4 SELECTED ARTICLES oppressed with their hevie labours that though their minds were free and willing, yet their bodies bowed under ye weight of ye same and became decreped in their early youth." Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Court Records and Province Laws give evidence of the serious attempt made to prevent idleness among children. In 1640, an order of the Great and General Court of Massa- chusetts required the magistrates of the several towns to see "what couse may be taken for teaching the boys and girles in all towns the spinning of the yarne." And in 1641, "it is desired and will be expected that all masters of families should see that their children and servants should be industri- ously implied so as the mornings and evenings and other seasons may not bee lost as formerly they have bene." In the following year more definite orders are given. For a child to "keep cattle" alone is not to be industrious in the Puritan sense, and it is decreed that such children as have this for their occupation shall also "bee set to some other im- pliment withall as spinning upon the rock, knitting, weveing tape, etc." In 1656 a consideration of the advisability of pro- moting the manufacture of cloth leads to the order that "all hands not necessarily imployed on other occasions, as woemen, girles, and boys, shall and hereby are enjoyned to spin according to their skill and abilitee and that the select- men in every towne doe consider the condition and capacitie of every family and accordingly assess them as one or more spinners." The belief in the necessity and propriety of keeping little children at work may also be read in the early poor law provisions. In dealing with dependent children, as in so many other methods of providing for the poor, the colonies were much influenced by the practice of the mother country. In England, the Elizabethan poor law had provided for the apprenticing of the pauper child, and in the eighteenth, and even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the "philan- thropic device of employing cheap child labor" was much ap- proved. Spinning schools were established and houses of indus- try founded in order to provide for the employment of children. CHILD LABOR 5 Much the same policy was followed in the colonies with regard to the children of the poor. In Plymouth, in 1641, it was ordered "that those that have reliefe from the townes and have children and doe not ymploy them that then it shal be lawfuU for the Towneship to take order that those children shal be put to worke in fitting ymployment according to their strength and abilities or placed out by the Townes." The Town of Boston in 1672 notifies a list of persons to "dispose of their severall children .... abroad for servants, to serve by Indentures accordinge to their ages and capacities," and if they neglect this "the selectmen will take their said chil- dren from them and place them with such masters as they shall provide accordinge as the law directs." The children are both girls and boys, from eight years old up. In 1682 the rebuilding of an almshouse and workhouse in Boston was recommended in order that children who "shamefully spend their time in the streets" and other idlers might be put to work "at ye charge of ye Town." It is not to be assumed that the work of these ap- prenticed children was as great an evil as child labor in a modern factory. In many cases they were employed in the open air and their tasks were only properly disciplinary. The point which is to be emphasized is that child labor was be- lieved in as a righteous institution, and when the transition to the factory system was made it was almost inevitable that this attitude toward children's work should be carried over without any question as to whether circumstances might not have changed. Virginia also looked after the employment of the children of the poor. In 1646 two houses were erected in Jamestown for manufacturing linen. The diflferent counties were respect- ively requested to send two poor boys or girls at least seven or eight years old "to be instructed in the art of carding, knitting and spinning." The Virginia emphasis on the commercial side of child labor became pretty general in the other colonies in the eighteenth century, particularly in the latter half of it when \ 6 SELECTED ARTICLES attention began to be directed to the importance of develop- ing domestic manufactures; and we find that the policy of keeping children at work becomes less and less a question of moral principle, even in New England. It is not so much the virtue of industry about which men are concerned but the fact that child labor is a national asset which may be used to further the material greatness of America. " In the latter half of the eighteenth century, more persist- ent efforts began to be made to further the cloth-making industry, and there is much interest in the possibility of mak- ing children useful to this end. Two Boston newspapers m 1750 announce that it is proposed "to open several spin- ning schools in this Town where children may be taught gratis." In the following year the "Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor" was organized with the double purpose of promoting the . manufacture of woolen and other cloth, and of employing "our own women and children who are now in a great measure idle." Domestic industries became increasingly important dur- ing this period, and children were not only employed in the various processes of manufacture carried on in the house- hold but it was considered a subject for public congratulation that they could be so employed. The report of the governor of New York declares that in his province "every home swarms with children, who are set to spin and card." In 1789 the New York Linen "Manufactory" advertises that "the Directors are disposed to take young boys as apprentices to the linen and cotton branches" and notifies, parents to make application for their children. In the same year President Washington finds a sail duck "manufactory" in Boston where there are fourteen girls "spinning with both hands, the flax being fastened to the waist," and with children (girls) to turn the wheels foi them; that children should be employed at work of this kind seems to have been regarded with- out any misgivings, both in Boston and at Haverhill, where h^ thinks the system more "ingenious." With the introduction of machinery and the opening up of new and great possibilities for manufacturing industries, the CHILD LAHOR 7 employment of children hecanie^ mor e and more g rofitabje ] and we find that their labor is always counted on as a valuable resource, with which to meet the deficiency and high cost of male labor in this country. In the first mills in which machinery was used, children's labor was depended on. ' In 1789 a petition in behalf of the "first cotton factory," that\ of Beverly. Massachusetts, states that "it will afford employ- ! ment to a great number of women and children, many of j whom will be otherwise useless, if not burdensome to society." 1 In Rhode Island, Samuel Slater, the "father of American I Manufactures," employed only children in his first small establishment. Smith Wilkinson's account of this mill, which was published many years later, describes all of the operatives as being between seven and twelve years of age, "I was then," he says, "in my tenth year and went to work for him tending the breaker." When the new government began to consider seriously \ the possible means of developing our "infant industries," we I'liul Hamilton calling attention in his "Report on Manu- factures" to the fact that "children are rendered more useful by manufacturing establishments than they otherwise would be," and Trench Coxe argues that women and children widi the newly discovered power machinery will do the work and meet the demand for factory labor. It was indeed one of the arguments with which the early protectionists most fre- quently met their opponents in the first quarter of the last century. The objection that American labor was most profit- ably employed in agriculture and that to "abstract" this labor . from the soil would be unwise and unprofitable was answered/, by pointing to the children. In the pages of Niles' Register this is done again and again. The work of manufactures does not demand able-bodied men, it is claimed, but "is now better done by little girls from six to twelye years old," One hoary old protectionist in the pages of the same journal carefully works out the exact gain that comes to a typical village from the employing of its children in textile factories. He comes to the conclusion that "if we Suppose that before the establishment of these manufactories, there I 8 SELECTED ARTICLES were two hundred children between seven and sixteen years of age, that contributed nothing towards their maintenance and that they are now employed, it makes an immediate dif- ference of $13,500 a year to the value produced in the town!" Philanthropists like Matthew Carey follow in the wake of colonial traditions which made industry a fetich, and are warm with their praise of manufactures because of the larger field of employment furnished for children. They point to the additional value that can be got from girls between the ages of ten and sixteen, (604,912 bein^ their estimated num- ber) "most of whom are too young or too delicate for agricul- ture," and in contrast call attention -to the "vice and' immorali- ty to which children are exposed by a career of idleness.' Indeed the approval of child labor is met with on all sides. Com- mendation was solicited for Baxter's machines on the ground that they could be turned, one sort by children from five to ten years and the other by girls from ten to twenty years. Governor Davis of Massachusetts calls attention in one of his messages to the fact that not only the machines in the textile manufacure but '"thousands of others equally impor- tant, are managed and worked easily by females and children." Moreover the employment of children varied not only from state to state but from district to district. Child la- bor was much less extensive in Massachusetts than in Rhode Island. Samuel Slater had established in Providence and its vicinity the plan of employing families in his mills — a transplanting of the system with which he had been familiar in England. The factory village of the Rhode Island type, therefore, was composed of families entirely dependent upon their labor in the mills, and the mill children lived at home with their parents. On the other hand, in towns like Lowell and Waltham in Massachusetts, the operatives were almost entire- ly farmers' daughters, who, being away from their own homes, were cared for in corporation boarding-houses. The result 'was. that since the cost of their board was more than a child could earn, the employment of children was not profitable. . Kirk Boott's estimate for Lowell in 1827 was that, in six mills employing 1,200 persons, nine-tenths of the operatives were CHILD LABOR 9 females and only twenty were from twelve to fourteen years of age. But that children were often employed very young, even in so-called model places like Waltham and Lowell, can- not be questioned. Mrs. Robinson, who gives us a delightful if somewhat optimistic account of the early mill girls, was only ten years old when she went to work in the Tremont Mills, and Lucy Larcom was only eleven when she became a little dofifer on the Lawrence Corporation. Looked at through an historical perspective our modern child-labor problem seems to have been inherited from the indus- trial and social life of the colonies, as well as from the industrial revolution and the establishment of the factory system. /The having "all hands employed" was a part of the Puritan idea of virtue, and although the employment of children tended to become more and more for commercial purposes rather than for moral righteousness, the old moral arguments were used and are still used to support the commercialized system. It is clear and unmistakable that the colonial policy of promoting thrift and industry was skillfully used in the early part of the nine- teenth century by the "friends of industry" who saw in child labor a useful instrument for the developing of our national resources. Such documents as Samuel Slater's time list for his first group of operatives, all children, the memorandum of the hiring out of Dennis Rier and his family of little children from Newburyport, or Lucy Larcom's "Strange Story of a Little Child Earning Its Living" all point to a general acceptance of the propriety of children's labor in the early days of the factory system. That so little interest was taken in the. subject until the last two decades is due, perhaps, to the fact that our social reform movement belongs to recent, if not contemporary, history. A consciousness of our social sins today does not mean that they are of sudden growth, but rather that public opinion has slowly become enlightened enough to take cognizance of them. Arena. 28: 370-8. October, 1902. Movement to restrict Child Labor. Leonora Beck Ellis. The slavery of little children in the cotton mills of the South is a deplorable evil, but, unhappily, not a new crime even lo SELECTED ARTICLES against modern civilization. Certain mistakes and sins peculiar to industrial development seem to repeat themselves no less persistently than those of political history. Precisely one hundred and six years ago, there was pub- lished by Dr. Aikin of England a little work descriptive of the country and the people around Manchester, a town that even in 1795 had grown to be the manufacturing center of Great Britain. Page after page of this brief but valuable contribu- tion to earlier economic literature reads as if written concern- ing the Lowell or Fall River operatives of a generation back, or concerning those who this very day are plying spindle and loom in Augusta, Ga., Charlotte, N. C, Columbia, S. C, and Huntsville, Ala. After pointing cut that the sudden invention, within his own day, of machines for the abridgment of labor had already exerted a most surprising influence in extending British trade, as well as calling in hands from all parts, "particularly," he adds, "children for the cotton mills," Dr. Aikin goes on to state that domestic life was seriously endangered by the ex- tensive employment of women and girls in the factories; for ignorance of all household duties had quickly become the rule among them. The old-fashioned economist proceeds: "The females are wholly uninstructed in knitting, sewing, and other domestic affairs requisite to make them frugal wives and mothers. This is a very great misfortune to them and to the public, as is sadly proved by a comparison of the labourers in husbandry and of manufacturers in general. In the former we meet with neatness, cleanliness, and comfort; in the latter with filth, rags, and poverty." These observations, commonplace reading now but startling enough in that early day of the spinning and weaving mill, may well be supplemented by another English work, "The Historv of the Factory Movement,^' in which the author says: "In stench, in heated rooms, amidst the constant whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet are kept in cease- less action, forced into unnatural activity." Still further to corroborate such testimony regarding this period of England's industrial progress, there are the well- CHILD LABOR ii known '"Memoirs of Robert Blincoe/' the Blue-books at the be- ginning of the nineteenth centur\-, and the letters and speeches of Lord Ashley, afterward famous as that Earl of Shaftes- bury who so unfalteringly championed the cause of the Eng- lish working-people, thus devoting his great powers to pre- serving the very life-blood of the English nation. Xo more authorities need be mentioned, though many others tell the same story of grinding toil, domestic neglect, ultimate disease and deformity, startling mortality, and appalling deg- radation. The picture of Shaftesbury at the factory gates in that dead and gone age, watching the despondent, sunken- cytd children issuing forth, scanning pitifully the numerous maimed and distorted forms among them, the unvarying hope- lessness of the hollow little faces, cannot be forgotten while a semblance of those conditions exists in any corner of the civil- ized globe. No one fails to recognize that, even if this man had stood utterly alone in his comprehension and pity of the misery before him, some revolution must have issued from such an hour. As early as 1802, an act was passed in the British Parlia- ment "for the preservation of the health and morals of ap- prentices and others employed in cotton and other mills." Here begins the history of legislation restrictive of child labor. The inconsiderable exception of those Russian enactments peculiar in their class, bearing the early dates of 1763 and 1764, which, by protecting to a very slight degree the toiler in general, somewhat shielded childhood also, need scarcely be noted, since the fact remains unaltered that we must look to England for the most complete and authentic history of child labor and the evils in its train, as well as for a record of the earliest and most effective remedial measures applied to the uprooting of such evils. When the elder Sir Robert Peel, worthy pioneer of labor legislation, had secured the passage of the act of 1802 amelio- rating in a limited sense the condition of child labor in cotton and woolen mills, the most pernicious features of the system disappeared for a time. The hours of work were by the re- quirements of this bill reduced to only twelve per day! They 12 SELECTED ARTICLES had been fifteen or sixteen. Public sentiment was so deeply- stirred that the degrading custom of apprenticing the parish poor, half-witted children, and other incapables, to the mill- owners, had also to be discontinued. Yet, as contrasted with the existing evils of the day, the re- sults accomplished by this first prohibitive labor legislation must appear to us meager, sorry, unworthy of the originator as well as of the advanced social state of England in general. Children other than apprentices streamed into the factories, and the cottage life of Great Britain shortly began to feel and show the depletion. During the whole of the period from 1800 to 1820, continuing, though in a slightly modified form, to 1840 or 1850, the effects of that merciless system of child labor in the Lancastrian and adjacent mills were shown in the early deaths of the majority of such workers and in the distorted forms of the majority of the survivors. Gibbins, who has faithfully chronicled that period, speaks also of the disastrous effects upon the women and grown-up girls, and goes on to write as follows of the deplorable system: "A curious inversion of the proper order of things was seen in the domestic economy of the victims of this cheap labour system ; for women and girls were superseding men in manu- facturing labour, and, in consequence, their husbands had often to attend, in a shiftless, slovenly fashion, to those household duties which mothers and daughters, hard at work in the factories, were unable to fulfill. Worse still, mothers and fathers in some cases lived upon the killing labour of their little children, by letting them out to hire to manufacturers, who found them cheaper than their parents." Here is the same sorry story that we have learned by heart from a more modern page in New England's economic and domestic history, and, alas ! the same story that is to-day tak- ing living shape in the factory towns of our Southern States, barring such modifications as grow out of a forced concession to the demands of the present era. Indeed, in every nation, age, and section, when a quickly growing industry such as textile manufacturing has gathered to its sudden needs all available labor, calling the woman from hearthstone duties and CHILD LABOR 13 the child from lessons and play, there is read the same fearful tale, the same inescapable disaster must come in due sequence before the land is shaken into recognition and resistance of the evil. No State's experience seems wholly to save another from having to pass through its own. The emphatic dogma of certain creeds that requires experiential knowledge of sin to precede the perfect joy of regeneration appears to be the prevailing law in this phase of development also. In England, although Sir Robert Peel's measure of 1802 was soon fought into ineffectiveness by the might of the manu- facturers, who were shortly open enough in crowding their foul-smelling torture-places again with young and tender children, yet the public had been aroused and moreover the fact had been demonstrated, even if feebly, that there was efficacy in restrictive legislation. The strength of the races bound together by Anglo-Saxon traits and traditions has Iain preeminently in their recognition of the responsibilities of the future quite as much as the present. The first element to be considered in the race's future is the health — physical, mental, f and moral — of the coming generations. When Englishmen \ began to tell one another, not in Lancaster alone but from end p to end of Britain, that the intelligence of the future genera- tions of working-people, bone and sinew of the nation, was being stultified, their bodily powers reduced, and their moral tone lowered by the arduous labors and unclean surroundings of immature children, it required no prophetic tongue to fore- tell remedial legislation close at hand. But, although England to-day enjoys the enviable distinction ) of having the best regulated factory system in the world, she arrived at this, as she arrives at most things, by slow grada- tions. Troublous signs and portents in the first third of the nineteenth century hurried Parliament into measures that merely temporized — measures that later were with difficulty displaced by effective and permanent laws. Criminnlity. among thejaboring classes showed a fright f jjLin crease _by the time a generatioiPHad' worked through the mills, going "blunted in morals and blind in intellect from the sphere of childhood to full political sovereignty." Next, it was made matter of 14 SELECTED ARTICLES public information that the manufacturing and mining districts could no longer supply their quota of able-bodied men for the army, while military officials entered constant complaint of the itli erior size and strength of the recruits furnished. The cause could not be denied, but unfortunately the remedy required much debate and many experiments. Champion after champion appeared before Parliament praying that the children of the State be defended. The manu- facturers, panoplied in greed and gold, constituted a host diffi- cult to gain ground from; but the righteous cause pressed on step by step. In 1815 Sir Robert Peel again urged the matter with such overwhelming arguments that Parliament was con- strained to the appointment of a "Committee of Inquiry" to investigate conditions and make honorable and fair report be- fore the body. The issue of this investigation was the enactment, in 1819, of a law forbidding the employment of children under nine years of age in factories and limiting the hours of labor of those under sixteen to twelve a day, with one hour and a half taken from this for meals. In 1825 Sir John Cam Hobhouse secured the passage of a measure that went a step further, and, among other provisions, contained a requirement for abridging the hours of labor on Saturdays. The act of 1831 prohibited night work to all between the ages of nine and twenty-one — a most important point gained ; moreover, it limited the hours of labor of all persons under eighteen years to twelve a day except on Saturdays, when the Hmit was nine hours. But it was not until 1833, when Lord Ashley, afterward Earl of Shaftesbury, came to the front as the advocate of pro- tective legislation for the working classes, that sufficiently stringent measures were taken to prevent the decay of England. During his long career, one statutory enactment after another was fought through Parliament, each bringing about some urgently needed modification as regards hours, conditions, and age of factory operatives. When these had culmination in the Ten Hours' bill of 1847, the Minimum Age bill of 1874, and the excellent amendments of these in 1878 and 1891, the CHILD LABOR 15 necessary bulwark against national decadence might at last be called complete. Since 1847, no child under thirteen years of age has been allowed to work exceeding five to seven hours a day in English mills, and no person under eighteen exceeding ten hours. In 1874, the age for a full day's work was raised to fourteen years and stringent provisions made for the attendance at school between work periods. The measure of 1878 consoli- dated and amended all existing laws for the regulation of child labor and provided adequate means for their enforcement. By this measure the employment of children under ten years was totally prohibited, a limit that was in 1891 raised to eleven years. Greatly improved sanitation was also provided for in the 1878 enactment, and adequate safeguards against accidents were set up. Periodic medical certificates were required from all operatives under sixteen years ; employees were compelled to obtain weekly certificates proving the necessary school at- tendance, and a sufficient number of inspectors was demanded to execute the provisions of this comprehensive act. Such is, in brief, the history of what has come to be called the child-labor movement in England. To follow it at similar length in France, Germany, Russia, Austria, is impossible in a single article. The processes were much the same in all ad- vanced European nations, and the ultimate results were like those enumerated. The age limit for the beginning of work in textile factories is a year higher in these countries than in Great Britain, but other provisions scarcely average so well. Yet, on the whole, their regulations are so nearly uniform with those of England that we may well leave them for the present and turn to our own country. In this Western Republic, the introduction of machinery for textile manufactures on a large scale was much later than in England ; therefore, the demand for remedial legislation re- lating to factory workers cannot be traced back to so early a period. But no sooner were the large mills established in New England, early in the last century, than the curse began to be felt. The agile fingers and feet of little children were needed here as in old England; their cheap lives and unaccounted little 4 i6 SELECTED ARTICLES souls were bartered as readily here as there. , They were crowded into the new infernos, and the river towns where the great mills hummed were shortly rich from such barter and sale. The struggle to rescue the little ones was initiated in Massa- chusetts about 1830. Six years later an inadequate law for pro- tection was passed; but it was not until 1866 that this strong commonwealth was able to enact the first really effective measure, nor until 1894 that she could write upon her statute- books the law prohibiting children under thirteen years of age from being regularly employed in textile factories. Excellent limitations as to hours and provision for education, are now embodied in her code, and to-day the Bay State stands a fair pattern for others in the Union in regard to this most import- ant phase of protective legislation. Connecticut followed Massachusetts closely in throwing the State's protective arm around her children, New York and Pennsylvania pressing behind Connecticut, and others falling gradually into line, until, at the opening of the twentieth cen- tury, twenty-six out of the sisterhood could show statutory en- actments of this nature worthy to rank with those of Great Britain. At present all eyes are turned upon the South Atlantic and Gulf States, to ascertain the results of the movement now be- ing agitated there. As manufacturing reached them tardily, child labor in textile mills was an unknown evil in this section until very recent times. Even fifteen years ago the factories were few, and the half-million spindles, widely scattered, drew mainly cheap adult labor to their service. ' The marvelous industrial transformation of the last decade has wrought as great a change in the moral questions bound up with such development. The mills in the South are sud- denly reckoned by the hundred.s, soon by the thousands, and the people of that section are confronted with the appalling fact that in many of these mills from 20 to 30 per cent, of the operatives are under sixteen years of age, hundreds of them being children of twelve, eleven, ten, and in some cases even younger. CHILD LABOR 17 Public feeling has been greatly stirred on this score during the last two or three years, and bills for regulating child labor are now pending before the General Assembly of every cotton- growing State that has also entered cotton manufacturing. Tennessee, a sister of these and. although reckoned chiefly a grain-producing and pastoral State, yet rich in minerals and boasting many large woolen mills, merits particular mention as having already passed an enactment fixing the age of employ- ment of children in factories, mines and similar places of labor at fourteen years, while Louisiana has for almost a decade re- stricted the age of girls to fourteen and of boys to twelve. But kindred measures, though, earnestly fought for during last winter's legislative sessions in Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas, were unfortunately lost in each case, adding a new defeat to those of several preceding years. It is on this account that the movement in the South is now attracting an interest so eager and widespread, both at home and in England. The ad- vocates of protection are claiming that a victory is at hand, pointing to the overwhelming gain they had made in each of these four States last winter over the preceding season, and estimating, with sound reason, that a similar gain in the twelve months ending will put them out of reach of defeat. But the danger is, lest in their optimism they have forgotten with what unparalleled efforts the capitalists and promoters have worked against the measure in the same period. This, then, is in brief outline the story of the movement to preserve Anglo:-Saxon_children, and the great countries they stand for, from premature blight and decay. The logic of such a movement needs no exposition, nor can its importance as an element in the maintenance of the economic and moral su- premacy of the foremost two nations be overestimated. Yet. again, the ultimate issue in this latest section to face such a crisis requires no seer to foretell. The triumph of right may be still a while delayed ; but that it is coming at a more speedy pace to the New South than to New or Old England no one acquainted with conditions will attempt to deny. i8 SELECTED ARTICLES Annals of the American Academy. 25: 417-29. May 19, 1905. Child Labor in the United States and Its Great Attendant Evils. Felix Adler. At the beginning of 1903 it is estimated that there were in the factories of the South — chiefly cotton factories — about 20.000 children under the age of twelve. Twelve is a very early age at which to begin work; but under the age of twelve, and 20,000, and in the United States of America — who would have credited it? And these children, too, not the children of foreign im- migrants, but for the most part the offspring of the purest American stock of this continent; and some of these children, as eye witnesses attest, were at their work even more than twelve hours, as much as thirteen and fourteen hours a day. Where are our instincts of mercy, where is the motherliness of the women of this country, whither is the chivalry of our men that should seek a glory in protecting the defenseless and the weak? Within the last two years child labor laws have been passed which have doubtless reduced the number of children under twelve years of age in the factories; how great the reduction is it is impossible to say. But the South is by no means singular, though it has of late been more conspicuous in its employment of child labor than other sections of the country. And there is no excuse for adopting a pharasaical attitude toward the southern communities and saying: "We are glad that we are not like these." For in the first place, in not a few instances it is northern capital in- vested in southern mills that shares the responsibility for the conditions named; and then again, while the proportion of child to adult labor in the South is greater than anywhere else in the country, the absolute number of children employed is greater in the industrial centers of the North. The lack of adequate statistical inquiries makes it impossible to express in figures the extent of the evil of child labor. But wherever investigation is undertaken, wherever the surface is even scratched, we are shocked to find to what an extent the disease is eating its way underneath, even in those States in which CHILD LABOR 19 legislation on the subject is almost ideal. The laws are admir- able, but the enforcement is defective. Thus glancing over the reports recently transmitted to the National Child Labor Com- mittee by its agents I find that in New Jersey, in one of the woolen mills, 200 children under the legal age are at work. In the glass industry of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the evils of premature work and of night work are combined. A boy, Willie Davis, for instance, thirteen years old, works on alternate nights from 6 130 p. m. to 4 130 a. m., earning ninety cents a day. In one of the glass houses of Wheeling, W. Va., forty boys were seen by the agent, apparently from ten to twelve years of age ; one child looked not over nine years old, "but was too busy to be interviewed." In this place 3,000 children of the school age were found to be out of school. In this town there "J^ are also many cigar factories that employ children. And speaking of the tobacco industry reminds me of the case of a child worker just reported from Pittsburgh. The boy is employed in a toby factory — "tobies" being a cheap kind of cigar — in rolling tobies. He is twelve years of age ; he has already been at work for seven month sj^ Vthe hours of labor" are trom a. m. to 8 p. m., inter-^ ^missTon tor lunch fifteen minutes, for supper twenty minutejl 'in allt hirtv-£ve minutes in f ourt een hours^ /Tle works ISaturday nightsfrom seven until midnight^ and sometimes until 2 Sunday morning; does not work Saturdays, but works Sundays. The room in which he rolls his "tobies" is described as dark and poorly ventilated ; the atmosphere is charged with tobacco dust. The boy seems gentle and uncomplaining, but he coughs ; and when he was asked whether he was well, he pointed to his chest and to his back and said : "I have a pain here and there." And in our own state of New York, which in point of legisla- tion is in advance of all the rest, the infractions of the law that occur are frightful enough, as the petition for the removal of the present Factory Inspector sent to the Governor by the Child Labor Committee of New York plainly proves. In a single one of the canning factories where abuses are particularly flagrant, the foreman himself estimated the number of children at work in violation of the law to be 300. Children as young as ten, nine, and seven were found to be at work side by side with their mothers, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. In the Chelsea Jute Mills of 20 SELECTED ARTICLES Brooklyn, an establishment which acquired an unenviable not- oriety in connection with the Annie Ventre case some months ago, there are reported to be at the present time 85 children at work under the legal age. In the sweated trades the evils are the same, or if possible worse. The report further states that the number of violations, not of the child labor laws in particular but of the factory laws in general, are alarmingly on the in- crease; 33,000 reported in 1901, 50,000 in 1903. And now let us briefly consider some of the arguments that are advanced in favor of child labor, and the grounds upon which they are to be rejected. The first argument is, that neces- sity knows no compunction ; that however undesirable it may seem to harness young children to the yoke of toil, it is impos- sible to do without them, because if child labor laws are enforced certain important branches of industry will cease to be profitable. For instance, in the glass industry. It is said that this industry cannot be carried on without the aid of young boys, and of the textile industries in the South the same has been averred. This argument is as old as human avarice, and it appears again and again in modern economic history. It is fallacious, for the rea- son that cheap labor is not really cheap, and that higher paid labor — in this case the labor of adults as compared with that of children — is not really more expensive. The prohibition of the cheap labor of the child is favorable to the invention and use of labor-saving devices; it challenges and promotes a more efficient organization of the business; and it imparts a higher value to the product, because of the greater skill, vigor and interest of the labor that enters into the pro- duct. As a matter of fact, at the time when the two prin- cipal industries of England — the textile and the coal mining industries — were prohibited from employing children, there was a tremendous outcry, and it was freely predicted that those branches would cease to be profitable, and especially that England would cease to be able to compete in the matter of textiles and coal with foreign countries. But what has been the event? That England is stronger to-day — not in spite of, but because she has forbidden, child labor — in just those two branches of industry than she was at the time when those sinis- ter predictions were uttered. And so if it is said that the glass CHILD LABOR 21 industry cannot be carried on without child labor there is the fact to be noted that the largest glasshouse in the state of Ohio is carried on without child labor, and does not appear to be con- ducted at a loss. A second argument is the attempt to block a humanitarian movement for a seemingly humanitarian reason, the reason being that the labor of these little hands is necessary to relieve the pov- erty of their families, and that it is cruel to deprive the poor of that increase of their weekly earnings — even if it be only two or three dollars — which little children are able to supply. In answer to this plea it must be said that the actual state of the case is sometimes quite different from what is supposed. For in- stance, I have in mind the case of a boy who, fifteen years of age, was sadly overworked, his hours being from 6 a. m. to 10 p. m. The father of this boy earns from six to seven dollars a day. Surely this is not a case in which the necessity of the parent excuses the overtaxing of the strength of a young boy. In other cases parents are found to lead a parasitic life, reversing the order of nature, the adults living at the expense of the children. Econom- ically it is brought home to us, that the wage earned by children is not really an increase of the family earnings ; that where there is competition between children and men the wages of the men are thereby reduced ; so that a family in which man, woman, and child are breadwinners, may not earn more — sometimes earns less — than the income gained by the man when the man alone was the breadwinner. And again, in those cases of genuine hard- ship which undoubtedly occur, especially where women have been left widowed with the care of a family upon their hands, and where the small earnings of children ten and eleven years of age do make an appreciable difference (cases have occurred of loyal little men under the age limit coming to the mills with tears in their eyes and begging to be allowed to labor for their mothers' sake) ; I say in such cases it is wiser for society to com- mend indeed the loyalty of these little fellows, but to send them to school, and to follow the example of Ohio, which has spread a law upon its statute books looking to the public relief of des- titute families of this kind. It is better for the state to furnish outright relief than to see the standard of living of whole sec- tions of the population lowered by child competition. 22 SELECTED ARTICLES Y These are the two main arguments. There is one other argu- ment, so un-American and so inhuman that I am almost ashamed to quote it, and yet it has been used, and I fear is secretly in the minds of some who would not openly stand for it. A manufacturer standing near the furnace of a glass house and pointing to a procession of young Slav boys who were car- rying the glass on trays, remarked: "Look at their faces, and you will see that it is idle to take them from the glass-house in order to give them an education ; they are what they are, and will always remain what they are." He meant that there are some human beings — and these Slavs of the number — who are mentally irredeemable, so fast asleep intellectually that they cannot be awakened ; designed by nature, therefore, to be hew- ers of wood and drawers of water. This cruel and wicked thing was said of Slavs ; it is the same thing which has been said from time immemorial by the slave owners of their slaves. First they degrade human beings by denying them the opportu- nity to develop their better nature; no schools, no teaching, no freedom, no outlook; and then, as if in mockery, they point to the degraded condition of their victims as a reason why they should never be allowed to escape from it. These are the arguments advanced for child labor. What I have summarily said may suffice for their refutation ; but I shall not content myself merely with the negative attitude of meeting our opponents, and I should like in approaching the close of my address to present the grand positive reason why child servitude should be abolished throughout the length and breadth of this land. The battle is sometimes put on what are called sentimental grounds. Any one who has children of his own cannot help enduring a certain anguish in thinking of such cases as those of the little children treading up and down those stairs of the inferno of the English coal mines with buckets of coal on their backs, or of the little children in the mills returning to their squalid homes at 2.30 in the morning, or of the little boy rolling "tobies" in the dark and ill-ventilated room for fourteen mortal hours, coughing, with a pain "here and there." And when we picture these things and realize what they mean we are apt to cry out in a sort of wild indignation, saying: "These things must stop ; we will not permit them to go on." In other words. CHILD LABOR %^ we think of the individual children; and as we are men and women capable of sympathetic feeling, our hearts bleed for them. But in addition w^e must never forget that beyond the individ- ual interest there is*^ vast social interest at stake, the interest of American civilization, of human civilization, of all those genera- tions that are to succeed us. The reason why child labor must be abolished, apart from the sufferings of individuals, is one which biology and ethics combine to enforce upon us. The higher the type of living being the finer the organism, the longer the period of time required for its maturing. The young of birds and of the lower animals are full grown after a few days or a few weeks. They acquire with incredible rapidity the use of inherit- ed instincts, and after the shortest infancy are ready to take up the struggle for existence after the fashion of their species. The human being requires a period of preparation extending over years before he is ready to take up the struggle for exist- ence after the human fashion. First infancy, then childhood, then early youth ; and during all that period he must remain de- pendent on the protection and the nurture of adult kinsfolk. If that period is curtailed the end of Nature in this highest type of living being — man — is thwarted. It is for this reason that pre- mature toil is such a curse. The child must develop physically, and to do so it must play; the child must develop mentally, and to do so it must be sent to school ; the child must develop morally, and to do so it must be kept within the guarded precincts of the home. The physical effects of precocious childhood are arrest of growth, puny, stunted stature, anaemia, thin, emaciated limbs, sunken cheeks and hollow eyes ; and diseases of all kinds — of the lungs, of the joints, of the spine — for arrest of development does not mean mere arrest, but means malformation. The mental effects of precocity labor are likewise arrest of mental development; and this, too, means not only a stopping short but a development in the wrong direction. The brilliant but short-lived intelligence of many newsboys, their high-strung excitability, their sinister anticipation of world knowledge, fol- lowed often by torpor and mental exhaustion later on are an instance in point. We laugh at and applaud their sallies of wit, 24 SELECTED ARTICLES their quick repartee, their seeming ability to play the game of life on a par with adults; we do not look beyond the moment, nor count the cost they pay. And the moral effects, as is to be expected, are of the same sort: loosening of family ties, roving the streets, familiarity with vice and the haunts of vice, a startling independence before the moral nature is fit to maintain independence, a process of selec- tion so trying that while sometimes it leads those subjected to it to distinguished achievement, more often it leads to ruin. The finer the type the longer the period needed for the ma- turing of it. In the case of youths dedicated to the professions, the period of preparation at present extends far into the twenties. In the case of all who are to be component members of this American nation, to carry on its great traditions and help in solv' ing its tremendous problems, the period of preparation should not be cut short below the sixteenth year. This is the standard toward which we are working, toward which we hope to approxi- mate — more rapidly in the older communities, more patiently and with a due regard to all the interests involved in the less ad- vanced communities. But we look forward to the day when the standard shall be adopted in all the American Commonwealths, and the total abolition of child labor in every form shall be the honorable achievement of the entire American people. The emancipation of childhood from economic servitude is a social reform of the first magnitude. It is also one upon which we can all unite. There are so many proposed reforms upon which it is impossible to secure agreement, different minds, though alike honest, inevitably differing with regard to them. But here is a reform upon which we can agree, which must ap- peal to every right thinking person, and which is urgent. And one particular advantage of it I should like to point out, namely, that it is calculated to be the best induction into the right spirit of social reform, that it will attune the community in which it is achieved to a favorable reception of sane and sound social re- forms generally. Because if once it comes to be an understood thing that a certain sacredness "doth hedge around" a child, that a child is industrially taboo, that to violate its rights is to touch profanely a holy thing, that it has a soul which must not be CHILD LABOR 25 blighted for the prospect of mere gain; if this be once generally conceded with regard to the child the same essential reasoning will be found to apply also to the adult workers; they, too, will not be looked upon as mere commodities, as mere instruments for the accumulation of riches ; to them also a certain sacredness will be seen to attach, and certain human rights to belong, which may not be infringed. I have great hopes for the adjustment of our labor difficulties on a higher plane, if once we can gain the initial victory of inculcating regard for the higher human nature that is present potentially in the child. And there is one additional word which, if I may so far en- croach upon your patience, I should like to say : It is not enough to shut the children out of the factory, we must also bring them into the school, and compel parents, if necessary, to send them to school ; the movement for compulsory education everywhere goes hand in hand, and must go hand in hand, with the child labor movement. The child labor movement has for its object to fence off an open space within which the educational institutions of the coun- try may do their perfect work. The school has for its object to win from the human beings, confided to it the human qualities latent in them, imagination, taste, skill, appreciation, vigorous reasoning, will power, character; to fulfill the ends of Nature in the finest organism, the highest type of living being which she has yet produced. A more convincing appeal than comes to us from these two movements jointly, the child labor and the educa- tional movements, in my judgment, cannot be conceived of. And without the former the latter cannot succeed. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 1-8. January, 1907. Poverty and Parental Dependence as an Obstacle to Child Labor Reform. Homer Folks. The history of efforts for child labor legislation shows that they usually pass through three stages before reaching final success. When an agitation for a child labor law is started the first objection raised to it is that there are no children employ- ed, or not at least any corrsiderable number. After good people 26 SELECTED ARTICLES have gone to the mines and factories and have counted the children, and have gathered undeniable data disproving that statement, the next objection that is brought forv^^ard is that While there may be some children employed, after all such employment is a good thing for the children, and some very eminent men are named as having been employed in their childhood, by reason of which they became very distinguished when grown up. After further research as to the evil effects of child labor, such as has been made at great length by our two assistant secretaries, and by many others, and after it has demonstrated beyond question that this employment of children is bad for the children, there still remains one stronghold to be taken. It is then said: Well, yes, there are some children employed, and that perhaps it is not altogether exactly what one would regard as ideal, but nevertheless the earnings of these children are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of their families. Many of them, it is said, are the children of widows. In other cases their fathers have deserted or are ill, and, except for the earnings of these children, the families would suffer and might starve. That is the final stronghold to be captured by the friends of progressive legislation, not only for the restriction of child labor, but also for compulsory school attendance and for the exclusion of children from certain occupations dangerous to health or morals. What was said by the friends of such legislation until quite recently was substantially this, that we did not believe that there were many children whose earnings were really needed by their families; that only a small propor- tion of the children could be the children of widows; that only a small porportion of those widows were dependent upon the earnings of their children, and that in so far as it might be true that the earnings of the children were needed by theii families, it was, in our opinion, a great deal better that their income should be supplemented from some other source, and, furthermore, that it was our conviction that other resources would be at hand if those earnings were stopped. That was a CHILD LABOR 27 word of hope and of confidence, and of conviction indeed, but it was not at that time founded on actual experience. The task devolved upon me is to set forth the results of several years of actual experience in this direction, and if I speak with comparatively little first hand knowledge of child labor legislation and problems, I can speak with sixteen years of uninterrupted experience in the study and actual administra- tion of charity. During the past three years child labor legislation has been adopted in many of the states of the Union, and those who have been most active in procuring that legislation have taken up in earnest the task of providing supplementary incomes, when needed, to replace the earnings of children excluded from employment by the new legislation. We now have back of us several years of observation and experience of t'he actual facts as they exist, and we can now put the hope that we expressed a few years before to the test of practical application. In New York City the local child labor committee some fifteen months ago took this ground, that whenever the child labor law made it impossible for any child under fourteen years of age to be employed, if his previous earnings were a necessary element in the family income, it would give to that family, through the child, what it called a scholarship — a sum of money equal, as nearly as could be ascertained — to the amount the child would have earned, that is to say, from one to three dol- lars per week. An individual member of that committee very generously offered to contribute the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars per annum, or such sum not exceeding that amount as might be necessary to provide these scholarships. Notice of this offer was sent to all the superintendents and principals of the public schools to the State Labor Department, charitable societies, truant officers, settlement workers and social agencies generally. As the result of that experiment, 490 applications for scholar- ships were received from October i, 1905, to December 15, 1906, Of these, 160 have been referred elsewhere, because the diildren were not of the age at which they could have been 28 SELECTED ARTICLES employed previously, that is to say, they were over fourteen, or were under twelve, and were not within the provisions of the recently enacted law. Of the remaining 330 applications coming within the age limits, 95 scholarships have been granted, that is a little less than 30 per cent. Bear in mind that these figures relate to the entire City of New York, with its population in round numbers of 4,250,000 of people, and that with all the publicity attached to this offer, and in the space of nearly fifteen months, only 95 cases have been found in which these scholar- ^ips should be given. These scholarships are adjusted to the probable amount of the child's earnings, ranging from $1 to $3 per week, and the total present outlay per month is at the rate of $5,000 per year, that is to say, it is about $100 per week. It seems possible tlhat in the course of another year there may be some further increase, although the number is very nearly stationary at present. It seems to be well within the mark to say that $10,- 000 at the very most will meet all the deficiencies that arise from the discontinuance of the employment of children by the new law, in so far as such income is a necessary part of the living expenses of the families. Here, as in nearly all the other cities reporting, the scholarship continues until the child reaches the age of legal employment, unless the need therefor ceases at an earlier date. I have been struck, in examining the reports which have been received by the National Child Labor Committee from each of the larger cities of the country, on this question, to find the very different conditions that seem to exist in different cities. In Chicago, for instance, where a similar plan has been in operation under the joint auspices of the Consumers' League and the Bureau of Charities, the total number of scholarships awarded during a period of three years is but fifteen. Only a small percentage of those who filed applications for scholar- ships are found to be actually in need. The scholarships are largely provided by the women's clubs, though the investiga- tions of the families and their oversight is in the hands of the Bureau of Charities. The scholarship is usually $3 per week. CHILD LABOR 29 In Philadelphia, the Public Education Association and Child Labor Committee have established the same plan, and there during the year ending June 30, 1906, the number of scholarships granted has been twenty-eight — about one-fifth of the total number of applicants. There also the investigation of the family is by the Charity Organization Society. The scholar- ships, ranging in amount from 75 cents to $4 per week, are adjusted, not on the basis of the probable earnings of the child if employed, but on the actual need of the family. In St. Louis there is a compulsory school attendance law from which children may be excused, lawfully, on the ground of extreme proverty. The cases that have been so excused were inquired into recently as to the merits of the excuse, and it is reported (July, 1906) that so far as the investigation had gone it indicated that not more than fifty full term exemptions were granted during the past year, and judging by the results so far secured about twenty of these would prove to be cases calling for material assistance if the children attended school, and that the total expenditure for such aid would probably be covered by the sum of $1,000 per year. The Secretary of the Missouri Child Labor Committee reports: "In the case of parents claiming permanent or long-term exemptions in order that their children might work in stores or factories, a success- ful eflfort is being made this year in St. Louis to eliminate all such child labor by providing scholarships for children rec- ommended for exemption by the truant officer. The chairman of the executive committee of the Children's Protective Alliance, Mr. W. O. Nelson, has proposed to the women's clubs of the city to share equally with them the expense of such scholar- ships; and pending action by the women's clubs, Mr. Nelson is personally providing for all these cases, after they have been reported on by the truant officer and carefully investigated by the agents of the St. Louis Provident Association. The cases, of course, accumulate gradually through the year as the truant officers continue their work, so that it is impossible to say at this date how many will present themselves per annum. I have not Mr. Nelson's authority to say what the expense involved 30 SELECTED ARTICLES has thus far been. But a rough preliminary investigation of last year's long-term exemption cases indicated that the number of children properly entitled to scholarships would certainly not exceed fifty, and would probably be less than thirty. Some- thing over a third of the cases approved for exemption by the attendance office are rejected after the Provident Associa- tion's investigation." In Pittsburg, during the year ending June 30, 1906, the number of scholarships granted was three, the amount being $2 per week in each case. The reply from Boston is, to my mind, very significant. I will quote one or two sentences: "Child labor has not been an issue in Massachusetts for many years. In the statutes of 1880 practically no employment of children under fourteen was permitted in school hours. There has been, therefore, in those who are dependents, no new problem to meet by keeping the children in school until fourteen, and there are no special scholarship funds or societies for such children. . . . The public outdoor relief, and the private charitable societies have always worked with the enforcement of the child labor law in mind." That is to say, the standards of relief, both on the part of the public authorities and of the private societies, have been such as contemplate a full enforcement of the child labor law; so that instead of receiving aid in the form of scholarships from some newly-established agency, the parents in case of need receive the aid in the form of relief either from the public officers or from private societies. That appears to be the state of affairs in a number of other cities. In Buffalo for instance, we find that the health department sometimes refers families to the Charity Organization Society, where the operation of the law would otherwise seem likely to work hardship. The families re- ceive relief on the usual plans, but without any system of scholarship. In Minneapolis, the Associated Charities have adopted the scholarship plan, and during the year ending June 30, 1906, ten full scholarships were granted, and in some thirty other cases partial relief was given — a comparatively large number for a CHILD LABOR 31 city of that size, as compared with other cities. About 10 per cent of the applications were approved for some form of aid. It is to be noted that in most of the cities, but not in New York, the amount of the scholarship is not based on the probable earnings of the child were he employed, but on the actual need of the family, aiming to make up the full amount that the family requires in order to live in accord with reason- able standards. The Associated Charities in Kansas City reports that, while the scholarship idea as such has not been developed there, that society assists, from private sources, widows with children, so that the children may attend the public schools and- need not be employed. Such also is the report from Indianapolis, with the further statement that when the recent truancy and factory laws were passed it was expected that there would be a large increase in the demand upon the funds of that society for aiding widows, but as a matter of fact, there was but very little increase of that character. In the City of Baltimore, the law has recently taken effect, and a plan has been adopted by which the bureau of labor and statistics refers to the Charity Organization Society all cases of apparent hardship, most of which, thus far, upon investiga- tion, have been found not to be cases of actual need. From Milwaukee, we have the report that there are no schol- arships, but that the county superintendent of the poor extends additional relief to certain families when it would otherwise be a hardship to require the child to attend school. There are several such cases, and the plan is resulting in better attendance in the public schools. The examination of these reports, with a study of the letters accompanying them, has suggested to me several conclusions, and especially this one — and I speak for myself only, and not as representing the views of the National Child Labor Commit- tee, having had no opportunity for conference with them on this subject — that this is at botton essentially a phase of the relief problem; that it is not primarily an educational problem or a 32 SELECTED ARTICLES problem of enforcement of law, but is ^ relief problem; and that all moneys given out in the form of scholarships, and under these circumstances, should be given with the same care and with the same adequacy and upon the same principles as govern the best relief work. It is not an exceptional thing to find that there are new demands upon relief-giving societies, and that the standards heretofore deemed adequate are no longer adequate. It is frequently necessary for such agencies and for such public offi- cials to revise their judgments as to what constitutes adequate relief, and this is, after all, the fundamental thing in all charit- able work. We may have been in error sometimes in- the past, and have been superficially satisfied in entering upon the rec- ord of a family that it is "self-supporting" without looking far enough ahead, and without considering whether the family is self-supporting with full justice to its future, as well as to its present. It is quite possible that the family may be self- supporting now, but in such a manner as to insure the fact that in a very few years it cannot possibly be self-supporting. The incipient consumptive can remain at work and support his family for a considerable time, but with the certain result that at the end of a short time we will have upon our hands a widow and a family of* children. We have revised our stand- ards of relief-giving in view of our most recent knowledge of the treatment of tuberculosis. Similarly a widow can go out to work by the day for six days in the week, and thus be "self-supporting" and maintain her family, but with the cer- tain result that in a comparatively short time her health must give way and we shall have upon our hands for an indefinite time a woman broken in health and a family of children. Un- der these circumstances, the families are not self-supporting in any proper sense of the term. Our conception of the amount and character of the relief that should be given must be ex- tended and extended and again extended; and it is a similar step that we must take in applying our relief system to families in which there are children who would be employed except for our child labor laws. While all this is true, and while in my opinion the schol- CHILD LABOR 33 arship is a passing phase of the relief problem, it has many tactical and temporary advantages. Charity has come to be something of a yellow dog. No one likes to receive charity; few persons particularly care to be engaged in dispensing re- lief. Institutions supported by charitable gifts always prefer to be known under some other heading. It may be well, there- fore, not to raise that question for the moment and to disguise the relief under some pleasanter name. Furthermore, of course, those who are instrumental in securing child labor legislation feel, and very properly so, a certain moral responsibility for seeing that hardship does not result, even in a small degree, from the 'proposed legislation. Therefore, it is entirely proper and justifiable — it is in some ways desirable — that they should be able to say to the community and to the legislators and to the public authorities that they know of their positive knowl- edge that the families deprived of the earnings of their chil- dren are not suffering; and that as an evidence of good faith they, from funds collected themselves, have met the need. There are perhaps many communities in which relief work is not suflficiently well informed and organized, or is not suffi- ciently strong to meet this situation, and until they can be im- proved — until the relief agencies, public and private, can be educated and strengthened, and induced to adopt the larger view, it may be wiser and, in fact, may be highly important, that some temporary provision of scholarships be made. The important thing, however, from the point of view of- the National Child Labor Committee, is this, that the experi- ence of the past four years has given us the measure of the prob- lem. It has demonstrated the soundness of our earlier posi- tion; that the number of such families needing relief is small; that funds would be forthcoming to meet this need; that the problem is an easily managed one; and that poverty and paren- tal dependence should not be an obstacle to progressive child labor legislation. 34 SELECTED ARTICLES Annals of the American Academy. 29: 19-25. January, 1907. Some of the Ultimate Physical Effects of Premature Toil. Albert H, Freiberg. It is greatly to be regretted that it is as yet not possible to present to this committee a comprehensive report upon the physical effects of premature toil, based upon a thorough and scientific investigation. Many persons express surprise at learn- ing that up to this time no such study has been made. In the course of a recent effort to improve the child labor law of this state, a discussion developed between the committee and a group of manufacturers objecting to certain of its provisions, the committee seeking to show that ten hours of work daily must be considered injurious to the organism of boys between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, even though the employment involved no great muscular exertion. We were met with the request to furnish reliable evidence that this is the case; evi- dence which we were unable to produce, even though we were perfectly sure in our own minds of the truth of our statement. It is apparent that the value of such evidence would be exceed- ingly great in the efforts to secure for the growing child its natural rights; of which eft'orts this meeting is so vigorous an expression. Unless one has devoted some thought to the subject, it might appear to be a task of no great difficulty or magnitude to collect the data incident to such an investigation. However, the re- verse is true, as may be seen from the following requirements, which are none too severe if reliable information is to be ob- tained. It should be required: (o) That the investigation comprehend a large number of children in each of the groups to be mentioned. (b) That the measurements be made by those familiar with such work, in order that they may be trustworthy; and by persons competent to detect physical abnormities even in their beginnings. (r) That a sufficient number of measurements be taken of CHILD LABOR 35 each child so as to insure a convincing record of its physical condition. (d) That the children be examined upon beginning their factory life and at certain intervals until the termination of adolescence. (e) That comparative investigation be made of a large num- ber of children of the same types who have not been engaged in gainful occupations during the most active period of adoles- cence. The value of such an investigation may well be considered inestimable. It would determine beyond doubt whether the charge of physical deterioration from premature toil is a just one or not and would fix definitely the responsibility of the state in the protection of its future citizens and mothers. We feel sufficiently sure of the result of such an investigation, made with skill and impartiality, as to court it most ardently. Upon thoughtful consideration it must, however, appear that the means and power necessary for the execution of so compre- hensive a program cannot be within the reach of a private as- sociation. This should be a function of government, and the need for it might well be looked upon as one of the most important arguments for the establishment of a Children's Bu- reau at Washington. In the absence of data dealing with the investigation of large numbers of toiling children and based upon a systematic plan of observation and record, it may nevertheless be of in- terest to call attention to certain effects of a purely physical character which professional experience has for years been accustomed to look upon as the results of environment and occupation, and especially when considered with reference to the physical peculiarities of the child between the ages of ten and sixteen years. In doing this, effort will be made to avoid that which is purely technical, but also that which is in any way still a matter of supposition rather than observation, and therefore not generally accepted. The role of the play hours in the development of the young child, his innate desire for physical activity and especially in the open, are well recognized by all laymen, and there are 36 SELECTED ARTICLES few indeed who will not acknowledge how important these are in promoting the formative processes which are at this time of life actively going on. The statement that this natural desire for movement and exercise cannot be balked in the child eight to ten years of age, without damage to his physical progress, will meet with little protest, and for the present discussion this is of minor importance, since, by far the greater number of children at work have at least passed their tenth year, and since no state, whose statutes do not ignore the question altogether, has ventured to place the limit for work below this. When the child arrives at its twelfth year, however, it enters a period which, lasting until its seventeenth year as a rule, is characterized not only by those changes of disposition, of mind and soul, of body and appearance, embraced by the term "puberty," but a period also during which the body experiences its most rapid growth in length. As the bones grow longer, at this rapid rate, the muscles controlling these bones must grow longer with them. The muscles must, however, increase not only in length but in volume if their strength is to be propor- tionate to the ever-increasing demands made upon them. That this increase of volume, therefore, of strength, is dependent upon exercise, is common knowledge; that lack of use causes wasting and therefore weakening of muscle is no less so. It is likewise well known that excessive exercise of certain mus- cles will result not in increase of strength but in degeneration and weakening, and that there is no surer way of inducing great fatigue than by using the same set of muscles for a long time without change, thus giving no opportunity for what is called rest but what is really the replenishing of muscle ma- terial which has been consumed. Let us now apply these state- ments in practice; to the case of a girl feeding material to a machine and sitting in one position for hours at a time; to the case of a boy handling small articles of manufacture, having perhaps nothing more to do than to remove them from one ma- chine to another close by, or to perform, in the standing posi- tion, a set of movements with rapidity but involving no test of strength whatever. Such work commonly develops quickness of eye and dexterity of fingers. It is certainly not looked up- CHILD LABOR Z7 on as involving physical strain of any account. Here lies the fallacy; standing and sitting are looked upon as passive and involving no great muscular action. If this were true, why should we then tire so much more easily from standing than from walking, since this apparently requires much more use of the muscles; why so much more easily from holding a weight continuously in one position than from moving it in various directions. As a matter of fact, standing and sitting are possible only by active muscular work, and, when prolonged, have connected with them the disadvantage of permitting but little change of activity to other muscles. It cannot be surprising to learn, therefore, that under these circumstances the tissues yield under unrelieved strain; that the leg and trunk muscles become ex- cessively fatigued and thus compel the assumption, for relief, of faulty postures and attitudes which can at first be voluntar- ily departed from, but which finally take the place of the nor- mal and leave the child more or less permanently deformed. Thus it is that, even before the advent of modern factory em- ployment, certain deformities were recognized as being associ- ated with certain occupations; the expression "baker's legs," for example, will be found in surgical treatises written many years ago. The argument that the labor performed by the child is not hard is therefore only a specious one. Keeping a grow- ing individual at an occupation, for ten hours daily, which in- volves the use of only a limited set of muscles, when he is at an age when nature prompts running and jumping, deprives him of the need for deep breathing, and therefore expansion of the chest, which these bring with them, and of the stimulus to the blood circulation which, although often harmful to the man past middle age, is of the greatest value to the developing or- ganism. However desirable it may be to preserve the normal form and symmetry of the human body, that it may be agreeable to look upon, there is underlying this a factor of greater import to humanity than mere personal vanity. This is the economic factor which takes into account the future of the individual, after the period of immaturity has passed and the child has 38 SELECTED ARTICLES become the citizen and has assumed the responsilibities of parentage. Whatever can be shown to now permanently im- pair wage-earning capacity or to interfere with the performance of family duties, or indeed to shorten the tenure of life, will be acknowledged by all to be of prime importance. I shall not refer to such conditions as general weakness or diminished chest capacity and the tendency to acquire disease in conse- quence thereof, but rather to certain definite deformities which I have had frequent opportunity for observing, both in process of formation and in their final results. For the present, the various occupations of toiling chil- dren may be grouped according as the work is done in stand- ing or sitting position. In general, and there are of course many exceptions, boy's work requires standing and girl's work sitting. It may also be said, in the same general way, that the work which the boy does standing is an apprenticeship for work which the man also does, as a journeyman, in the stand- ing position. This is correspondingly true of girl's work. Standing occupations naturally involve the feet and legs in greatest strain, and more especially the feet. In consequence we see developing, during the adolescent years, that condition known as weak and flat foot. This frequently occurs in the adult also from causes of similar nature, but only too frequently the result of conditions and weakening which must be attrib- uted to the period of active growth. The deformity acquired in adult years, though it may be disabling and painful in high degree, but rarely assumes the severe form so frequently seen in the later period of adolescence as a sad testimony of the child's experience. Commonly, the foot loses its strength and shape gradually, so that, at this time, but little notice is taken of it. Later, when the child has become the father, and the necessity for continuous employment is apparent, the feet only too frequently become so painful that long absention from work is imperative, and it happens not rarely that an entire change of employment cannot be avoided ; thus are lost the skill and aptitude acquired during the period of prematurity; for while medical science can do much for these unfortunates, they are often debarred from continuing in trades requiring CHILD LABOR 39 constant standing. Frequently upon coming under medical care the condition is such that nothing short of a long stay in hospital will prove availing, and this means loss of income if not loss of independence for a greater or less period. I doubt whether it is generally realized how frequently such con- ditions are met as those to which I have just referred. While originally uttered in a somewhat different sense, the saying seems here most appropriate that "the boy without play is the father ^withouta_job.'' When the one weekly holiday comes, the ac- cumulated fatigue of the week's standing is apt to be so great that only the exceptionally robust have the desire for outdoor exercise left in them. The day is therefore only too often used for repose of the body, which, while furnishing relief to the ex- cessively fatigued muscles, does nothing for the remainder of the organism, which would otherwise invite active movement in the open air. Turning now to the girl in the sitting occupation, I would attract your attention to the frequent occurrence of curvature of the spine, spoken of as "lateral curvature." This deformity is often seen in school children and even in those leading luxuri- ous lives. It betokens a weakness of fiber and a need for phys- ical culture, which is, however, to be controlled by proper treatment. When this is within reach, the progress of the de- formity is checked so that it does not become a menace to health, and it is objectionable chiefly as constituting an esthetic defect which the skilful dressmaker is usually able to conceal. Were this, however, the extent of the damage done to the organism by lateral curvature, I should have nothing to say of it in this place. It becomes of importance in this connection, however, because it is so frequently seen in girls who have been engaged in sitting occupations during the developmental period and because in them it assumes not only the role of a deform- ity of most severe type, not simply a most unfortunate dis- figurement, but also because it now constitutes a very serious menace to health and the attainment of longevity of even aver- age degree. I shall not discuss the deformity in detail except to say that when assuming the severe grades under discussion, its effects reach far beyond the spine itself, which bends not 40 SELECTED ARTICLES simply to one side or the other, but is always markedly twist- ed on its vertical axis also. In this twist the chest partici- pates fully, so that not only is its power of expansion greatly interfered with, but its capacity is reduced and much crowd- ing and displacement of the vital organs contained within can be determined. Small wonder, then, that such severe degree of lateral curvature adds greatly to the likelihood of develop- ing pulmonary consumption and that the heart cannot be thus be pushed aside with impunity. It has been ascertained that, for these reasons, the duration of life of individuals with severe lateral curvatures is far below the average. The remoter effect of the deformity upon the pelvis of the girl I need only mention to the extent of saying that here, too, a distortion and diminution of normal capacity frequently re- sults, so that this 'has always been recognized by medical men as of potentially serious influence upon the maternal function. In conclusion it is to be said that these deformities are by no means confined exclusively to one sex or the other; neither is it to be interpreted that they occur in every child who works, or even in the greater number. It is asserted, however, that these deformities in the severe forms before re- ferred to are particularly frequent among toiling children, or those who have toiled as children. That the unfavorable influences of premature toil are only too often augmented by unfortunate home influences, by dwellings that are unfit, by insufficient and improper food, does not alter the case. I have aimed to speak of these deformities in particular, be- cause of their serious nature and because I have abundant opportunity for observing them. On the other hand, it is not to be overlooked that these are by no means "the only, or even the most common, evidences of physical deterioration to be observed among working children. Annals of the Americcin Academy. 33: Sup. 49-62. March, 1909. Unsettled Questions about Child Labor. Owen R. Lovejoy. It is the purpose of this paper to review a few of the typical questions that have not been solved, as an introduction CHILD LABOR 41 to the discussions that are to follow. Perhaps the questions requiring most immediate attention may be divided for con- venience as follows: — (i) What classes of children should be entirely eliminated as a factor in the industrial problem? (2) From what industries should all children be eliminated? (3) What regulations should govern the conditions of the children who may wisely be employed? (4) What is to be done with those excluded from in- dustry? /. What Children to be Eliminated Obviously there is a period in the life of the child which, both for the good of the child and for the good of society, must be. kept free from exacting toil or burdensome responsi- bility. How shall the end of that period be marked? The method thus far applied has been through the establishment of a minimum age limit. That age limit has advanced steadi- ly from eight and nine years until to-day it is generally agreed that, in this country, no child under fourteen years can wise- ly be subjected to wage-earning labor. Not that all our states have advanced to this standard, tor South Carolina, Alabama, Maryland, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and West Virginia permit children of twelve years to be legally employed, and North Carolina fixes thirteen years as the limit. Furthermore, in a number of these states if a child is poor or otherwise handicapped he is turned at even an earlier age to the hard battle for life. But the interested citizens in those parts of the country make an apology for permitting this early exploitation of the child, and are seekng to raise their commonwealths to the higher standard. This fourteen-year limit, however, does not express the standard agreed upon. Beyond this the prevailing demand requires that the fourteen-year-old child shall meet certain edu- cational and physical tests before being subjected to indus- trial competition. In Colorado, Michigan, Nebraska, Vermont, and Wisconsin he must pass at least the eighth grade before being released under sixteen from school, and in New Jersey 42 SELECTED ARTICLES he must pass all the grammar grades, and his fifteenth birth- day before he can be excused from school. In New York, Ohio and Montana he is required to pass the eighth grade. In a number of states efforts are being made to add care- ful physical tests, to be made frequently during the school course and upon entering industry. Especial emphasis is at present being put on the physical qualifications of the working child. Manifestly the under-developed child, the child lacking in sight, hearing, lung development, muscular growth, bone formation, or heart action should not be abandoned by the state to the rigors of an industrial life merely because he has reached the age of fourteen years. There are those who take the position that the age test should be abandoned and there should be substituted educational and physical quali- fications. One of the papers at this Conference will seek to show the possibilities of making anatomical and physiological tests, by which the development of the child can be gauged with scientific accuracy, and thus the actual physical age be recorded. The difficulty of applying this method in small communities and in parts of the country devoid of skillful medical practitioners will at once appear. It would seem that the medical profession should everywhere be counted on to give the child that meed of protection which is due. Yet is is notorious that in many cities the local boards of health perform in a merely perfunctory manner, or entirely neglect to perform their duties in relation to the certification of chil- dren seeking employment. Despite these objections we welcome this proffered aid to the solution of one of the most perplexing phases in this problem. And we believe the movement among physicians marks the beginning of a more rational and scientific treat- ment of the whole subject. Such tests would, from the out- set, have immense educational value. Let the people be con- vinced that the child is not a little man or woman, but a being in the process of physical formation — with features of that de- velopment so delicate that no less caution is required at the age of ten or twelve years than was required in infancy — CHILD LABOR 43 and a speedy end will be reached of all the popular fallacies about the benefits of hard and exacting labor in the training of the little child. Such tests as are foretokened in these ex- periments present an encouraging prospect. Meanwhile there will be a period of experimentation and civil war among the experts. During the period if we must continue to "fumble" we must insist that, while we work by confessedly unscientific methods, the child shall be given the benefit of the doubt. For the encouragement of those who have fought to es- tablish the laws that now protect the children in many states it may be noted that thus far the findings of the physicians and anatomists tend to justify the rough line of demarcation that has been drawn at fourteen years and to urge the adop- tion of still higher restrictions. Upon this point, then, we are clear in our duty to attack every part of the country which compels younger children to be wage earners. At a recent child-labor conference in Connecticut a leading manufacturer of New England frankly proposed a sixteen-year limit for all children in wage-earning industries. This gratify- ing proposition is meeting with popular favor. The governor of Connecticut has advocated this in his message to the legislature, and a bill may be presented to thus amend the law. Such a step in Connecticut would provide a new basis for legislation in other states. //. From What Industries Should All Children be Excluded Upon this question there is a ground of general agree- ment with a wide margin of doubt. We may agree that all mines and quarries; all mills in which, as yet, no successful method of guarding dangerous machinery has been applied; all factories in which dangerous acids, chemicals, or high ex- plosives are used should be positively shut against the child. But just what are the kinds of industry referred to? In a few states a partial list of industries regarded as dangerous has been made, but nowhere, we believe, with completeness. Neither can there be until every state shall establish, as New York has this year done, a sanitary department of factory 44 SELECTED ARTICLES inspection and shall have that department so perfectly equip- ped that a report may be made to the state of all forms of industry that offer menace to life, limb, or health and in which the measure of risk in each may be tabulated upon their record or if they have no record, upon their reputation else- where. Such inspection will doubtless add to the list of hazard- ous employments, many now looked upon as safe places for working children. They will note the special aptitude of the little child to get into danger or harm in places that are entirely safe for the adult — from the mere fact of immature judgment, recklessness and curiosity. The labor required about a coal mine is obviously danger- ous, and we are not surprised to learn from the last avail- able statistics upon this point from the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania that among the slate pickers the ratio of acci- dents to boys sixteen and under is 300 per cent, higher than to the men and boys above sixteen in that branch of the in- dustry. Ordinary industries of our states are not, as a whole, exceptionally dangerous. Yet the report of the Factory In- spector of Indiana for 1907 shows 400 per cent, of accidents to children as compared with the adults, and the report from Michigan in 1907 shows iioo per cent, of hazard to children — in proportion to the number employed. What is the record of the whole country? Are children being sacrificed by in- dustry twice as rapidly, or three times, or four times, or eleven times, or what is the percentage of risk to the work- ing child? And what are the industries in which these acci- dents most frequently occur? We believe no state wants to mangle or kill its little children in industry. We sin in ignorance. But we have no right longer to be ignorant. Our industries are well enough developed and cause and effect are sufficiently well known to make ignorance inexcusable; and we spend enough money in public administration on far less important matters to leave no excuse for neglecting this safeguard to the public health. CHILD LABOR 45 Such a Federal Children's Bureau as we are urging would have, as an essential part of its field of labor, to discover and compile for public information, all the facts that can be gleaned from the whole country bearing on industrial accidents to children. A few well-compiled reports, we venture to pre- dict, .would put an end to the discussion. For the present, however, in default of any more complete basis of agreement, we may reasonably urge that, if fourteen years is to be made the minimum age for general employment, sixteen years shall be laid as the minimum for employment in all industries that are known to be dangerous in the ordinary sense, and eighteen years in the extra-hazardous occupations. This higher age limit should also, of course, apply to all industries in which there is a menace to the moral life. ///, Regulations Governing Employment of Children and Youth Assuming that many children on reaching the age of fourteen years, or its equivalent in mental and physical devel- opment, may be employed, also that, for those employed there are certain industries which are not excluded as being extra hazardous or dangerous, we have to consider regulations governing the work of children between fourteen years and maturity who are employed in occupations that are not dan- gerous. Shall we consent that, because the child and the in- dustry meet certain tests, all protective care on the part of the state shall be removed? Shall it be lawful for a boy who could not be employed legally last week to enter a factory or workshop for an unlimited number of hours, day and night, simply because he has attained a given birthday? On some of these questions we ought soon to arrive at a fair consensus of opinion. We may differ as to whether the opening and closing hours in a factory should be five, six, seven, or eight o'clock, but there should no longer be any doubt as to whether a young boy or girl, just passed the age of fourteen, may work a ten-hour day as in New Jersey and Indiana and all the New England states, or eleven hours as in Alabama, or twelve hours as in North Carolina, Penn- sylvania and Georgia, or an unlimited period as in West Virginia, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Nevada. 46 SELECTED ARTICLES Here is a plain question on which neither the interests of the industry, the poverty of the family, nor any other motive should lead us to compromise. No child can study for a ten-hour day without serious injury; nor play for ten hours or more without harm. How much less reasonable to suppose that a child of tender years and with bones but part- ly formed and muscles undeveloped may be put to the single task of earning profits for its employer, or bread for its progenitors, for a ten or eleven or twelve hour day, without suffering an injury for which society must pay heavily in the future!" It is gratifying to record that already Ohio, Illinois, Nebrasr ka. New York, and Colorado have fixed an eight-hour day for children under sixteen years (the law of New York applying to factories, with a nine-hour day in mercantile establishments, and Ohio extending the eight-hour protection in the case of girls to eighteen years). No evidence is on record, either from the reports of the Factory Inspectors, the School au- thorities, the compilers of labor and industrial statistics, or from the operators of the industries affected or the families of the children concerned, to show that any serious interrup- tion to business has been suffered, or that poverty and family dependence have increased. On the other hand, these reports, official and unofficial, tend to show that some industries have adopted the eight-hour schedule, while others have been en- couraged to advance to higher levels, because of the elimina- tion of those who could not profitably be employed for a short- er period than the normal working day, and the consequent substitution of older and more' competent employees. As to the families affected, the reports from state and local com- mittees to be presented at this conference will show that the dread of causing sick fathers and widowed mothers to starve because little children are forbidden to be crushed under excessive industrial burdens is a needless dread. Poverty has rather tended to decrease and family standards have tended to advance toward the line of self-support as a result of these humane measures. CHILD LABOR 47 In the light of this experience, shall we not agree that we have a plain duty to press upon the people of the states adjoining those mentioned, namely: Indiana, Michigan, Wiscon- sin, Iowa, New Jersey, Pennsylvania add Connecticut, as well as a number of younger western states — the need of throwing this special form of protection about those who are on the border line between childhood and youth. Shall we not urge them to establish an eight-hour day for all children under sixteen years in all wage-earning employments? The necessity of gradual approach to this reasonable stand- ard is recognized, therefore we shall count it a gain, if in Pennsylvania this year a ten-hour day can be secured for children of fourteen or if in North Carolina the hours per week can be reduced from sixty-six to sixty. Night Work The same conclusions are potent as against all industrial employment at night. It may be granted that certain forms of industry can be carried on more profiably when operated day and night and that no legislation should be enacted which will cripple them in their night operations. But when the wel- fare of a child or youth of eleven or thirteen or fifteen years is involved, argument should be at an end. If the child can- not find a place in the industry without being subjected to the obvious injuries of night work, then let him be excluded altogether. The chief opposition to such restriction will continue to come from those engaged in the glass manufacturing industry. Night work-of children is practiced in other industries, especial- ly in certain textile industries, but not as a recognized essential feature of the industry. No cotton mill or silk mill has pro- claimed its inability to exist without the systematic employment of little children at night. Yet the glass industry, a branch of manufacturing that has made as great progress as any other in this country in the past quarter-century, under the influence of an exceedingly high protective tariff, stoutly claims that the prohibition of night employment of little boys will be its ruin. The cry usually takes the form of a threat to move the factories to some other state. 48 SELECTED ARTICLES Three states in which glass is extensively produced have enacted laws forbidding the night employment of children under sixteen years. These are New York, Ohio and Illinois. These states stand, according to the Census report of 1905, as fourth, fifth and .'leventh in the scale of glass-producing states. The chief glass-producing states which at present permit the employment of children under sixteen years at night are New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Maryland, Missouri and Kansas. In Indiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey bills are before the legislatures this winter forbidding such employment. Were it possible to combine the forces working for such legislation in these four states, we believe the glass manufacturers would be less opposed and might consider favorably such simultaneous action. Vacation Permits Among the specific questions that are to receive considera- tion here is the question: "What shall be done in the case of school children who apply for permits to work during the long vacations?" On this matter there is the greatest confusion of opinions and programs. In the discussion, which we hope will bring about a degree of harmony in action, we suggest that in the case of vacation permits the injurj' to the child is not so much from the work he does, although too little attention has been given to the right of the child to a period of relaxation from the overwork often required in our schools, but what makes the summer work a menace to the child's develop- ment is the difference between what he does in the summer and what he will have to do in school in the fall.^The prover- bial reluctance among working children to return to school ought to be a clear suggestion to our communities as to what the school should be. The fact that people are now so per- plexed about what to do with the children prevented from work either in vacation or at all times constitutes the strongest possible argument for co-operation with the National Educa- tion Association and those associations formed to promote practical education, to the end that a constructive program shall be worked out without delay. CHILD LABOR 49 Street Trades The various street trades and work in city tenements are forms of child employment sorely in need of study and reg- ulation. The physical difficulty in regulating the hours and conditions of employment in street trades is greater than in the case of factories and mines. It is further complicated by the traditions which teach that the little newsboy or messenger of eight or ten years is the only support of his widowed mother, and furthermore, that the little man is on the straight road to the White House or the presidency of some billion dol- lar trust. We stupidly adhere to these delusions, overlooking the sacrifice of health, education and character, which in the over- whelming majority of instances are suffered by infant news- boys and night messengers, while we have kept the mind fixed on the few notable men^ who rose to eminence from a child- hood in these nomadic pursuits. Sweat Shops In the matter of tenement-house employment the question of regulation is further complicated by the tradition of parental ownership. We are asked, "How dare the state invade the sacred inclosure of a man's own home and deny his right to the help of his own children, who work under the home roof?" Tlie question sounds conclusive, but it is wholly specious. Its answer is in two parts. In the first place, the place invaded is not a "sacred inclosure." The tenement house workshops in our cities are not under home roofs, but in crowded blocks of congested humanity, where hundreds of our nation's little children are burning out their eyes at night as they work in the dim gas light on some monotonous task which develops neither mind nor body. For this labor the only rewards are shamefully inadequate wages, bent and diseased spines, stooped shoulders, contracted lungs — the culture beds of deadly germs, and the other natural fruits of wrong physical environment. In the second place, the child is not a parental asset. The state is bound by the law of self-preservation to deny a father or mother the privilege of exacting from his own child what would be regarded as cruel or injurious if exacted from 50 SELECTED ARTICLES another's child. If the parent, either through poverty, vice or ignorance is unable to provide the care and protection needed, then the state is bound to enter and become the parent of that child. Farm Labor A kind of child labor which has received too little attention in this country is to be discussed at this conference. It has generally been assumed that if children work on the farm there can be no objection to their employment. Indeed, one of the most prominent critics of the work of this committee in questioning our representations as to" the extent of child labor in America with one sweep brushed aside all the children working on farms as wholly beyond the need of attention. Naturally the factory and mine have received the first atten- tion, for there the children are congregated, and if evils exist they are more apparent. But disturbing reports are coming to us from many parts of the country, testifying to the neglect or the abuse of childhood in the rural districts. We learn of the twelve-hour workday in the berry fields of New Jersey; of the congestion, overwork, and immorality in the vegetable gardens of Delaware and Maryland, where the pickers' shanty repeats the unhealthy evils of the city tenement; of the beet-sugar fields of Michigan, Nebraska and Colorado, and the tobacco fields and stripping barns in Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Reports reach us from many parts of the country which pro- duce tobacco in large quantities that not only are the children kept from school during the harvesting season, but that through the winter, whenever the weather is favorable for stripping tobacco, they are kept from school one, two and three days a week, thus their education is interrupted and the whole school system demoralized. In the fruit-canning sections of New York state, eighteen months ago, a thorough investigation of child labor was made, which revealed such abuse of little children that the canners hiding behind a technicality in the agreement with those directing the investigation insisted that they suppress the pub- CHILD LABOR 51 fication of the report, lest its publication ruin the industry. Canners in the states not investigated would, it was claimed, use this report against their New York competitors, although the same abuses are believed to exist in nearly every section of the country where canning is extensive. 'IV. Constructive Measures But manifestly legislation that eliminates the child or the industry is not enough. There is the constructive side. As to the industry, perhaps we need not concern ourselves. It is enough to know that no necessary form of industry has ever been permanently crippled by excluding the children from it. Iriventive genius has always come to the rescue of the in- dustry and has found a way to apply better methods or better machinery, which in the end has put the industry on a higher plane and rendered better service than the child had ever done. At a time when all over the country so large an army of unemployed men exists as a burden upon the charitable agencies of our communities and as a menace to individual virtue and the foundations of the home, there can certainly be no justification for the contention that manufacturing in- dustries would be crippled by the elimination of young children. Indeed, there is a double motive for the release of young children from industry. Not only are the children benefited by having a substantial addition made to their period of prepara- tion for the obligations of maturity, but the normal demands of our industries would inevitably draw into service large numbers of able-bodied men who are now idle. But the problem of what to do with the child is less simple. The question arises as soon as a child is thrown out of em- ployment by a new law. "What are you going to dO with him?" And no one seems to know. At least there is no agreement upon the point. A mother in Washington a few days ago charged the child-labor law of the District of Columbia with making her son a forger. The newspaper story does not bear the majks of authenticity, but it serves to illustrate the feeling of a large number of people throughout the country. The point of view of those who would leave all children to work 52 SELECTED ARTICLES indefinitely until society has fully prepared to take care of them, loses some of its force when it is remembered that the same opposition to the law is found in Ohio, where boys under sixteen and girls under eighteen have been thrown out of employments which could not use them on an eight-hour day, and in Alabama and Arkansas, where children of eleven years are thrown out because they were not fortunate enough to have a widowed mother or a crippled father. None the less, the question is a vital one, and calls for careful study. It is easy to say, "Give the child a practical education and thus fit him for a useful industrial life." But where? In many states the only place a child can get a practical education is in a reform school. In default of such opportunity for a practical education the schools are yearly leaking a large percentage of those who enter the early grades. Less than thirteen per cent, of all enrolled pupils were reported as above the fifth grade in the last United States Educational Report. It is obvious that those who leave school at ages varying from eight to thirteen years of age are wholly unprepared for the industrial battle of life. Even children who remain in school to the end of the compul- sory period in some of the more advanced states are totally unfit to enter industry. The following sentences from the unpublished manuscript of the forthcoming report of the New Jersey Commission on Industrial Education are significant: "Fully ninety-five per cent of the pupils leave school between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and without having formed any idea as to what trade or vocation they should follow; in consequence they drift into occupations rather than select those which might be most nearly suited to their aptitudes, and their progress is generally arrested at an an early age, because of the restricted character of their experience and the failure to receive supplementary instruction." Much interest attaches to the experiments that are being tried in a number of communities, in making a closer alliance between the school and the manfacturing and commerical enter- prises. It is argued that by such an arrangement children may have an introduction to the practical phases of industrial life CHILD LABOR 53 without interfering with their school work. In our discussion of this project we should not overlook the necessity of a radical revision in the school curriculum. The demands for book learning in many of our city schools at present lay upon the pupils a burden of home work, which not only robs child- hood of its rightful recreation, but is a menace to the health and a chief motive in the child to end the school career. It would be necessary also radically to change the processes in the industries under consideration if they are to have any value for the child. If he is to be placed in a factory to do the monotonous tasks now required of the unskilled workers, he might, it is true, earlier become self-supporting, but his in- dustrial cfifiiciency would be thwarted rather than promoted. The proper equipment for industrial education in the schools of our country would, in relation to this problem of Child Labor, accomplish two very desirable results: (i) A far larger percentage of pupils would remain in school to or beyond the termination of the compulsory period, thus vastly simplifying the work of factory inspectors and truant of- ficers. It is well enough to talk of the error of catering to the whim of the child, nevertheless, until the American school house becomes a place to be sought by the children of our com- munities, instead of shunned, we shall continue to witness the suicide of the higher school grades, the sacrifice of children in our factories and mines, or their almost equally disastrous ex- posure to the perils of idleness. (2) We should be able, as we are not at present, to place the young child improperly equipped, in an environment certain to meet his immediate need of training and certain to produce for his family the material rewards which were their chief motive in having him employed. Our four-fold duty, therefore, seems clear: — (i) To exclude all young children and all undeveloped children from the bur- dens of wage-earning industries; (2) to forbid the employment of all children and youth in industries which menace life, health or morals; (3) to limit the hours, forbid the night em- ployment, and otherwise guard the conditions of those children and youth who may be employed, and (4) to aid in those con- 54 SELECTED ARTICLES structive measures which aim to revise the curriculum and equip the facilities of the public schools to meet the recognized needs of an industrial civilization. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 86-99. March, 1909. Practical Restrictions on Child Labor in Textile Industries; Higher Educational and Physical Qualifications. Howell Cheney. As a rule the textile industries, both north and south, have been advertised as among the worst offenders against the chil- dren, and I suppose that it is on this account that your sec- retary has asked me to explain the attitude of a textile industry which has found that it could do without the labor of children, at least until they were fifteen years old. At the start. I must explain that my experience has been confined to but one branch of the textile trade, namely, siik manufacturing. The conditions surrounding this industry have, however, given me exceptional opportunities to study the prob- lem, not alone from the mill standpoint, but from the stand- point of the school. The firm by which I am employed has roughly some 3,600 hands. The plant is situated at some distance from a city, and, in a community of approximately 13.000 inhabitants, is the principal industry. Most of the employees in the mill live with- in one school district, which has 1,800 children enumerated. As a member of the Board of Education, it has been my duty for four years to pass upon the certificates of children leaving school to go to work, and also for the last two years I have in- spected the applications of persons under sixteen years of age applying for work, to see that they had conformed to the state laws and school regulations, and to the firm's rule that they would employ no children under fifteen years of age. As a great majority of the children attended one school and went to work, if at all. for one firm, it has been possible as in few oth- er places to watch the workings of a rule forbidding the em- ployment of children for a year more than the law required. CHILD LABOR 55 and of a school board ruling that no child should leave to go to work who had not completed the sixth grade. This ruling was possible but not customary under the Connecticut law, the fourth grade being usually considered sufificient to earn a cer- tificate. Therefore, neither the school nor the mill had a com- pelling law behind it, but the fact gave a much greater oppor- tunity to study the exceptions, because they all had to be an- swered reasonably rather than legally. Of course, every just exception which led to giving work to a child made it more difficult to keep others out. I must say frankly at the start that there was some opposition among some of the heads of departments to excluding these children. But in all those departments where the work requires consecu- tive labor demanding concentration, attention and care, there is now a unanimity of opinion that a textile industry can do bet- ter without than with children, until they are at least fifteen years of age. The boy or girl of sixteen will actually give in work at least half an hour a day more than the average younger child; will do at least five per cent more work, hour for hour with an appreciable less amount of waste of material and dam- age to finished product. The work will require less supervision, and will be of a higher grade when finished. The savings secured to the employer by the older child as an offset to the fifteen per cent higher wage can be better measured by ex- perience than by statistics, which are noticeable only by their absence. But wherever the work to be done is continuous for nine or ten hours, and requires attention as long as the ma- chinery runs, our experience would say emphatically that the increased production by the older child, of goods of a higher grade, at a lower cost of supervision and all other overhead charges, is cheaper than the production of the fourteen year old child at a lower wage. Two factors have been constantly at work in the silk industry to bring about a changed condition in respect to child labor. I. We are constantly raising the standard of our goods, and hence the workmanship. A plain black grosgrain for which my firm made a name forty years ago, would not be a 56 SELECTED ARTICLES marketable piece of goods now. Every process requires more exact handling than it did then. 2. The great strides in improved machines have not been made without a nearly proportionate increase in the capital in- vested, and hence it is increasingly necessary to secure the maximum production of machinery to pay a fair return on capital. Twenty years ago an investment of $1000 per loom would have been considered ample to build and equip a mill of one hundred silk ribbon looms, where to-day $2000 a loom would be necessary to place your plant on a plane of efficiency equal to the most up-to-date mills. Consider, therefore, how much more necessary it is to watch the product of a machine and its operator per day and hour. When you couple these conditions with a raw material worth from three dollars to seven dollars per pound, and in which a careless hand can spoil more in an hour than he can earn in a week, he is either a very poor silk manufacturer, or a manufacturer of very poor goods, who persuades himself that there is any economy in child labor as far as silk throwing, dyeing, winding, warping, quilling, weaving or finishing goes. The processes already described include all those in silk manufacturing in which the work is continuous and demands more or less constant attention as long as the machinery runs. In these there is no economy in the employment of children, at least until they are fifteen years of age. In the above I have stated as fully as possible the economic reasons only which lead me to believe that child labor is not at all essential to the silk textile industries. In all frankness I must also present to you the difficulties which manufacturers must overcome in doing away with this class of labor. I be- lieve your agitation would make more rapid headway and ob- tain the co-operation of the more enlightened manufacturers, if it would concern itself with the making of these difficulties less where principles are not sacrificed, rather than by accentu- ating them by prohibitive legislation. There are distinct lines on which you can co-operate with the manufacturer, and I am sure he will meet you halfway in them. CHILD LABOR 57 Discrimination Needed. The first of these leads to a group of employments in which the work is intermittent and requires the attention of the em- ployee for perhaps not more than two-thirds or one-half of the time. This covers a variety of jobs which in the total would not employ a large number of hands, such as "dofTers" or chil- dren who replace the full spools on a spinning frame with empty ones ; bobbin boys, who keep the various operators of machines supplied with spools and deliver the full ones to the next process; booth tenders, who in weaving rooms hand out the full filling boards to the weavers and refill the empty ones; and a small number of errand boys and girls. In all of these cases the work is intermittent, i. e., allows for periods of rest, and in none of them are children engaged in the operation of run- ning machinery. This group of employments is much more im- portant to the cotton industries than to the silk. It is possible to define it, as above, in legislation on the subject; and the employment is not injurious to the children where it is safe- guarded by registration with factory inspectors for all cTiildren over fourteen years of age so employed, and permits issued only after inspection of the conditions and hours under which they work. It represents a group of employments which con- stitute a peculiar problem to the manufacturer, and in them centers an economic opposition to further restrictions on this class of labor. This kind of employment illustrates a point I wish to em- phasize. I believe that your agitation does not always take account either of the things which children can do in a mill with less chances of injury than they encounter on the streets and in work at home, or of the perplexities which the manu- facturer encounters, both as a maker of goods and an employ- er of labor. With him it is not alone a question of economies in particular jobs, important as these are, but of maintaining a scale of wages fairly adjusted to the skill required and amount of work done. If he pays a girl one dollar and twenty- five cents to put empty spools on in place of full ones, and then to rest for half an hour, when a girl at seventy-five cents 58 SELECTED ARTICLES can do it just as well, he not only increases his cost in a small item, but invites a condition of dissatisfaction with all of the other one dollar and twenty-five cent help in his mill. It is one of the difficult problems in manufacturing to make a wage scale fairly proportioned to a wide range of abilities, and one's capacity for fair dealing is measured largely by one's success in this respect. The manufacturer has often given un- selfish thought and anxiety to the problems which you are agitating, and can work with an intelligence born of actual ex- perience, which is not possible for you on the outside of a mill to approach. It may be a truism to say that if you devoted more time to his difficulties you would encounter his opposition less. His next most serious difficulty is in meeting your demand for an eight-hour day for laborers between fourteen and six- teen years of age. As long as the machinery runs in his mills there must be operatives to tend them, and these operatives must have their assistants, doffers, bobbin boys and booth ten- ders, ~" If their labor is essential, it is just as essential from four to six as it was in the earlier hours. In the proposal of a fifty- five hour week for such employees he would more readily meet you, because by shifts it is easier to arrange the work to meet a deficiency one afternoon in a week than for a shorter portion of every afternoon. He would also more readily meet you in the enforcing of more stringent physical and educational standards, which would keep out the physically defective or mentally deficient children to whom the longer hours would prove injurious. I believe such physical and mental standards should be rigidly enforced. But in allying yourself with the eight-hour cry you are weakening your cause to the extent that you are burdening the child-labor issue with a more general economic question. There is a final difficulty in connection with the restrictions on child labor in which the manufacturer finds you in sympathy with him, namely, in providing a system of industrial training which will produce more efficient labor than our present school system does. I will refer to this matter more fully later. CHILD LABOR 59 To summarize my arguments up to this point, I would say — 1. The silk textile industries realize no economy from child labor where the work is continuous, and in these employments economic forces and conditions of production are working out the problem in harmony with the moral campaign to which you have given an impetus. 2. Where the work is not continuous, or not engaged in direct operation of running machinery, and is not paid by the piece, it should be your policy to safeguard the children by re- strictions rather than by prohibitions. 3. The organization of a mill cannot lend itself to one set of hours for mature workers and another set for fourteen to sixteen year old hands, and here again restrictions will accom- plish your ends without prohibitions. In brief, prohibition of child labor in the textile industries, wherever the work is continuous and involves the operation of running machinery, is necessary. Restriction is required only where the work is intermittent, or is not done under the strain of the piece-work system, or the worker is not directly engaged in tending machinery. So far as economy of production goes, as a manufacturer I believe we can do without the labor of children. But ridiculous though the statement may sound to some of you, from an intimate connection with the schooling on a large scale of the children of laboring people, I feel that these children can- not do without the work until a better substitute than the present school is provided. The theoretical proposition "that the worst thing a child can do is to go to work," is more true than its comp- lement "that the best thing for a child to do until he is sixteen years of age is to go to school." You too often approach the problem from the theoretical side, and stating the condition under which the normal child can best develop, you assume that there is a choice open to the average child between these conditions on the one hand and work on the other. You infer that he has plenty of nourishing food; that he is working progressively in school; that his hours out of school are given to proper recreation and fresh air, and that his home life protects him from evil in- 6o SELECTED ARTICLES fluences, while he is undergoing a discipline or training which will prepare him for his future work in the world. You assume that it is a choice between a healthy growth under these conditions and work that is physically injurious, mentally stulti- fying and morally degrading. Of course, this is a colored picture intended to illustrate a not uncommon attitude. Whoever studies this problem of child labor must soon come into a sense of its many-sidedness. It is only secondarily a problem in economics and primarily one in humanity in general and education in particular, and I believe that its ultimate solution must be found in the schools rather than in the mills. It may seem somewhat surprising to you, but the manu- facturer's point of view, if he be at all progressive, and if his plant has been established long enough for him to appreciate the responsibility it owes to its workers no less than to its stockholders, is not radically divergent from yours. Unless he be blind to everything but his next quarterly dividend, he appreciates far more forcibly than you do that keen minds, active bodies and willing hearts transmitted from the apprentice to the master, or from the child to the man, make directly for steady and devoted helpers, for ingenuity, interest and efficien- cy — in brief, for skill and economy. If he is building for his sons, no less than for his own immediate pocket — and many an Aiperican father has that habit — he knows more certainly than you can appreciate that fair dealing with his help has no un- certain connection with fair dealing with his customers, in goods made with all the interest, the intelligence and the force which he can command. More than all, he knows, or he has missed the highest possibilities of his business, that nothing else can supply these qualities in his goods or any improvements in mechanical processes make good their absence. Humanity plays no less a part in successful manufacturing than in any of the occupations by which selfish man makes his living. But if what I have said is true, you will at once challenge my statements by demanding an explanation of the presence of child labor in these trades. Frankly admitting the selfish motives of manufacturers, I will endeavor to show the influences CHILD LABOR 6i Avhich are at work on this problem, and you will please bear in mind that I am speaking of the Northern and Eastern states, where only children who are over fourteen years of age, working not more than sixty hours a week, under some educational qualifications, are employed. I would say that the presence of these children in the factories is due to three causes, whose potency will vary with every locality and in every family. (i) Belief on the part of the manufacturers that such labor is profitable, either directly or indirectly, in maintaining an average wage scale and as an apprenticeship system. (2) The desire on the part of the parents, or children, or both, for a larger income. (3) The failure of the school to advance or interest the average child of over fourteen years of age who is going to work with his hands. The interests of the manufacturer I have described above, and have endeavored to point out practical ways in which he could co-operate with you. But in reality you have no right to consider his interests except in so far as they are identical with those of the children. Turning to the family and educa- tional side of the question, I will attempt to explain, from a personal observation which is the result of responsibility for a school system in a textile town, the influences which are compelling children to go to work, where the manufacturer's selfishness is at least restricted. I will leave the conclusion to point its own moral — that the truest safeguards you can erect for the protection of these children are higher educa- tional qualifications which enlist the whole boy and not his mind alone, and which leave every possible opportunity open to the boy who can avail himself of it without injury. Attitude of Parents The parents, if they influence the child at all, in rnore than the average case decide in the interests of a larger family income. In a well-defined class of cases I have found that the worst offenders against the children are their own parents, and it is from them that they need protection. The only 62 SELECTED ARTICLES protection which will be effective against this particular evil will be the rigid enforcement of educational and physical re- strictions. Laws prohibitive as to age will not aflfect the parents who lie about their children's ages, nor prevent them from altering and forging birth certificates in a way that would be ludicrous if it were not so pitiful. The percentage of cases of real need in which it is a question between self-support and town aid is small, not over fifteen per cent. In principle as well as practice, self-support, if attainable, is better than town aid or assistance from any public charity which it is now possible to give. Perhaps public school scholar- ships wisely administered may ultimately solve the . difficulty. They are not available now to any extent. But until the con- dition of actual need is met, you are committing a positive in- jury in depriving this class of children of their only opportunity to find a way out. In such cases the school ami charity authorities jointly should be given discretionary authority to allow a child of fourteen years to go to work or to he supported at public charge. But of greater frequency than the cases of extreme need are those in which the influence of the parents, without sufficient necessity, or the loyalty of the child, persuades him to assist in supporting the family. The total of such cases of both kinds is perhaps one-half of the total number of children who leave school to go to work. That a portion, perhaps large, of this number could actually have done without this assistance, does not seem to me to alter the conclusions that if j'ou forbid the parents to make the chil- dren help toward their own support, you must provide an al- ternative, which in the long run will make a continued parental sacrifice worth while. That is, you must be able to demonstrate that more schooling will either make their children higher wage earners or will open up to them a higher social position. The first motive will appeal more powerfully to the struggling families, and to them the school now fails admittedly to provide a training for higher efficiency. The second motive, social posi- tion, your school can enlist, legitimately in some intances, un- wisely and harmfully in a great majority of cases. To any one CHILD LABOR 63 who is acquainted with our schools the most unnecessary and pathetic failures are where parents are sacrificing their very lives to maintain in a high school a child who has no ability, and cannot even conceive the value of the opportunity offered. Wherever false ideals based on a smattering of many things, imperfectly digested, have grown in place of trained habits of thought, of efficiency and diligence, your school has done an injury which can only be undone by bitter experience afterwards. Influence of the School So much for the influence of parents. If they do not compel or strongly advise going to work, what influence does the school have on the child's decision? If he is working progressively, it is fair to assume that he is interested and would like to stay on. If by the time he has reached the age of fourteen he has not passed the sixth grade, which means he has taken eight years to do the work which should have been done in five or six, he must have lost from two to three years either through incapacity or lack of interest. As we are c'oncerned, in this discussion, only with those children who do go to work, we are certainly within the truth in stating that not over a third of those at work can do more than read fluently, write fairly legibly and perform the sim- pler processes in numbers, including common fractions. The average child who goes to work from the sixth grade, or below, has reached the limit both of his interest and his capacity to ab- sorb what is put before him. If you compel him to stay in school, you may be protecting him from physical and moral injury, but you have done nothing to positively advance him upon his way, or bridge over what you frequently term "the two wasted years." It is possible that a widespread interest in industrial training may in time produce a school which will meet the pressing re- quirements, but in the meanwhile are you justified in advanc- ing the age limit two years before you have provided an adequate training for at least one-half of the children affected? It is per- fectly true that in the past schools have been provided much more slowly than increases of population demanded. I know that I am laying myself open to your criticism in sug- gesting a compromise between the fourteen-year-old standard established in most states of the North and East and your six- 64. SELECTED ARTICLES teen-year ideal limit. I have heard you describe in scathing terms the manufacturer who seeks to continue his exploitation of child labor by exaggerating the educational shortcomings. But fortunately the facts need no exaggeration to make them sufficiently startling. And so long as not more than a third of your laboring children are advanced beyond the sixth grade when they go to work, it is not a satisfactory solution of the problem to continue them in such a school for two years longer. The Need in Education In agreement with Dr. Draper, I believe that the vital need is not so much for a brand-new style of education as for im- proving and intensifying what we have. I am out of patience with many of the students of industrial training, who have come to the conclusion that a more or less technical training for pupils of high school grade is going to meet a critical condition caused by pupils who are struggling along in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade. No industrial training is adequate unless it can be applied to the earlier grades. Taking these grades and the ideals which govern them, what are the foundations on which we must build? The ideal most indelibly stamped upon our common school is that they are to provide a training, admittedly and predominant- ly cultural, which is to open the door of opportunity to all kinds and conditions of people. Our free American schools are tn-* dividual in their purpose and general in their tendencies, as op- posed to the national ideal which governs the German schools in the development of specific trainings best adapted to classes of pupils. The German literature on the subject which has been so voluminously laid before us recently is most interesting, but it can only tempt us out of our plain course, so far as definite ap- plication of it goes. We are not ready to abandon our ideal of a cultural training as the best highway for an open opportunity, and we could not, if we would, force a separation at the end of our elementary schools between those children who expect to work with their hands and those who expect to work with their heads. The experience of England is no more helpful to us, unless it is an example of how not to work out the part-time system. We can obtain valuable suggestions and inspirations CHILD LABOR 65 from the fereign systems, but to make real progress against our own difficulties we must keep our feet firmly planted in Ameri- can traditions. Frankly accepting the fact that we are going to demand a cultural training, which seeks to open one's eyes to a wider world than our own, we must direct it toward efficiency and deilniteness. We must endeavor to get hold of our raw material, to use a manufacturing term, at an earlier age, in the kindergarten if possible, which should have a more definite aim. It should lay the foundations of a larger vocabulary, of a habit of doing for oneself rather than of being done for by a teacher; of simple, but definite, ideas of discipline and eff^ective co-operation ; of some degree of concentration and thoroughness, and finally of an' elementary power of expression with the hands as well as with the tongue. Then will your kindergarten become a prep- aration for the primary grades. In the elementary school no new direction is possible, but in our own case we have been able to secure greater efficiency by smaller subdivisions and more exact grading. Here the classes are flooded with foreigners. These foreign pupils and all subnormal children must be reached at an earlier age; they must be kept moving and not allowed to stagnate. This can only be done in smaller classes and more specialized work. The question of expense will be urged against all this. For a practical mill man the first prin- ciple to be learned is the economy of a high degree of comple- tion of every process in itself. "Yarn well spun is nearly warped and a warp well made is half woven." Do you school men seriously enough consider the extravagance and waste, both of pupils and teachers, in half-taught ideas which have to be gone over and over again, each time with an added danger of confu- sion and uncertainty? You may not admit any parallel between the production of immaterial ideas or brains and of material things. Yet you must, as teachers, admit the unfairness both to dull and bright pupils of the waste in energy and time caused by large classes of improperly graded children. Perhaps public parsimony may be slow in recognizing this fact, but the awaken- ing will come more rapidly if you lay your stress on the greater efficiency of what we have. 66 SELECTED ARTICLES Much, too, can be accomplished in securing more regular at- tendance. The practical abolition of truancy by capable truant officers and prosecution of parents ; a carefully organized system of medical inspection and efficient nurses who treat in school many minor ailments for which the pupils would otherwise have been out, and an intelligent attention to securing the co-opera- tion of parents, I know, will raise an average attendance of eighty-four per cent to ninety-two per cent. This would make a difference of about a half a year in the time the average child spends in school. In a town of only one industry and one school I recognize that many things are easy of accomplishment, which in a city would be impossible. Employ only efficient teachers and pay them well. Try to in- still a spirit of enthusiasm and vigor, even at a greater ex- penditure of wages. No motives of consideration justify a waste of children by the retention of teachers who have outlived their usefulness. It is far cheaper to pay a pension. Too great rigid- ity and conventionality in your systems of promotions make for inefficiency, so far as it insufficiently rewards exceptional ability and encourages a mediocrity just short of the dismissal line. Through the fifth and sixth grades, where the problems of discipline are most acute, scatter a few men. Here despite all your efforts those pupils who have reached the limit of their ability to profit by cultural training will begin to stagnate. Re- spect for a man's authority is more than moral tonic. It is re- specting the boy's developing manhood. You cannot hold him by methods which appeal to smaller children. With undeveloped capacities for guidance he feels a man's instincts, which must be honored and satisfied. In no way more legitimately can this be done than by giving him something that he is capable of doing, and through the doing of which under a man's direction he can come into a sense of his own power, and happiness in his own usefulness. Here again your school loses in power, because it has not studied its materials and intensified its proc- esses. I am conscious that some of you are thinking that I am treat- ing the problem just as if the children were so many different kinds of silk and the teachers were so many operatives and fore- CHILD LABOR 67 man. But I wish I could make you appreciate how many different kinds of good and bad humanity and saintHness and cussedness can be expressed in a piece of silk. No human being can spend himself upon a piece of work without putting something of his humanity into it. The silk dress which you wear contains some indefinable impression of the old Chinaman who tended the worms and moths more tenderly than many women care for their babies; something of the Japanese children who plucked the mulberry leaves and much of the climate of the particular coun- try which grew those leaves. The Italian girls who reeled the fibers from the cocoons, and the French women who spun the fine strands into coarser threads have added their individuality to the accumulating problem which the Yankee mill takes up. If you think we add nothing further, go from one department to another and observe the spirit and the character of the room as affected both by the character of the foreman and the hands ; or better still, go from mill to mill to study the effect of the controlling organization. Think, as you hurry along in con- fused ignorance, of the art of the designer, the dyer, the printer and mechanic, no less than the skill of the thrower, of the quil- ler, warper, weaver and finisher. Try to conceive of the brain matter that has gone into the improved machinery — and it is not the great discoveries but the many little improvements that seem so simple you wonder they were ever problems, which make for rapid progress. Do not stand like dummies asking what a machine is doing, only to be told that the product goes in so on this side and comes out so on that ; but try to get hold of some part of the human wits that have gone into the development of that particular process. You may not understand the process any better, but you must come into the renewed sense of the culture of work, however mechanical. Efficiency in the school is directly related to efficiency in the mill. Culture in the mill is the same thing as culture in the school. Whoever puts something of himself into a task is on the way to attain unto culture, and whoever has taken something out of a task and made it his own attainment is cultured to that extent, whether it be in literature or weaving. The problem 68 SELECTED ARTICLES that is before us is not to discover some mysterious and physiological connection between the hand and the brain. It is to find means whereby the child can express himself accurately, efficiently, and with a comprehension of what he is doing. Hand work is to many a child the easiest and readiest means of ex- pression. If accuracy and efficiency results from it, by so much will culture, or power to command expression follow. You have in your present feebly-organized manual training most of the equipment necessary. Do not be afraid to use it under the direction of an enthusiastic mechanic and rest assured that the boy will discover its meaning without the aid of philosophy and psychology. I have taken all the time allotted me to carry you to my point which is that if your grammar schools can attain that degree of efficiency which will have carried boys and girls who expect to work through the sixth grade, then and not till then can you guarantee the preparation which is necessary for a proper indus- trial school. In brief, stress laid not so much on the things done as on the way in which they are done ; on culture as the power to see, think and act in the experience of childhood, rather than on culture as the accumulation of ideas however valuable, will best lay the foundations of the industrial school of the future. And if that industrial school can teach mechanical expression rather than exact trades, it will become an ideal stepping stone to an efficient trade school. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 104-10. March, 1909. Effects of Improper Posture in Factory Labor. Albert H. Freiberg. I think that in any discussion of the physical effects of pre- mature employment, it is unnecessary to discuss the effect of employment upon children younger than ten years of age. I be- lieve that it is generally granted that children under ten years of age ought not to have to work in factories for a living. It is like- v.ise pretty generally acknowledged that such early employ- CHILD LABOR 69 ment cannot but result very unfortunately to these children physically. On the other hand the important ages to study with reference to the physical effects of premature employment are the years between twelve and eighteen; the years of adolescence, - that space-ef-lif€^atJout which there^is some discussion with regard to legal enactment, concerning which there is some difference of opinion even among those who are interested in children and who are striving in their behalf ; differences as to- whether a child should be permitted to work at twelve or at fourteen or at six- teen. During the period between twelve and eighteen years we have to deal with physical and mental changes in the individual which are of enormous importance, and which are recognized by everyone to be so physiologically; a period which is fraught with great dangers to the child, dangers mental, moral and phys- ical ; a period during which the child grows more rapidly in length than at any other time save that of early infancy; a period during which, because of the sexual development going on at this time, the child's nervous system is almost turned topsy-turvy. In many cases it is turned topsy-turvy and at this time the child is peculiarly open to external influences of both moral and physical character. There is a vast difference between the work which a child's muscles do in factory employment and the work which that child will do if he is allowed to go freely as he chooses. A child between the ages of twelve and sixteen or eighteen years will, if given the opportunity, play and play hard. He will play base- ball, play football, and he will use his muscles most energetically. He will take great delight in using his muscles in a gymnasium if he is given the opportunity. Therefore we are told by many who employ children or who would like to employ children at this age, that they are not using their muscles to any greater ex- tent than they would use them if they were given simply that to do which they would choose to do, meaning thereby play. Muscular excercise is beneficial. Exercise is our only means of strengthening the muscles, of encouraging their develop- ment, but the building up of a muscle which is actively growing 70 SELECTED ARTICLES and developing must be accomplished by exercises which are not too severe, which are not too long continued and which are of constantly varying character. Furthermore, the muscle which carries out exercises must be given frequent periods of rest, during which it may recover; it should be given an opportunity to build up again that which has been consumed by use. What happens when a child is employed in a factory? The child is employed in a factory as rule in one of two ways ; either in a standing or in sitting occupation. Sometimes the character of the occupation is such as to combine the evil effects of both these positions. Such a situation has been made clear to me in the illustration which Doctor McKelway gave with reference to the occupation of children at looms in the cotton mills. The child at the loom stands and sits at once, as it were, because he must stand in one place continuously for a long period of time in order to control the operation of the machine, and at the same time he must keep close to his work in order that this may be possible. Thus are combined the unfortunate effects of both sitting and standing. That which is unfortunate in factory employment as far as purely physical effects upon the muscles are concerned, is the fact that a muscle must perform its functions for a long period of time without the opportunity of relaxing, without the oppor- tunity of recovering. When a muscle has performed its func- tion up to a certain point, we experience the sensation which we speak of commonly as fatigue. Fatigue means that there is an accumulation in the muscle of the waste products of its use, which have not yet been carried away and replaced by new mate- rial. If we continue to use a muscle far beyond the point of fatigue repeatedly, there results in that muscle in the course of time instead of further upholding, a degeneration and the re- sult of such excess fatigue is the final weakening of a muscle which, if treated properly, would on the contrary grow stronger continuously. The result is that we find the children who are thus unable to change their position to relieve their over-tired muscles, taking peculiar positions which at first we call bad habits. We speak of the child that has round shoulders, for K CHILD LABOR 71 example, as habitually holding himself badly. Why does he hold himself badly? Simply because his muscles are not capable of holding him in a proper position, in what we call a normal position. It is not a matter of slouchy habit of mind, either ; it is a question of muscular weakness. So with the child sitting at the machine, so with the child standing at the work bench continuously for periods varying from six to eight or nine hours a day. It is the lack of oppor- tunity to relax, the lack of opportunity for these muscles to gain, within a resonable length of time, what has been used up, which causes degeneration to take place, which causes this weakened condition to take place, and by reason of this weakened condi- tion, certain postures which are abnormal and which will de- velop into deformity. At af former conference of the- National Child Labor Commit- tgg"f( sir cw r t t o show\how premature employment in standing positions tends to produce postural deformities of the feet ; how sitting employment in young children tends to cause distortions of the spine and chest, and to what extent the conditions thus produced are likely to interfere with future industrial efficiency, as well as future health and chances for a normal tenure of life. It is not necessary to revert to these questions further at this time, but it seems well to mention them, and to call at- tention to the importance of the matters involved. Consensus of opinion among medical men is that the period of adolescence is of critical importance for the individual, both mentally and physically. For me the physical condition of children has been of primary interest from a professional view- point. As before remarked, even if it could be shown that what we call premature toil was not injurious to the physical organism of the child, there would still be ample ground, both economic and humanitarian, why such employment should be forbidden. Nevertheless it is highly important to seek definite infor- mation respecting the physical effect of such employment and for two reasons. The more important of these in my judg- ment concerns us the less in the purposes of this conference,, since it advocates an investigation into the matter purely as a contribution to medical knowledge. As such a contribution,. K.^ 72 SELECTED ARTICLES however, an inquiry of magnitude would assume g^^reat impor- tance and would be likely to lend a determinative influence of great value to certain theories at present contending for proof, proof hitherto lacking because of the impossibility of carrying on an inquiry of such scope under private auspices. It is held by some that the marked deformities of adoles- cence, such as lateral curvature of the spine and the severe de- formities of the feet appearing at this time, cannot be produced by occupation or habit without the existence of structural weak- ness or disease of the bones of antecedent character. On the other hand, it is maintained that such deformities may result from overtaxing the muscular system alone, during this period when growth and development may be considered the principal functions of the body. If we could have such an investigation, it would be most important in its results, I am sure. Whether deformities of children develop as the result of very unfortunate or improper employment, depends on a number of factors. Not every child who is employed too early in life or in an improper manner develops deformity. On the contrary, it is highly probable that a comparatively small proportion of them develops deformity. But in speaking of the physical effect of premature employment, we are not dealing with deformities alone, but with the damage to the child's general organism as well. To begin with, children come to their employment with various abnormal conditions already existing. They come suf- fering from mal-nutrition as the result of insufficient or im- proper food at home. They come with the traces of former disease of the bones, such as rickets, and of tuberculosis and of inherited diseases. They come after having been employed to an excessive extent in their homes, or having been given improper work in their homes, or having been confined to their homes to an undue extent. These things, all of them, lead up to the postural deformities, which develop during the course of their employment, and these deformities may be present and in formation when they come. However, this is to be remem- bered, that a spine which has started to become crooked, that has begun to weaken, and a chest which has not developed to the CHILD LABOR 73 normal extent may be likened to a nail slightly bent. It may seem strong enough when you look at it, it may seem strong enough when you try to bend it with your fingers, but put it under the hammer and instead of going into the wood it bends still more. This is precisely what happens to these unfortunate children when they are placed in the unfavorable environment of factories and workshops, and at a time when their growth and development are not yet complete. We have heard much of the influence of the school on the organism of the child. A great deal has been said and written on the subject. It is granted, I think, by schoolmasters every- where and by others who have given the subject careful study, that the school very often has an exceedingly unfortunate in- fluence on the physique of the child. It is said to be exceedingly important that the child should have the right kind of desk and the right kind of light. But remember that children in the poorest school are under no such unfortunate circumstances as the child is in the workshop or the factory. The child at school changes his occupation at least once an hour, during which time he has an opportunity of relaxing somewhat, or moving about. He has an interval usually in the midst of his tasks for some physical diversion. The hygienic conditions of even a poor school are much better, it seems to me, than the hygienic conditions in the best of workshops, so long as a child must spend nine or ten hours a day, or even eight hours a day, at work with only the lunch hour as an opportunity for diversion and re- laxation. A comparison of the agricultural child with the child in the factory or workshop has been made, and curiously enough it was a thing to which I had meant to give some considera- tion. It seems to me that the advantage is all upon the side of the child on the farm, even though he work ever so hard. I shall not go into the details of this question. They were very fully entered into just a few moments ago and much better than I could do. but I have this to say about this phase of the matter ; that it is common knowledge that many of our most prominent men, not only a few, but a great many of them, have come from the farm, and they themselves have told us how hard 74 SELFXTED ARTICLES they worked, how unfortunate were some of the conditions under which they worked. But these conditions seem to have done nothing more for these men than to give them a rugged physique and give them opportunity for mental development which has enabled them to rise above their fellows. Where are the graduates of the factories? I have not come across them in literature, science, art or politics. And I do not believe that they are there to be found to an extent at all con- siderable. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 122-30. March, 1909. Handicaps in Later Years from Child Labor. William E. Harmon. My own consideration of the problem, which has extended over a number of years and in various parts of the country, has convinced me that excessive toil under the most healthful condi- tions between the ages of twelve and sixteen, or that any toil during this period which precludes an equivalent development of the intellect, results in an arrest of the normal growth of the brain; a replacement of functional with connective tissue or neuroglia. It reduces permanently the mental capacity of the individual, reflecting itself subsequently by the loss of ambition, of will power, the power of concentration, of extended mental effort. An investigation made to determine the correctness of this hypothesis may proceed along three Hues: 1. In the study of families of children where exactly the same conditions of living exist, but in which certain of the children have the opportunity for mental development, while the others are deprived of it through work. A study of this type of case, if sufficiently extended, would prove beyond dispute the truth of the proposition herein presented — if it be true. 2. A study of the children sent from institutions for adoption. If the intellectual achievements of the children of adoption, in a large percentage of cases, were greatly beyond those of the re- mainder of the family, the evidence would tend strongly to the CHILD LABOR 75 validity of the proposition. The advantage here is. that the material is easily accessible, although the results are not so conclusive. • 3. The third line of investigation would be to make a compara- tive study between the relative accomplishments of parents and children. It is reasonable to assume that the natural capacity of the child and his parents is about equal, and if the inability of the parent, through toil in childhood, to secure an education, has resulted in a serious handicap in later years, when compared with his children, to whom, by self-sacrifice, he has given proper opportunities, it is at least presumable that the labor itself has had to do with the case. Early Employment vs. Opportunity for Mental Development For many years*I have been interested in this question, parti- cularly in many country districts of the United States. I have seen instances where whole families, except perhaps one member, were raised under conditions involving severe physical labor during youth, and I have noted the subsequent history of the family, the fortunate child pursuing an even and continuous career of advancement, while his brothers, not only were left behind, but went on through life unstimulated by ambition for betterment. I have seen fellow playmates at twelve years of age equally bright, part intellectually, never to meet again, by reason of one being committed to a few years of hard labor, while the other pursued his onward course, growing I intelk<;tuallv ias he grew ,phy^sically. ^ ^ <-^\ UCr~^^ Have Watclie^'tne Individual working child at eight, ten J and twelve years, bright eyes, face full of latent intelligence; i at fourteen his eyes begin to deaden, his face becomes heavy; at sixteen much of the light of intelligence has passed out, and he gazes on the world in the quite open-eyed manner of the mentally . deficient — his ambition gone, his powers of rejuvenation vanished. The Changes in Environment With regard to the second type of cases, those children re- moved from a limited to a broader environment — by adoption, — I have for some time been interested in providing homes of adop- tion for the children of indigent parents. These children natur- 76 SELECTED ARTICLES ally secure many advantages in their new homes, and it has been easy to follow their careers, and even to learn some- thing of their brothers and sisters. A relative of mine has been engaged in the investigation of children of this type, who have been already placed in homes. The general opinion of those with whom I have consulted, such men as Homer Folks and Charles Loring Brace, and my own observations lead me to believe that the career of the child of adoption is much the same as that of the other children of the family into which he or she is adopted, and in many instances is marked with great success, while the other children, who re- main with their parents because they are sufficiently advanced in years to help support the family, have been little better than their indigent parents. « Relative Achievement of Parents and Children The third class of cases which I have investigated, and regard- ing which I advise study, involve the relative achievements of parent and child. It is here the question becomes an intimate one, touching our own lives. We are surrounded by living illustra- tions of the injury of child labor in our own ancestry, either direct or collateral. The winning of the West was a heroic achievement, and yet, it had its pric© in the limitation of intellectual development in most of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. I am not contending that there were no compensatory advantages in the development of the physical qualities of courage and endurance to which we owe greatly our present day success. I merely assert that, with the generation itself, there were limitations im- posed which absolutely precluded the men of the time from such acquirements as to-day are open to those without the intellectual handicap. Ulysses S. Grant became President of the United grandfather, could neither have occupied that exalted position States, but Jesse Grant, the tanner and contemporary of my own nor any other of great importance. The life of Abraham Lincoln is an exemplification of the possi- bility of achievement under extreme conditions, but in Abraham Lincoln we find an individual of great physical strength, on whose vitality ordinary tasks made no impression, and who. CHILD LABOR T7 through the influence of a neighbor, absorbed early a love of books and learning. Had Abraham Lincoln's labor been meas- ured by his strength until he reached his sixteenth year, it is quite possible that the world would never have been enriched by the life contribution of the Great Emancipator. The present generation is one with which we have to deal and the present day requirements are not those of the pioneer. The problems we meet are those requiring intellectual equipment. Those of the early part of the nineteenth century required largely physi- cal strength. I am familiar with the South where the ante-bellum farming aristocracy and the lower whites are equally poor. We see in our cities the "unsubmerged tenth"; those who, by the sacrifice of family, or extraordinary virility and ambition, have been en- abled to gain a start; but you can travel among the plantations of Virginia, North and South Carolina and find hundreds of families of the best type and heredity where poverty has been so extreme as to require the constant toil of the children; and wherever you find it, almost invariably the marks of mental arrest are distinctly evident. I have traveled through the moun- tain districts of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia, where the stock is pure. American for generations back, but where child labor is almost universal, and where the educational impulse has scarcely touched the people. Here the sign of or- ganic degeneracy is well-nigh universal. To all of us the investigation of this class of cases is an easy one, and if we will but give the matter serious thought, I am convinced that the evil of child labor itself, removed from any other correlative influences, will be apparent. We have but to look about us to trace the history of families in our own com- munity; in fact, to study ourselves, in many instances, to find wherein the excessive work of our fathers and forefathers has handicapped us In the exercise of the finer Intellectual and ar- tistic faculties which we feel sure are potentially resident within us. This brings the problem into our own households — this makes the evil cry with a near voice and imposes a task on us on behalf of our own posterity. 78 SELECTED ARTICLES Independent. 6i: 748-50. September 27, 1906. Child Labor and Family Disintegration. Owen R. Lovejoy. We doubt the efficiency of pity to solve the problem of child labor. A certain value is derived from pictures of the bent shoulders, the contracted lungs, the tired limbs, the sallow faces, the vacant eyes and the dwarfed intellects of those we are ban- ishing from home, playground and schoolroom to the weary tread of our sweats-shops, factories and mines. But not all child laborers are "slaves." Those who denounce the evils of child labor in such generalizations as that 'two million little, wan and dwarfed child toilers march in the wage slave ranks of Amer- ica's industrial army" are a menace to this reform. Intelligent people, seeing many of these two million children who are not "wan" or "dwarfed," and who bear no other visible marks of slavery, discount the whole cry against child labor as a senti- ment. Many of the two million working children in America are between fifteen and sixteen years of age and are in occupations and laboring; under conditions not injurious to themselves- or to society. Not all glass houses employ little boys at night. Not all coal breakers are dense with clouds of dry dust. Not all telegraph offices employ little children to carry messages at midnight to houses of vice. Not all children in Southern cotton mills work through a twelve-hour night. Some one tells of seeing a little girl in a Southern cotton mill rudely awakened at night by a dash of cold water in her face. Homilies on child labor followed this incident, abounding in graphic descriptions of numberless little girls cruelly awakened night after night by splashes of cold water. Nothing is gained by exaggeration ; much is lost. It is enough that some of the two .million are toiling all night in glass houses; that some coal breakers compel little boys of ten years to work in clouds of dust so dense as to completely hide the light and fill the lungs; that some little girls of eight years toil through a twelve-hour night in Southern cotton mills; that some of the little children of New York are crushed in body and soul in the slavery of sweat-shop labor. The truth is bad CHILD LABOR 79 enough. Let the picture be drawn with simple accuracy, and we may hope to arouse, instead of sentiments of pity, the sense of social justice; an appreciation of the relation of this system to OUT social institutions. A demonstration of the loss to society, the injustice to the laborer, and the dwarfing of the progen- itors of our coming generations, will be more effective than specific pictures of little children who suffer from the wrong. The fact that the volume of child labor is increasing in America becomes especially significant when we consider the effect of the system upon that most fundamental of our social institutions — the family. In the twenty years preceding 1900, while the population of our country increased 50 per cent., the number of boys between the ages of ten and fifteen who were placed in our shops and factories increased 100 per cent., and the number of girls be- tween the same ages and in the same occupations increased 150 per cent. We have all reason to believe the increase since 1900 has more rapid than before. New York official reports show an increase of 38 per cent, between 1898 and 1903. Pennsylvania shows an increase among factory children of 25 per cent, in the single year 1904. The boys working in the hard coal breakers of that State under fourteen years of age number not les^ than 12,000, and in the soft coal mines under sixteen not less than 10,000, tho thru defects in the State law none of these facts are officially known. Iowa has increased her army of working children 2^2 per cent, in six years. The census re- ports of 1900 return 24,000 children in Southern cotton mills. There are estimated today not less than 60,000 — many of them eight and nine years old and many of them working twelve hours at night every alternate week. Whatever the historical causes of its development, we have come to regard the family — one father, one mother, a group of children to be fed, clothed and educated during the years that precede maturity — as the fundamental institution of our civiliza- tion and the glory, thus far, of all social evolution. One of the causes out of which the family grew has direct bearing upon our subject — that to which Professor Fiske called attention as his chief contribution to the evolutionary theory — the lengthened 8o SELECTED ARTICLES period of infancy. The evolutionary trend has been to prolong infancy and adolescence, and thus to launch upon society better individuals. The tendency of modern industry is to reverse this process Up to the time of the introduction of our present industrial system the home was the factory and men and women shared the manufacture of the articles of the world's consumption. The consumer was then in large part the manufacturer as well. The child undoubtedly shared in the lighter forms of such industries, but the group with which he worked was most often composed of the other members of his own family While his work had an economic value, even if the article produced was .for home consumption, its chief value was that which we regard as accru- ing from manual training. Under proper conditions the transfer of manufacturing from the home to the factory should have resulted in incalculable gain to the world, for women — no longer under the necessity of being the textile workers, the fuel gatherers, the soap and candle makers — would have been free to set in motion great influences for the intellectual and ethical development of the race. With the rapid utilization of such mechanical devices as lift the heavier burdens from human shoulders and lay them on shoulders of iron and steel, leaving the human laborer to guide the machine, and increasing the speed of production a hundredfold or more, the father in the family should have found his earning capacity tremendously increased. A rational expectation would have prophesied that he could not only singly provide maintenance and secure leisure for himself and the mother for higher undertakings, but that together they could prolong the years of education for their children, thus sending them into life better trained for social service. . What we actually find is the direct reverse. The ignorant, the weak, the inefficient, the little children are profitably sub- stituted for stalwart men. The wife and the child enter the factory and other wage-earning industries, not to assist the father in earning a livelihood, but rather to compete with him and drag his wages down. The words of a Southern mother contained a volume of CHILD LABOR 8i economic philosophy of which she was quite ignorant, as she said to me a few weeks ago, "The cotton mill is a mighty nice thing, 'cause a right little girl can make as much rnoney as a big one." The "much money" referred to was from i8 to 40 cents a day. This mother has six children working in the mill while she works both at factory and home. The father's precarious employment yields only enough to pay for his personal main- tenance. The result of this modern revolution in the problem of wage- earning has been a reduction of individual wages (compared with living expenses) from an amount sufficient to maintain a family as the unit in society to an amount sufficient only to main- tain an individual as the unit. Thus we are developing that ex- aggerated individualism which seeks to destroy even the mutual interdependence of the home and hurls into the face of the baby that ancient edict, "He that will not work neither shall he eat!" Viewed from the economic point alone we see its seriousness in the tendency to depress wages and dissolve the home into its constituent parts, laying on each the burden of struggle for ex- istence. That many serious-minded laboring people take this view of the situation is evident from the growing reluctance of men whose trades are being captured by ignorant and inefficient child labor to bring offspring into a world which cannot promise a life of the simplest comforts in reward for hard labor. Here is the real danger of that "race suicide" so vigorously con- demned by President Roosevelt ; for while the man of virtue and strength is deterred from propagating his kind because of the jeopardy in which his children would stand, the vicious and ignorant, the physically unfit and the discouraged are not de- terred by any such consideration, but, regardless of conse- quences, continue to propagate their kind and swell the propor- tion of those who will be from birth to death a heavy liability against society. We may ignore the needs of a single child — or assume that those corrective agencies established to gather up the wrecks from the social sea will care for him — but Nature is not mocked. If we maintain an industrial system which sows to the flesh we shall of the flesh reap corruption. Our danger, then, is a greater suicide of quality, than of quantity. 82 SELECTED ARTICLES Both the intellectual and the ethical assets that enrich society — together with such social institutions as conserve and further develop these virtues — are believed to spring directly from the rich soil of the family life. The intimate contact of helpless childhood with tender motherhood and strong fatherhood yields in the parent that passionate devotion which blossoms in the richest fruit of sacrifice, and in the child those qualities of teach- ableness, obedience and filial love which — extended to social traditions, institutions and laws — can alone explain the accumu- lated wealth of community and national life. But the positive benefits of home are not all. The family implies the segregation of a small group of children of some- what kindred tastes, aptitudes and ideals, away from the dis- tracting influence of larger social groups. Such semi-seclusion of the child is imperative if definite and constructive impressions are to be made on the growing mind. The menace to the in- tellectual and moral beginnings of childhood from early min- gling in promiscuous crowds of people foreign to the home, is obvious. No eminence of industrial attainment can compensate a nation for the loss of the security, the inspiration, and the calm courage of that social institution pictured in "The Cotter's Satur- day Night." Shall we passively tolerate or actively promote an evil which destroys all this? Shall we deny to the parent the right, or excuse him from the obligation, to provide for the nourishment of the bodies and minds of his offspring? Shall we absolve the child from allegiance to the parent, by destroying at once his depend- ence and his respect, and shall we reduce the "home" to a mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb ^yith wear- iness and minds drunk for sleep? Shall we deny to the child who must be a wage-earner the years required to prepare himself for even efficient wage earning and commit him for life to forms of occupation still so crude as to offer the most precarious em- ployment, the most meager wages, and the hottest competition? And shall we further place this form of conscript labor in those fields now occupied by man to drive him out by the economic force of lower wages? Shall we say to the man who has gloried in the sweetness and seclusion of his home and in the tender CHILD LABOR ' 83 plants of childhood springing up under his protection, "This is a luxury you cannot afford !" There are glass factories in New Jersey and Ohio that virtually refuse employment to men who will not promise to bring small boys to work with them. There are Southern cotton mills in which parents sign contracts to send all their children to work upon reaching a certain age. And there are little cottages in the coal region of Pennsylvania in which daughters — because they cannot work in the mines or breakers — are unwelcome, while the bond between father and sons is hardly more than a relation of economic con- venience. Doubtless many social evils threaten the integrity of the home, but when we remove the economic foundation on which the home stands — the ability of the parents to provide for their children during their growing period — we reverse the evolution- ary process in human development and condemn the family to inevitable disintegration. This is what the American people are doing when they promote, or tolerate, the premature employ- ment of children. Westminster Review. 172: 406-9. October, 1909. Half-Timers in the Factories. Elizabeth Sloan Chesser. Half-timers are girls and boys of over twelve and under fourteen, who have obtained a labour certificate, and are conse- quently permitted by the law to work half a day in the mills or factories, if they attend school the other half. They are em- ployed either in morning shifts from six or six-thirty till mid- day, or in the afternoon from one o'clock till five or six in the evening. The morning sets attend school in- the afternoon; those who work in the factories in the latter part of the day have to go to school until dinner time. In some cases they work on alternate days — Monday, Wednesday, Friday, in the factory: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, in the school. They are living a treadmill existence from day to day, from week to week. They are doing work which involves a double strain. The mental effort of school life is combined with the physical strain of factory life. At twelve years of age, the period when normal 84 SELECTED ARTICLES growth is most rapid, they have to go through a strain which results in arrested development for life. It is the age when children require regular nourishing meals, exercise in the fresh air, combined with an extra allowance of rest and sleep. What sort of life is led by the half-timer? He has to rise at five or five-thirty summer and winter. He has often to walk a mile to the factory in all weathers with, perhaps, a crust to sus- tain him till the breakfast half-hour arrives. He spends his morning in the greyness and gloom of the factory, amidst the roar of machinery, the dust and heat of the rooms. He walks home again for dinner, which it is safe to say is far from being the ideal meal for a growing child working beyond his strength. The majority of half-timers are the children of factory mothers, who have had neither the tinle nor the opportunity to learn cooking. Fried fish and chips from the fish shop, or bread, pickles, and cheese would form a sufficient repast from the point of view of the child or his parents; the ideal child's food, milk, being conspicuous by its absence from factory homes. After dinner there is school to attend, and the evidence of school teachers and educational authorities generally as to the evil effects of the half-time system on the children is overwhelming. The children come to school worn out nervously and physically after six hours' work in the factory. They are generally dull and languid, or nervous and irritable, subject to habit spasms, to chorea, or St. Vitus' dance. Very often they fall asleep at their work, an effort of nature to counteract over-fatigue. Whenever a child becomes a half-timer the teacher can see mental, physical, and moral deterioration. The mental proofs are provided by copy book and exercises, and the deterioration of manners shown by both girls and boys after a few weeks' factory life is evidence of the moral evils of children being allowed to work in the factories. It is not difficuH to collect evidence of the physical evils of child labour in the factories. A few years ago an examination was made of the sight and hearing of 250 boys in a Lancashire school. It was found that 27 per cent, of the half-time scholars, and only 4 per cent, of the whole-time scholars suffered from defective hearing. Also that defective vision existed in yj per CHILD LABOR 85 cent, of the half-timers, compared with only 6 per cent, of the full time scholars. After the first two months in the factory the children show signs of physical deterioration, they become pallid and lose flesh. They suffer from headaches and other signs of nervous strain. They show every indication of over-strain and over-fatigue. From one week to another they never have their* due allowance of rest and sleep. They go to bed late compared with children of a higher social standing and they rise, perhaps at five a. m. Lack of nerve rest and sleep is one of the chief causes of mental defect in after life. The danger is, perhaps, greatest to the girls. From twelve to fourteen years is the critical period of a girl's life, and undue strain at this age affects her whole life for the worse. From the medical point of view there is something criminal in a system that permits girl children to work on their feet all the morning in a machine shop, and spend their afternoons at hard mental work when their bodies are aching with fatigue, and their brains are dulled and stupid from the noise and strain of the factory. What chance have they, child-women, who have had no youth, young girls exposed to all the moral pollution of life in the factories? Many of the older women exercise a bad moral influence on the half-timers and the younger full-timers. At twelve, thirteen, and fourteen years these young girls are women with a knowledge of the evil of life which is pathetic in the extreme. At the same time, this is the receptive age from the educational point of view, the period of life when the future mothers and housewives ought to be learning the A B C of a woman's education. What chance have these girls to gain a knowledge of cooking, housewifery, and economical expenditure, if their education is checked at twelve, is finished entirely at thirteen or fourteen by the half-time system? The majority of thinking people are opposed to the half-time system. The sentimental argument that if legislation interferes with child labour in factories, the poor widows with only sons will have to bear the brunt is not borne out by facts. In remark- ably few cases, according to school authorities, is poverty on the part of the parents responsible for the applications for half- time certificates. Very often the father of the child is getting 86 SELECTED ARTICLES good wages, but does not see why an extra few shillings a week should be given up because the teacher thinks the child is better at school. Cases of absolute callousness on the part of the par- ents are plentiful enough. They will often insist upon having the half-time papers, even when strong representations are made as to the consequences on the future health of the child. Opinion is unanimous that the cotton factory operatives are strongly opposed to any interference with the half-time system. They cannot be convinced that limitation of child labour will prove advantageous to themselves in the end by raising the gen- eral wage. It is only by legislation that the half-time system can be swept away. Comprehensive legislation would mean raising the age of half-timers to fifteen, and reducing the working hours of young people under eighteen years of age in factories. By the establishment of trade schools for the industrial training of boys and housewifery classes for girls between thirteen and fifteen years of age the children would have a chance of acquir- ing knowledge which would help them to secure a living wage in after life. Child labour in factories does not qualify the workers for future well-paid employment. The raising of the school age would provide them with the opportunity of obtaining a wider moral, mental, and industrial training. Under the pres- ent system the children leave school just at the age when they profit most from the discipline and teaching of school life. The girls go straight from grappling with elementary arithmetic and geography to the manual labour of the factory. It is im- possible for them, exhausted after a hard day's work, to attend technical classes in the evening. So they are unfitted for any life but the factory. Even when they marry, the factory draws them back ; they are happier in the card room than in the home. They have never learned to cook, to care for the simple homely arts of the housewife — in a word they have never had a chance. Let them have their chance. Abolish half-time and married women's labour. Teach the girls and the women hygiene and housewifery. And so strike at the root of the physical de- terioration of the nation. CHILD LABOR 87 Annals of the American Academy. 25: 558-62. May, 1905. School as a Force Arrayed against Child Labor. James H. Kirkland. Within past years we have traveled far in our ideas of the state. We no longer believe that government to be best that governs least. We no longer beHeve in the state v^'hose seal of authority is the badge of the policeman, whose temples are its jails and penitentiaries, whose sole duties are to protect life and property, and secure the enforcement of the commandments, "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal." We realize that a govern- ment has no higher duty, at certain times, than the preservation of its own existence by whatever force may be necessary to make secure that existence ; but we believe it is the duty of the state to guard its higher life as well as its lower life, and that, in guarding its higher life, there are some things better than armies and navies, and that school-houses and churches and books are no less necessary instrumentalities for national existence than gunpowder and dynamite. Representing, therefore, the school, we represent our nation and the country's government — for the school is the state, after all, in its parental capacity. We believe in popular education, in universal education. We do not claim that this is a panacea for all ills or a remedy for all wrongs. We do not expect to see all men made wise, or just, or good. We realize that with the best we can do there will be some failures in life. On every sea some barks must go down. But we take the position that an opportunity must be given to every- one, and that every child must have the privilege of working out his own life, of developing the best that is in him — and therefore we believe that every child must have the chance of an education. We are opposed to child labor because it shuts out that opportunity, and makes education impossible. Therefore no legislation on this subject can be satisfactory if it ignores the educational requirements of the child. The de- mand for an age limit in child labor is justified by hygienic laws, but a deeper philosophy lies underneath such enactments. Our problem is not merely to keep the child under sixteen out of the factory or mine, but to keep the child at work in school. The factory is better than the slums; it may be that the factory is a 88 SELECTED ARTICLES better place than the home, but it is never better than the school ; and it is just where parental obligation has failed, just where the home has disappeared from the life of the child, that the school must step in as another home and the teacher must take the place of the parent who has deserted his charge. The school must provide for that child a new opportunity, a new life. It is by no means sufficient to have an enactment saying the child must be able to read and write before being allowed to go to work in the factory or mine. It is not unnatural for such a child, after he has gone to work, to forget all that he has learned and to drift back into the class of hopelessly illiterate. Reading and writing is a very small requirement, when it stands as an educational test between childhood that must be protected and manhood that .should look after itself ; and yet, in every state in the Union, I suppose, there are children at work under the age of sixteen who can neither read nor write. From the standpoint of the school we urge three contentions in our consideration of this subject: I. We contend that there should be always a definite educa- tional requirement in every child labor law. The mere establish- ment of an age limit is insufficient, and the requirement that the child shall be able to read and write is pitifully small. A law re- quiring that the child shall attend some school while at work is some improvement, but is open also to very serious objection, and in practical operation is seldom found satisfactory. A child can- not work in a factory six or eight hours a day and do intellectual work at night; and a law permitting children to work during the vacation period puts a premium on long vacations and short school terms. II. The second principle for which we contend is that those who are interested in the education of the child shall have some voice in the execution of the law that guards that education. The making out of certificates should not be placed in the hands of notaries who are to get their fees for this operation, nor should such certificates be made out on the unsupported affidavit of parents, who may be unscrupulous in their desire to secure gain from the child's labor; but the responsibility should be placed in the hands of the men and women who are interested in the child and in its education. CHILD LABOR 89 IIL The third point I would make is a plea for better schools and more of them. I speak on that point as a Southern man. Of all our problems, that is the problem that is most far- reaching. North American Review. 191: 773-84. June, 1910. Will Trade Training Solve the Child-Labor Problem? Owen R. Lovejoy. We are repeating the history of factory regulation so long ago promoted by Sir Robert Peel, Robert Owen and other leading manufacturers in England. The larger social aspects of this problem — the weakening of citizenship and the cheapening of industry itself — are beginning to appeal as motives for action in addition to the mere sense of pity for the wrongs of childhood, which was the chief earlier motive. Through public interest, the beginnings of which date from the earlier activities of trade-unions, women's clubs, con- sumers' leagues and many earnest individual workers, there have been enacted important child-labor laws in the past five years in thirty-eight States and the District of Columbia. In the legis- lative sessions of 1908-09, seventeen States enacted new laws or revised existing laws. Five of these States are Southern. Since January 1st, 1910, important changes in these laws have passed the Legislatures of Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, while other important bills are pending in Massachusetts, New York and Ohio. But we must not be misled by this somewhat formidable rec- ord of legislative enactments. The end we seek, namely, adequate preparation of the American child for citizenship, is not attained, but only made possible of attainment by such pro- hibitions ; and it is significant that, although child-labor laws re- duce the number and force an improvement in the condition of working-children, the field of usefulness of such measures is limit- ed by their repressive nature. Multitudes of people affected, whether employers, parents or children, resent these laws and look on them as detrimental, while an army of officials is required to secure their enforcement against the connivance of these three interested factors. 90 SELECTED ARTICLES This negative legislation has been accompanied in most in- stances by positive laws for compulsory school attendance. In all the States having child-labor laws compulsory school attend- ance laws have been enacted except in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. The effectiveness of such laws is strik- ingly attested by the steady growth in the number of common- wealths adopting them. In 1870 less than five per cent, of the population were subject to compulsory school kws. To-day over seventy-two per cent, are subject to these laws. The findings of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education have been largely quoted. They are significant of what probably occurs in other States at the end of the compulsory school period. In Massachusetts there are 25,000 children between fourteen and sixteen not in school, five- sixths of whom did not complete the grammar school, one-fifth did not complete the seventh grade and one-fourth did not com- plete the sixth grade. The statement was recently made by a leading educator in Massachusetts that from the army of 20,000,000 children attend- ing the public schools of the United States during the school year, there would be at least 5,000,000 deserters before the roll would be called at the beginning of the following school year. It is of the greatest importance to discover the cause of this deser- tion ; why there is such a decrease in school attendance after the fourth grade ; why such impatience for the last day of the com- pulsory school period to come ; what the attractive feature out of school and what the future of these deserters. Unquestionably the majority become, temporarily or perma- nently, wage-earners, either from family necessity or because work promises less monotony and irksomeness than school at- tendance. The responsibility seems to lie mostly with the child, for out of 3,157 families investigated seventy-six per cent, could give the children industrial training and would gladly do so were it offered. In many instances the parents were found to be spending in supplementary lessons, such as commercial branches and music, as much as the child's income. It was found that these children seldom receive over fivp dollars a week before they are seventeen, and reach the maximum CHILD LABOR 91 wage of eight to ten dollars at twenty years of age. It is esti- mated that for every one going into an occupation advantageous to the employee, four enter a cotton-mill or become messengers or cash-girls. Moreover, it is rare that one goes from an unskilled to a skilled trade. Out of the fifty cases between seventeen and twenty years of age employed in Cambridge in skilled industries, only one had formerly been employed in unskilled labor other than errand and office work. Boys were rarely found in print- ing-houses who were formerly employed at other work, and this was true of mechanics, plumbers, painters, glass-workers, plasterers, masons and stone-cutters. A comparison was made of the aggregate wages at eighteen years of age, of children leaving school at fourteen and at six- teen. The results showed that even with the faulty education now aflforded, the child of sixteen goes from school so much better equipped as a wage-earner that in two years his earnings aggregate more than those of the child who left school at four- teen and has been working four years. Why do such unsatisfactory and poorly paid employments lure children from school? The desertion seems mainly due to posi- tive dislike of school life and a wish to be active. Influenced by their companions, children have a strong ambition for money of their own. A compulsory elementary education which results in such distaste for school that children prefer to enter some un- skilled labor, which wastes from two to four years of adoles- cence for an insignificant wage and leaves them stranded at twenty, has missed the purpose of education. Some helpful facts they may have gleaned, but there has been little influence in shaping their life and ideals. The most common deduction from the investigations made is that "many of these children would be in school if the school promised preparation for some life pursuit." Our problem is to supply the attractive power in our educational system that will prove the complement of prohibitive legislation and compulsory elementary education. The adaptation of our educational system to earlier needs in our civilization is well known, but we may as well face the fact that it is at present class education, for the great majority of our youth enter manual trades, w^hile our schools in the main 92 SELECTED ARTICLES furnish only preparation for professional life. In a recent paper which appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly" Dr. Paul Hanus de- scribes our present educational system as "general" in contrast with the excellent system he advocates. In our judgment our schools are not providing a general education, but a special class education. All the dominant characteristics of the regular school method tend to train children to avoid occupations which command the services of at least ninety per cent, of our population, while they are urged by precept and example to seek eagerly the employ- ments of the other ten per cent. The recruits for our industrial army receive comparatively little of the time or money, expended upon our public schools. Educators are giving their best thought to the task of adapting our public-school system to the needs of an industrial society, and many steps are being taken in this direction. In 1890 thirty- seven city school systems reported as having manual training. In 1906 there were five hundred and ten. Trade schools are being instituted in many cities and State Legislatures are rapidly making appropriations for industrial and trade training. We need not here discuss the excellent programmes which are being suggested by leading educators, covering as they do the in- troduction into our elementary schools of practical work with an industrial bent ; the multiplication and enlargement of high schools of the manual training type ; the founding of trade schools which will provide vocational training to bridge the chasm between fourteen and sixteen, when so many enter un- skilled industries : and continuation schools to serve the needs of those who have already entered industry with meagre preparation. Every revision is admirable that will make our schools a part of real life and impress their practical, helpful character to such a degree that the family will prefer to sacrifice the pittance that might be received for unskilled labor, in order that opportunity may be given the child to prepare for larger usefulness and remuneration. For some families this sacrifice would be impos- sible because of poverty. In every such instance, in the interest of the commonwealth, assistance must be given either by private or public aid. The question as to the limit of social responsibility CHILD LABOR 93 is a mere quibble. When society dictates that every child shall "be educated, it cannot disclaim the responsibility implied. But preparation for skilled production is not enough. It has been said that all our training to-day is a training for consump- tion, but nothing seems to us to have been quite so poorly done. Every worker during his vocational training should have an op- portunity to learn something of the demands and conditions of labor in other industries. Only thus can he be fitted for intelli- gent democratic citizenship, for wise sympathy with fellow workers and for an appreciation of work and the place of the worker in the social scheme. Workers thus trained would not tolerate the inequality of profits to the actual producer and the middleman, so strikingly demonstrated at the recent New York City Congestion Exhibit. Efficient workmanship and honest service would also be de- manded. Whatever the phases through which society may pass, the purpose of education is constant — intelligent citizenship. In a society pre-eminently industrial the education must be along industrial lines, but if it ends merely in the acquirement of a handicraft it is failure. There must also be training toward lofty industrial ideals. If we could train the coming generation to revolt against tawdry or dishonest goods, we should have some hope for the steady elevation of our industries to a higher plane. The manufacturer is forced by competition to cater to the ma- jority demand, and quantity is the popular goal. The true crafts- man who is dissatisfied with the dishonest results of the speed- ing which reduces himself and his fellows to machines has at present one recourse — he can quit. What is demanded is train- ing for the entire group to which this craftsman belongs. The very class of people who do the shoddy work buy that kind of goods. This is partly due to their cheapness, for the average mechanic cannot afTord better. But let him once sense the affront to his manhood, the insult to his wife and family, the so- cial sin he commits by taking from the hands of the merchant at any price that which is devoid of all ideals of proportion, beauty, simplicity, honesty or reasonable utility: — a new type of pur- chaser enters the markets of the world. The training of the child is the main concern rather than the 94 SELECTED ARTICLES effect this training is to have on industries. Our public schools must be called into requisition not to train experts in single specialized trades in order to lift the burden of expense from .the employer, but that the children shall become so alert and well developed as to be fit for a choice of several opportunities. A noted educator has recently suggested that "the last two years of vocational training would include specialized instruction in the trades appropriate to a given locality." There is the danger-point. This is legitimate, if the trades that seem proper to a locality afford a fair opportunity for ad- vancement in skill and in wages. Otherwise the boys and girls should be so fitted by a knowledge of other occupations that their future and the future of their children can never be dominated by what may chance to be "the leading industry" of the com- munity. It is obvious to careful students that the dominant in- dustries of a community are frequently not such as offer the best opportunity for the development of skill and advancement to self-support. In spite of this fact, is it not true that the move- ment toward manual training is too prone to accept the local situation as inevitable, and to seek to adjust itself rather than at- tempting to alter local conditions? For example, the mining of coal is a chief industry in Pennsylvania, but the child of the coal- mining community, instead of being absolutely predestined in his industrial career, should have presented to him an industrial horizon broad enough to enable him to choose intelligently whether he will become a coal-miner. It is questionable whether the training offered the youth in some of our industrial centres can be regarded as of especial construction value. To equip them for earlier entrance into some trade or labor which can never give promise of a living wage may be only to aggravate the evil we seek to abate. Girls should be excluded by law from all trades which menace their physical or moral well-being, and thus jeopardize the in- terest of the home and of future generations. The trades re- maining should be carefully selected on the basis of labor de- mand, opportunities for advancing in efficiency and remuneration and their effect upon womanly instincts and domestic tastes. In the trades thus selected they should receive as careful industrial training as boys. Such a course would deter them from enter- CHILD LABOR 95 ing industry at an age and degree of preparation which forbid their becoming skilled laborers. The unskilled trade is often more vitiating to women from the social standpoint than to men. A boy at least looks upon industry as a permanent thing and rarely fails to have some regard for his fellow workmen. The girl is apt to consider it as a temporary occupation and hence does not respect industry and her fellow worker and cares noth- ing for organization or any protective measures. The excuse made for not including domestic science in trade schools now existing is that girls do not desire to go into domes- tic service. It is preposterous that only those girls who are will- ing to enter such employment should receive this training. For every girl there should be adequate instruction in the subjects that vitally affect the home. She should receive some knowledge of productive processes in general hygiene, decorative art in its relation to the home and domestic science. Society, in order to serve its own ends, should expect each girl to be mistress in her own home, and if industrial training is provided at all, should embody domestic science not as a fitting for remunerative oc- cupation, but as preparation for home-making. When it does not mark a girl as having chosen to be a domestic servant, un- doubtedly many will choose such instruction and go out with loftier ideals of a home and with preparation for its responsi- bilities. The stigma now resting upon domestic science as being something necessary to be understood only by domestic servants should be removed. Let us give all our girls the idea that home-making requires scientific preparation or else give up the theory that the home is especially "woman's work." Incidentally, this might so develop the future directors of homes that they would bring about con- ditions which would make domestic service a dignified and de- sirable trade. It is notorious at present that in many homes no self-respecting girl can work as a domestic servant, for conditions are such as would invite speedy correction if any manufacturer or merchant attempted to maintain them in their places of busi- ness. And this, not from a deliberate desire to be unjust, but from sheer ignorance. Both employers and organized workers are divided on the sub- ject of trade schools under a system of public instruction. The 96 SELECTED ARTICLES manufacturer doubts the efficiency of workers thus trained. This doubt cannot be removed by argument, but only by a practical demonstration of the quality of workmanship. The equipment and instruction should be such that a certificate from a public trade school would mean that its holder lacks nothing that his trade calls for, save the celerity which comes only by practice. However, there is nothing to hinder the inauguration of factory trade schools when an industry so desires. A most interesting experiment in combining practical train- ing with education is in the team-work system, evolved by the University of Cincinnati. Students are employed alternate weeks in various factories of the city and alternate weeks in the class- room. Thus the employer has a regular shift of two workmen," while the students receive the practical training required under commercial conditions. Organized labor fears that the public trade school will flood the labor market and increase the sharpness of competition for work. But, as Robert A. Woods has observed: "It is incon- ceivable that as a class school-trained workmen should not be even more jealous than others of all unreasonable encroachments upon their wage standard, and that they should not apply their additional training to the development of even more effective forms of labor organization than now exist." All private and class interests must be forgotten in the interest of the social good, if we are to meet the problem of proper educa- tion in a democracy. Undoubtedly the manufacturer will profit by having the public, through the trade school, pay for training his recruits and bear the cost of the material now wasted by be- ginners. To make the employer and not the child the chief bene- ficiary of such a system, to make the newer education play into the hands of great industrial interests, would be a perversion of a splendid opportunity. But while this direct benefit to the employer is acknowledged, the trained worker and society in gen- eral will reap the chief advantage if industrial training is proper- ly directed. The trained worker will cease to be menaced by the helpless and ignorant competitor, many times the child laborer, now so often the potent tool of the employer. Moreover, the trained worker, together with society at large. CHILD LABOR 97 will reap the constant advantage of having offered for purchase in the markets honest products. The community will be relieved of the burden, now so heavy, of that multitude of industrial mis- fits whose helplessness arises from ignorance and utter lack of training for any useful occupation. Best of all, if there is placed before the youth of our nation the opportunity to learn some one handicraft in its completeness, they can never be crushed to the level of industrial machines. The methods pursued in this edu- cational revolution must keep paramount the necessity of en- hancing our most valuable social asset, intelligent citizenship. Prohibitive legislation and compulsory elementary education open the door of opportunity for youth, but the education must be of such a character as to help the child by its attraction and lead him into such fields of skilled labor that in the education of his own children compulsion will cease to be necessary. The pres- ent demand among parents — in so far as they have been able to express their desires — are so wide-spread as to justify more ag- gressive steps than have thus far been taken in this direction. Annals of the American Academy. 25: 437-58. May, 1905. Children in American Street Trades. Myron E. Adams. An investigation of 1,000 newsboys, ranging in age from five to twenty-two, showed that out of this number, 127, or 12 per cent, were under ten years of age. Among the number there were forty-two Italians, twenty-five Americans, twenty-four Germans, sixteen Irish and eight Jews. One hundred and six had both parents living, and only twenty-one had lost either father or mother. Their aggregate earnings were $41.40 per day. or an average earning of thirty-two cents per day, for which they worked three and one-half hours daily. It is sometimes asserted that children under ten years of age, if not engaged in street trading, would lounge about in idleness and mischief. It must, however, be remembered that the truancy law requires the attendance of all such children at school. It would certainly seem better if only to secure a normal physical development that these children should play about the street, around their homes, in the playgrounds or in the crowded 98 SELECTED ARTICLES downtown district at the Chicago Boy's Club, which is con- ducted exclusively for the boys of the street, than that they should share in the intense life of street trading. Nor is it right to characterize as idleness the play of a child of ten after live hours' application in the public school, since play has been recognized as one of the most important factors in the physical and mental development of child life. Anyone famiHar with the necessities of child life in the tenement districts under- stands that the street is the playground for the child. It ought to be emphasized here that there is a well-known difference in the physical and moral influences surrounding street trading in the downtown district with all the freedom from external control either on the part of city or parent, as compared with the con- ditions of street play within the neighborhood in which the child" lives where the restrictions of home and friends are able to in- fluence to some measure his conduct. The suggestion which may occur to the casual reader, that the newsboy under ten years of age, prohibited from trading on the street, would be deprived of a very important part of his support, is not sustained by the facts obtained during the inves- tigation. Only a very small number of these children are from dependent families. A careful investigation of the records of the Charity Organization Society shows that of the i,ooo newsboys in- vestigated, the names of but sixteen families are found, and of these sixteen, eight applied for the privilege of a vegetable garden, of the remaining eight only four received direct help, such as coal, clothing or food. Some children sell papers through the coercion of selfish par- ents. During the investigation, a well-dressed Italian was seen standing on the corner of Adams and State streets watching his three sons selling papers. The three boys, aged respectively, fourteen, ten and eight, earned jointly $2 a day. The father stood by to prevent any investigation of their earnings or school attendance, yet there seemed to be no desire on his part to participate in their labors. In the majority of cases the boys do not have the protection, even of the fathers, but are left to the mercy of the street. The investigation disclosed the fact that the newsboy is pecu- liarly subject to dangers of this sort. He is the only working CHILD LABOR 99 child whose occupation offers an excuse for remaining on the street at night, while apparently pursuing a legitimate industry. Although the city is full of unscrupulous men, it is toward the newsboy that such a man may most easily hold the advantage of an employer of boys under fourteen. Besides this he has an op- portunity of employing boys who are already enervated by ir- regular hours, improper food, and where sense of decency in many cases has been broken down by life on the street at all hours of day or night. Instances of this kind are of frequent occurrence, although they are seldom made public. The police have direct evidence that a newsdealer, who had a prosperous corner on Halsted street, hired eight young boys, working for him at a percentage of one cent for five papers sold. This man required the boys to come to his room to receive their pay, and there committed violence on each of the eight boys, most of whom were under fourteen years of age. A newsboy who was brought to the John Worthy School was found to be suffering from disease. An investigation instituted by Mr. Sloan disclosed the facts as stated above. The case never came up in the courts, as the man disappeared from the city when he discovered that there was such damaging evidence against him and the author- ities have been unable to find him. Mr. Sloan, the superintendent of the John Worthy School, authorizes the statement, that "One third of the newsboys who come to the John Worthy School have venereal disease, and that lo per cent, of the remaining newsboys at present in the Bride- well, are according to the physician's diagnosis, suffering from similar diseases." The newsboys, as well as the messenger boy, and American District Telegraph boy, on account of his availibility is frequently found in the "red light" district, and as a messenger boy for men and women of dissolute character, learns the very worst side of the city's life. He knows many of the professional pro- stitutes by name, and has become attached to them by presents of fruit and candy. Mr. Sloan also states, that "The newsboy who comes to the John Worthy School is, on the average, one-third below the ordi- nary boy in development physically." This is to be accounted for 100 SELECTED ARTICLES by irregular days and sleepless nights. The strongest under these conditions cannot long hope to compete with the boy who has a normal amount of sleep and who does not lack for proper food at regular intervals. If boys under ten are required to rise at 4.30 or 5 a. m., they have been under four and one-half hours' ex- citement and labor before entering school, where for five hours they are to be engaged in more or less mental effort. Then many of the boys distribute papers by the route system in the morning, also sell papers in the evening, beginning in such in- stances the labor and excitement of their trade immediately up- on leaving school, lasting for an average time of three hours, making a total daily activity of over twelve hours. The physical danger of the child varies with his age. We must not and cannot treat him like a man, for the youthful or- ganism is particularly susceptible to physical abuse. The excite- ment of the street stimulates unnatural desires on the part of the boy. He sees the men about him participating in questionable pleasures and soon learns to follow their example with dis- astrous results to himself. Among the 1,000 newsboys examined, there were 75.1 per cent, who came under the compulsory education law. Of these, 662 gave the name of some school they were attending. Sub- sequent investigation of the information thus given proved the statements to be generally true. It was found, however, that in many cases their attendance was so irregular as to amount to truancy. Authorities on truancy agree that the street trades are the chief support and resource of truant children; requiring prac- tically no capital, and demanding no recommendation, they are open to all alike. In the minds of the parents who have little or no education themselves, the school is naturally made subordinate to the pecu- niary gain of the child in selling papers, even if at times it is a mere pittance. The boy is made to feel at an early age that his value is determined by the money he can earn on the street. The school is the place that demands his time for some of the best hours in the day. He cannot see the relation between the school and his daily trade, and in most cases he assumes that the school CHILD LABOR loi is his enemy. To the boy accustomed to the street, school soon becomes irksome. The freedom of life appeals to him, the very busy hours are soon over and there is time for loafing and idling with other and older boys, and it is in such idle hours as these that the vices that are later to prove the ruin of the boy are contracted. The secretary of the probation court officers states that "these are one hundred and forty-three newsboys in charge of the officers of that court," and adds, that "the first offense of almost every boy she had had to deal with has been truancy." The boy who is out at four, or even earlier, in the morning either to deliver papers on a route, or to sell on a corner, is breaking into hours of sleep that the young and growing body is much in need of. The energy expended in the first spurt of selling or delivering his papers leaves him unfitted for the school room when he reaches there at nine o'clock, the reaction sets in, the body demands rest, and the quiet monotony of the school room is in such marked contrast to that of the street full of life and motion that the study of books seems more than ever a drudgery, and the desire to get away from it more than ever intense. Gaming is unquestionably a most common vice among news- boys. Selling newspapers does not make the boy gamble, and it cannot be said that gambling is peculiar to newsboys, yet here the opportunities seem largest. Where money is ready at hand and more is to be easily had, its value is seldom recognized. It is very easy for the boy to "chance it" with the hope of greater gain, when at various times during the day and night he is brought in contact with many boys who are likewise inclined. Gambling in the downtown district takes various forms. "Shooting pen- nies" is the most common, although "craps" takes a large part of the earnings. In this way the income of the whole day may pass through the hands of a number of boys in a few moments. Probably no one familiar with juvenile delinquency can seri- ously doubt that any child that tires of parental or school re- straints can go downtown to borrow or beg a "stake." and by joining a "gang," live the exciting and ever-degrading life of the streets. The immediate cost of this pernicious license falls most 102 SELECTED ARTICLES heavily upon the families of the foreign poor. There is no story more tragic in the annals of life in Chicago than the break be- tween the American boy of foreign parentage and his tenement home. The foreigner's child, even though born abroad, after two years in the public school, is to all intents and purposes an American, while his parents remain European peasants. The mother quite probably speaks no English, and the father just enough to understand his Irish foreman. The boy learns to discount his parents' ignorance, and they misunderstand and half fear his strange new world wisdom. The boy, becoming im- patient of their restraint, runs away, sleeps out a night or two, maintains himself by selling papers, likes the license and excite- ment of the street life, and his home knows him no more. He is now easy game for the experienced vagrant or sneak thief. Girls have long been selling papers in Chicago, so long indeed that the fact seems to have passed unnoticed. The investigator saw twenty, and a moderate estimate puts them at three times that number. They are mostly Italian, with a few Germans. At one time an attempt was made to stop the girls by refusing to sell them papers, but they were able to obtain them from stands, since that time there has been no further effort to prevent their selling. A little girl who began to sell papers when eleven years old, built up a large trade in the neighborhood of Madison and Halsted streets. For more than two years she sold papers there with great success. She was quick to see the customer, simple and childlike in her replies and gained many friends. At times an older brother came with her to her corner, but generally she came alone. Gradually she lost the simplicity of the early days, she was pert in her answer and brazen in her request. She would saunter into the saloons with the men and drink "pop" with them at the bar, finally her brother saw that she could stand that kind of a life no longer, and she was taken from the street. If we leave the street without protection we shall have new problems with each passing year. It is obviously the duty of every American city to face this situation without delay. The conditions in Chicago are no worse than in a multitude of other cities in the East and West. A census of newsboys taken on the streets of Buffalo during the month of March, 1903, which aimed CHILD LABOR 103 to be representative of the 2,000 newsboys in that city, showed that out of the 328 boys, 273 or 83 per cent, were under fourteen and eighty-four or 25 per cent, were under ten years of age. Out of these eighty-four it was found that three were orphans. There were only eight full orphans and twenty-two half orphans out of the 328 who were examined. Although the dangers of the street trades are not determined alone by the size of the city, it is nevertheless true that in a city where there are many editions night and morning the chances of abuses are increased many times. New York City has seen this, but has delayed long to seek remedies despite the almost unan- imous support of the press. It is a sad commentary on our city civilization that the street child has not been cared for before this. It is difficult for the uninitiated to realize the number of children who are subject to the temptation of a city like New York, or who are lacking in those restraints of home and school which are so necessary for the development of a strong character. The results of this life are repeated almost without the slighest variation. The New York Juvenile Asylum reported, "that out of the 311 boys who had worked at various trades prior to their commitment, 125 or 40 per cent, had been newsboys. Out of this number, eighty had begun between four and twelve years of age." The hospitals, the public schools and the courts all have the same story to tell of diseased bodies, of incapacitated minds and bad morals, the gift of the street to its unrestrained children. The attempts to remedy this condition have been few in number and rather unsatisfactory in results. In 1902 Boston adopted a system almost identical with that used in Manchester, Liverpool and London, England. The city ordinance of Boston provides that "no minor under the age of fourteen shall, in any street or public place in the city of Boston, work as a bootblack or sell or expose for sale any books, newspapers, pamphlet, fuel, fruit or provisions, unless he has a minor's license." The regula- tion of 1902 provides, "that the principal of a school or a district in which a minor under fourteen is a pupil, shall receive the ap- plication in duplicate of the parent or guardian of such a minor or of any responsible citizen of Boston, and shall forward the same to the superintendent of schools, accompanied by a cer- 104 SELECTED ARTICLES tificate of the teacher in whose class the minor may be and the principal of the school stating that they approve the granting of such license to said minor." No minor shall work as a newsboy or as a bootblack unless he is over ten years of age, and shall not sell any other article unless he is over twelve years of age. The legislature of New York, in April, 1903, amended the labor law relating to children employed in the streets and public places in cities of the first-class (New York and Buffalo), The amendment, "that no male child under ten and no girl under sixteen shall in any city of the first-class sell or expose for sale newspapers in any street or public place. No male child, actually or apparently under fourteen years of age, shall sell or expose for sale unless provided with a permit and a badge." No child to whom such a permit and badge are issued shall sell papers after ten o'clock at night. These laws are both definite and comprehensive. They mark a welcome advance in preventive legislation. Their enforcement, however, has been a very diflficult problem. Many methods have been tried. The Boston law was to be enforced by the board of aldermen. This proved unsatisfactory, and in 1902 a law was passed, transferring the licensing of bootblacks from the board of aldermen to the school board. The committee on newsboys reported in 1903, "that three-quarters of the boys do not obey the law, and its agents on fourteen consecutive days in Septem- ber, 1903, made observations with the following results: Number of boys not having badges in sight, 140; number having no badges or license, 63; number selling for other boys, ro; number under age, 33; number selling after 8.30 p. m., 117. As a result of this investigation a special officer was appointed who had special charge of the enforcement of the law. Subse- quently considerable progress was made. During the past year there have been sixty-five arrests, all of which except one have been fined. Nine have been arrested for not having their badges in sight. Thirty-seven were unlicensed and ten were arrested for congregating on the street. There have been but four who have been arrested for the second time and two for the third. The enforcement of the law in New York has been timid and ineffectual. During the first few days after the law went into CHILD LABOR 105 effect in September, 1903, the city and the street took it seriously. Then it was discovered that the public schools could not even seat those who had already applied. There was little room for the truant newsboy even if he had been anxious to attend school. The result was a system of half sessions. This was the first ex- cuse. For whenever a boy was found in the morning on the street, he invariably belonged to the afternoon division and vicer versa. The truancy force was too small to enforce the com- pulsory education law as it should be enforced. The number of violations was constantly increasing and the police were only making sporadic attempts to check the return to old conditions. The result was inevitable, and New York added just one more to the number of her disrespected laws. In Buffalo the same law had a better effect. The truant of- ficer who distributed the permits for the Board of Education was also a member of the juvenile court, thus assuring the co-opera- tion of the two. The boys whose labor was chiefly affected by the new law worked within well defined limits. One thousand eight hundred and sixty boys applied for permits. A much larger num- ber than was thought to be engaged on the street of that city. These boys received the careful attention of the school author- ity, as well as the police. The principals of the public schools testify that there was an immediate and continuous decrease in the amount of truancy. The small boy disappeared almost entirely from the street and the vagrant and truant newsboys were not difficult to detect. Al- though there may be a few violations of the law in that city, the character of the street trades has materially changed. This is due largely to the fact that the school authorities have taken a hand in the enforcement and have not left it entirely to the police. Even the casual observer who is unfamiliar with the law has seen and commented upon the great change that the law has made in that city. The laws of Boston or New York are well adapted to the needs of any city, no matter what its size may be. The universal adoption of this law in other American cities would do much to obviate those abuses which are so familiar to the streets of the American cities. io6 SELECTED ARTICLES Annals of the American Academy. 29: 77-83. January, 1907. Children in the Glass Works of Illinois. Mrs. Harriet Van der Vaart. All who have had experience in child labor legislation know that each state — sometimes a group of states — has its own par- ticular problem to solve, relating to the employment of children in the industries of that state. In some states it is the mining industry; in others the cotton industry, and in Illinois, as in many others, it is the glass industry. When we were working for our present law, the glass manu- facturers of Illinois kept some one at Springfield to watch and oppose each step of the law, and in* all of the arguments they always closed with, "If this law goes into effect it will drive this industry out of the state." Perhaps all do not know the character of the work in a glass factory. Every glass blower has to have two or three boys to assist him in the work. The glass blower pours the molten glass into the molds; a boy sits and closes the molds; another one picks the bottles out of the molds and puts them on a long stick or handle, and puts them in front of a small furnace, which is called "the glory hole," where the top or the neck of the bottle is finished. Then they are placed on a long tray, and the boys carry them into the annealing furnaces, where thqjr are gradually cooled. One of the arguments advanced by those who are most inter- ested in keeping boys in the glass factories is that it requires the agility and activity of boys to carry these bottles to the anneal- ing furnaces, for they cannot get men or adults to run as these boys do most of the time between the ovens and the furnaces. The day shift of one week is always the night shift of the next, which means that the boy who worked during the day this week, the next week will work at night. The night shift gen- erally leaves the factory at half-past three or four o'clock in the morning. Now it is very easy to see that coming away from those heated furnaces out into the chilly, cool air of the winter morning makes the boys liable to colds and pul- monary diseases. CHILD LABOR 107 The moral influences surrounding the boys in a glass factory are generally bad. Anyone who visits a glass factory will see little saloons or grog shops all around the factory, and while a great many factories prohibit liquor being brought into the fac- tory, all do not. In some factories the boys carry the liquor, but where it is prohibited this temptation meets them when they first leave the factory and, coming out into the chilly morning air, debilitated by the labor and heat, of course the temptation is great to take something that will stimulate them. Around all the factories there is a high board fence, and on top of this fence are two or three barbed wires. When I inquired at one of the factories the reasons for this, one of the reasons given me by one factory was, "Well, it keeps the boys in for one thing." The glass blowers are very dependent upon their helpers, and if the boys leave at a critical time the glass blowers are obliged to stop their work. Of course, I do not mean to say that this is the only reason for this high fence, but it is doubtless one. The work of the boys in the factory is irregular and requires no training nor skill. In some factories where I visited I found that boys received forty cents extra at the close of the week if they worked the entire week and if they did good work. Through the National Child Labor Committee two years ago I was permitted to visit a large number of the glass factories in both Indiana and Illinois. I not only visited the factories, but the homes also, to learn the health of the child, the grade he was in when he left school, the conditions of the factory, if he worked nights, and his wage. These and many other questions the schedules of the Child Labor Committee required to be answered. rXiring this investigation I came to the conclusion that the char- acter of the young help in the glass factory was greatly changed ; that the most intelligent parents throughout the country were becoming convinced that the glass factories were not the places for their boys. It was very seldom that the cliild of a glass blower was found in the factory. Generally the children of glass blowers were kept in school. Mr. Root, of the Root Glass Com- pany, said : "The smaller number of boys that are found in the factories throughout the country is due to the changed conditions of labor. The large glass industries attract to them large num- io8 SELECTED ARTICLES bers of foreigners, and the American boys are not being em- ployed in the glass factories as they were some time ago." I was told a number times that the Glass Blowers' Union was the only thing that kept the intelligent workmen in the trade, and that manufacturers never objected to this union, because they recognized this fact: it is the only inducement that is oflfered to intelligent men and to parents to allow their boys to enter the work. The apprenticeship system among the glass blowers is such that a very long time is required, and it is a fact that a very few of the boys who enter the glass factories ever become ap- prentices. One manufacturer admitted to me that the boys in the glass industry generally were smaller and not as well developed as the boys who had lived a normal life outside. He said he thought this did not argue that they were not as well. Mr. Root did not object to the prevailing laws as long as his competitors were subject to the same restrictions ; he did not think that a law prohibiting boys under sixteen from being im- ployed could be enforced. "He said he knew of one manufacturer where there had been returned thirty-two indictments against him, not one of which had ever been brought to trial. At the time of my investigation I was convinced that there was some degree of reason in his remarks. At least I felt quite sure that the glass manufacturers were not obeying the laws in this respect. I talked with the president of one of the large glass blowers' unions in Indiana. He said that he had been in that particular factory for three years ; that during that time he had never seen an inspector or the results of a visit from one; that in the fac- tories where affidavits were required the manufacturer simply sent home a paper by one of the children which was signed by the parent and brought back. In one of the factories in Indiana I insisted upon seeing the affidavits. There was a little bundle of affidavits brought out to me that were several years old, none of which could apply to any of the children that were at that time employed in that factory. The president of the union in Indiana said that he had worked in Alton as well as in Indiana, and he thought that the conditions CHILD LABOR 109 were much worse in Indiana than they were in Illinois. Night work is not prohibited in Indiana. It was quite the customary thing for school children to go into the factory at night and work until eleven and twelve o'clock and go to school during the day. This would be found especially true on Thursday and Friday nights. I went to the inspector's office in Indiana and talked with him in regard to the condition in Indiana, and he told me that he only had five inspectors ; that with five inspectors a state the size of Indiana could not be inspected. This is something for us to con- sider. The factory force should have the number of inspectors that is necessary for thorough work and a sufficient appropriation to carry on the work. The best factory I found was in Indiana — the Ball Brothers factory — which I hope is a sample of the future glass factory, where machinery is gradually taking the place of the boy. In talking with Mr. Ball, he said that he thought that the time was not far distant when machinery would take the place of boys in all glass factories. It seems to me that the glass manufacturers are not only not living up to the law themselves, but that they are educating chil- dren to be law-breakers. When we visited Alton two years ago we went through the factory, both in the afternoon and in the even- ing, and we found a model factory. The next day when I was visiting in the homes of the children who worked in the factory, in order that I might gain the data required, I was told in quite a number of homes that this factory had known that we were to visit them, and had been prepared for our visit. After I had received a great deal of this information I went back to the fac- tory and made known what I had discovered during the after- noon : that I had learned that they were prepared for our visit. Mr. Smith, of the Alton Glass Factory, said to me: "But, madam, if you were informed that the enemy was in the field, what would you do? Wouldn't you take all precautions that were necessary to protect yourself?" When I was asked to talk upon this subject at the Third Na- tional Child Labor Convention I did not think it would be fair to speak upon the conditions as I found them two years ago. It no SELECTED ARTICLES seemed obligatory at least to visit the largest plant, the Alton glass factory. I reached Alton last Wednesday morning, at eight minutes past six. I took a car and went down at once to the glass factory. On the way there a gentlemen in the car told me that a few days before he had seen two little, very ragged, dirty boys taking the dinner out to their father in the factory, and he asked them why they were not in school. They said they did not have clothes to go to school, and one of them told him that the oldest one would be old enough next year to go to work. He told me that these two boys were growing up there without any education and were being kept at home for the sake of carrying their father's dinner every day. When I arrived at the glass factory it was about half-past six. There are two large gates at the Alton factory where the em- ployees enter to work. I stood at the upper gate from half -past six until a few minutes past seven, until all the employees had entered for work. I saw perhaps two or three hundred em- ployees enter the yard. I did not keep an actual tally of the children that entered. But I am sure that I am giving a con- servative estimate when I say that the age of at least forty or fifty of the children that went into that yard would have been questioned by any disinterested person. I was told that our factory inspectors had been through Alton only a week before, and had found quite a number of violations, and that they had quite heavily fined the firm. Perhaps that is the reason why I saw so many that morning. I presume it is quite natural for a factory to feel that after a visit from the inspector they certainly have a little time when they need not be so strict. In the forenoon of this same day I went back to the Alton Glass Factory and asked if I might go through the factory. I was quite peremptorily refused. Mr. Levis said he didn't think it would do any good ; that they had been painted quite as black as they could be, and he wasn't willing for me to go through their factory. Not far away from where the factory is located there is a tract of land that is very low and swampy, a very uncomfortable place to live, but where a great many of the people live whose CHILD LABOR iii children work in factories. I went down into that locality and visited from house to house. At the second house I went into the sister told me that her brother was asleep ; that he had worked the night before in the factory. I asked her how old he was ; she said he was fifteen. The next house that I went into there was a small boy in the room who, his mother said, was twelve. The boy said he had been sent home from the factory that morning because the inspectors were there. I asked her if he had an affidavit; she said, no. I asked him: "How long have you worked in the factory?" He said: "I've worked here one month — one week, days, and one week, nights." In going from house to house I found a number of children whose mothers told me they were not sixteen; they were fourteen and fifteen, who had worked all night the night before in the factory. It seems to me from what I saw and heard that the Alton glass works are not living up to the requirements of the law. Being so near East St. Louis, I also visited the glass factory there. On my way to the office I was overtaken by two girls, who told me that anyone could walk in, and one of them said, "I will take you where the children work, we girls hide the kids when the factory inspectors come in." I said: "Why do you do it?" "O, well, I would like to be hid if I was their age; but," she said, '"I think it is a mistake to send them to work so young. They are employing boys for thirty-five and forty cents a day to do men's work." It was the time of recess, and at the door of the factory there was quite a large group— at least ten or twelve very small boys— who, at the sound of the whistle, scampered back to the furnaces. When I went into the factory the foreman tried immediately to attract my attention. He said: "I want to show you where they are putting glass into the furnace to be melted and where they are packing, that you may know the work is not hard." I saw at a glance that he was trying to give these boys time to get out of the way, but I saw a number of boys that any one would have said were certainly very small to be working in a glass factory. From this investigation and my own judgment, I have come to the conclusion that the glass manufacturers throughout the country are not obeying the laws for the regulation of child 112 SELECTED ARTICLES labor ; that they are not only not living up to the requirements of the law, but that they are teaching our young children that it is not necessary to obey laws. Education is helping to eliminate the American child from the glass factories, and that education must be extended. We must have a type of public school that will appeal to our foreigners; we must have more industrial education ; we must have trade schools. If the parents and children were convinced that continu- ing in school meant industrial training; that it meant a step nearer receiving a living wage, and entering a more skilled trade, our factory and our compulsory education laws would be more easily enforced than they are at present. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup. 1 16-21. March, 1909. Overworked Children on the Farm and in the School. Woods Hutchinson. Those of us who happen to have been born or raised upon a farm, a real farm, run to earn a living and not as a healthful and very expensive amusement, can promptly and feelingly testify that it is not half so rose-colored as it is usually pictured in literature or through the pearly mists of our boyhood memories. Farmwork is the hardest and most disagreeable work there is, with the longest hours and the poorest pay. Much of it has to be done before daylight or after dark in mud, in snow, in storm and slush. Farm bedrooms are cold and badly ventilated, and the sheer discomfort, verging at times upon agony, of getting out of bed on a winter's morning and starting the fire with damp wood in a kitchen that feels like a cold storage plant in January, and then going out to thaw the pump, shovel a path to the barn, feed the shivering, staring, coated horses, and milk half a dozen frost-rimmed cows, is still fresh in our memories. These and a score of similarly cheerful and agreeable memories rise before us like a nightmare. It makes little difference where we may have gone, or what our lot in life, we never have had to do anything so disagreeable or abominable since. Moreover, while there is an abundance of food growing upon the farm, that food is raised for CHILD LABOR 113 sale and wherever the balance is a narrow one between the in- come and expenditure, as it is in most of farmers' families, the bulk and the best of that food that will bring a good price in the market is and must be sold, leaving only the poorer quality for home use. In short, the farmer who farms for a living, or who expects to make money, must in the terse language of the corner grocery, "do all his own work, and live on what he can't sell." This stern necessity reacts upon the children of the farm just as it does upon those of the factory town, and the physician in country practice can show you in the remotest and most peaceful country district as severe cases of malnutrition, of rickets, of anaemia, of diseases of the joints and the spine, and of stunted development, as you can find in a city hospital. There will not be so many of them, but they will be there nevertheless, except in unusually prosperous and well-to-do neighborhoods. In the ag- gregate, I think it would be safe to say that they equal, if they do not far exceed, the defectives and the degenerates of our much smaller slum population. Unquestionably, a large majority of the work done by children upon the farm, being for the most part in the open air, and under the care and protection of their own par- ents or relatives, is not only not harmful but decidedly beneficial ; but we must not shut our eyes to the fact that young children and boys and girls are overworked upon farms, badly fed, and deprived of proper amusement, and social and intellectual oppor- tunities to a most undesirable degree, and that this is one of the most potent reasons for the oft-deplored exodus from the farm to the city. When it comes to overworking and underfeeding his children, making home hateful and life one joyless, monoto- nous grind, a certain class of farmers has no right to throw stones at any factory operative, miner or even sweat-shop worker. If President Roosevelt's commission on country life will succeed in reforming or even improving this type of man — you all know him, whose barn is four times as big as his house, and his real pets and prides his horses and pigs — it will do as much good as any factor>' legislation that can be placed upon the statute books. Bad as the hours and conditions under which the children in the much-berated cotton mills of our Southern states live and 114 SELECTED ARTICLES work, it is a question in the minds of competent physicians who have visited the neighborhoods, whether, in many instances, the children are not better off in point of food, education, recreation and opportunities for development, than they are, upon the small, barren, poverty-stricken farms of the average "cracker" or "poor white" of those states. By all means let us insist upon the strict- est regulations to protect the health, the welfare and morals of the children in those mills, or let us remember that we are not restoring them to a perfect hygienic paradise if we send them back to the farms. The same thing must be borne in mind in regard to the other great alternative to child labor, the place to which the child must be sent if he be taken out of the factory — the school. As things stand at present, it is my unwilling judgment that while the factory may become a sweat shop, the average school in the United States to-day is little better than a mental treadmill for the average boy of the working classes after twelve years of age ; that the education is so purely formal, so bookish, so ladylike, so irrational and impractical in a word, that it stunts his mind, be- wilders his senses and fills him with a dislike for real education and training, which warps him mentally as badly as the factory does physically. Many a boy of this class and age, as our antiquated curriculum stands at present, is better off working six hours a day, in a well-ventilated, thoroughly sanitary workshop, conducted on kindly and intelligent principles, than he would be in the schoolroom droning and day-dreaming over classical ab- surdities, in which he can find no interest nor profit. The motto of the school is "By books ye are saved." But it is a case of "the letter that killeth." In the total, the school is doing more physical damage to our children than the factory. What the boy wants is not books but life, not words but things, and as matters are arranged at present, he has to leave the schoolroom and go into the factory or the shop to get them. The average schoolroom is preferable to the shop or factory for the working boy or girl after the thirteenth year, in but little more than the fact that it protects him from physical overstrain and its deadening six-hour confinement at hard and uninterest- ing tasks, which is a heavy offset to this. CHILD LABOR 115 Not only so, but this utter lack of appeal of the public school curriculum to the working boy of thirteen or more is one of the principal causes of the rush of child labor into the shop and the factory. Taking it the world over, the principal cause of harmful child labor is poverty ; the stern need of even the pittance that can be earned by the child to enable the rest of the family to live, not unmixed with greed on the part of a certain class of parents, eager to recoup themselves for the expense and trouble of rearing a large family. In European countries the value of the child's earnings to the parents is the principal motive for early work. In this country, however, we are more fortunately situated. Wages are higher, so that the father's income is more often or more nearly adequate to support the entire family, and the average of intelligence and humanity in the parents of the working class is much higher so that they can see the advantage of giving their children the best possible start in life. Statistical investigations of this point appear to have been made only upon a very limited scale. But so far as they have gone they bring out the interesting fact that from fifty to seventy per cent, of the child labor at too early years is due to the initiative not of the parent but of the child. The causes alleged by the children for their choice were most suggestive ; while many of them simply wanted to earn money, to have more to spend, to get on in the world, to buy better clothes or went just because their friends and comrades did, the largest single group gave it as their reason that they were tired of school, that they could not get on at school, that they could not understand their studies or even, horihile dictti, that they got sick at school — they seem to stand confinement of the shop better than that of the schoolroom. In many of these cases, the parents were not only perfectly willing for their children to continue at school, but were paying out money for instruction in bookkeeping, shorthand, music, drawing, etc., in addition to letting the children keep their wages. In short, the conclusion, strange as it may seem to many, is almost inevitable that if we rationalize and modernize the curriculum of our public schools, we should cut the foundation from under one-half if not two-thirds of the child-labor tendency. In fine, as our most intelligent teachers. ii6 SELECTED ARTICLES our most thoughtful students of pedagogy, our physicians, our sanitarians, our child-labor students, have united for years in de- claring the most vital, the most crying demand before the Ameri- can Commonwealth to-day is to make our public schools educate the whole child, and not merely the expanded bulb at the upper end of him. Train him physically and emotionally as vi^ell as mentally. Substitute the playground, the garden, the shop for the book-school. Fit him for life and for action, instead of for contemplation and culture ; for service instead of superiority ; for work, not for display. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 145-9. March, 1910. Child Labor in Home Industries. Mary \^an Kleeck. The present employment of children in tenements in New York City gives no ground for optimism regarding New York State's method of regulating home work. A casual investigator who chooses to walk through the crowded tenement districts will find children at work who would not be permitted to enter a factory. He will see women and children carrying bundles of clothing or boxes of artificial flowers from workshop to home, and if he should follow any of them he would learn something of the sys- tem of industry which makes child labor still possible in New York State. Two days ago one of my fellow-workers visited a family liv- ing on Thompson street. It was after school hours. She found a mother and four children making artificial flowers. The oldest girl was eleven years old. Her sister was nine, her little brother was seven, and a little sister was five. The three older children had just come home from school, but the youngest child was too young to go, and worked all day separating the petals of artificial flowers. The oldest child of eleven was deformed. She was not larger than a child of five. The mother and four children have set themselves a certain allotment of work to finish each day, and the book in which their earnings are recorded by the employer says that those earnings are sixty cents a day. To earn that sixty cents a day they must CHILD LABOR 117 make six dozen wreaths of daisies, three or four pieces to each daisy, and thirty-nine daisies on each wreath. The father is a ragman earning six dollars a week. The brother is out of work. The mother and children work until ten or eleven o'clock at night, and what they do not finish at night they must get up in time to finish in the morning before school begins. The little girl, Angelina, said she did the work the teacher gave her to do at home before school in the morning. "This morning, first I did the writing," she said, "then I did the two times, and then the three times, so I won't have so much to do to-morrow. I like school better than home. I don't like home. There's too many flowers." There is no law violated by the employment of those children. They are in school when they ought to be in school. The build- ing has been inspected by the tenement department and the factory department and found satisfactory, and there is nothing which legally can be done to prevent the work of five-, seven-, nine- or eleven-year-old children. Similar stories might be multiplied, but this may serve as a picture of present conditions. Within a month forty-two families of homeworkers selected at random have been visited, and in them fifty-nine children under fourteen years of age were found at work. The importance of these few cases is more fully real- ized when read in the bulletin of the New York State De- partment of Labor in September, 1909, that in New York City on June 30th of this year there were 11,162 licensed tenements. The corresponding number for 1908 was 9,805. In 1906 there were 5,261. We do not know how many families were living in those tenements, nor how many children were at work at home, but the number of licensed houses has been increasing at the rate of two thousand a year. This does not necessarily mean that the homework system has been spreading. It does mean, how- ever, that the labor department is discovering hundreds of tene- ments each year in which home manufacture is carried on. Whatever may be said of New York's law regulating man- ufactures in tenements, it does not appear that it has had the effect of decreasing the amount of work given out to be done in homes. It is characteristic of the system that its evils are its life, ii8 SELECTED ARTICLES that the unrestricted competition of unskilled workers, the un- regulated hours of work, and the employment of children are the things which make it profitable for the manufacturer. It seems obvious that to eradicate these evils we must find some way of checking and in time eliminating the system from which they are inseparable. The development of the New York law is an illustration of an attempt to "regulate" a system which thrives on failures to regulate it. When the law prohibiting the making of cigars in tenements was declared unconstitutional in 1885 the legislature made no further attempt to deal with this subject until 1892, when the law passed providing for the licensing of apartments in which certain articles were manufactured. From time to time the law has been amended, but its essential provision, the license, remains unchanged. More than forty separate articles are named, and none of these may be manufactured in any living rooms unless the house has been licensed by the New York State Department of Labor. A license is issued when the department has ascertained that there are no orders outstanding against the property either in the tenement-house* department or the board of health, and when a factory inspector has reported that sanitary conditions are satisfactory. The manufacturer, the owner of the house, and the worker are all held responsible if any of the articles named in the law are made in unlicensed houses. In brief, the law is designed merely to establish a certain standard of sanitation in home workrooms. The best test of its effectiveness is the actual present condi- tion and extent of tenement manufacturers in New York. From three investigations among several which have been made, the outlines of these conditions may be traced. In 1902 the De- partment of Labor investigated more than 1,000 home workers in New York City. In 1907 the same department made a special inquiry. into the employment of children in licensed tenements on three or four streets. At the same time an investigation was being carried on by the Child Labor committees, national and city, the Consumers' Leagues, national and city, and the College Settlements Association. In these two last studies made in a very limited territory in a brief period of time, 558 children who CHILD LABOR 119 could not legally have worked in a factory in New York State were found working at home. The youngest was three years old. More than half were less than eleven years. Forty children were out of school in violation of the compulsory education law. Twenty-three were too young to be protected by its provisions. Nearly half the houses in which these children were at work had not been licensed. Fifty cents a day was a common wage re- presenting the earnings of at least two workers. More than a dozen different articles found in the tenements were not named in the law, so that the houses in which they were manufactured did not come under the wording of any labor legislation. For example, children were found sewing a fine quality of kid glove in a house which the department of labor had refused to license. Because gloves were not named in the law this work was permissible. The great majority of the home workers are Italians. A few are Germans or Russian Jews, and a few are native born. Only a very small proportion are native born of native parents. One little Italian girl was asked whether she had ever made flowers in Italy. She said "No" with great emphasis, and added, "When we were in Italy we used to think it was funny that people made flowers in New York. In Italy we have them natural." It is not merely the most recent arrivals among the immi- grants who are at work in their homes. In the official investiga- tion of 1902 only eleven of 705 licensees were recorded as having been in this country less than one year. More than one-half had been here longer than five years. In the investigation of the work of children no family was found in which the income from homework was sufficient for support. In the official study of 1902 it was found that the av- erage earnings of homeworkers* families in the clothing trade were $3.67. Artificial flower makers earned $2.07 a week. A worker, who reported recently that the price for making a flower had been reduced from five cents a gross to two cents a gross, said, "You see, some women are willing to do it for that, and the rest must do it if they want the work. Two women came to our factory the other day and offered to work at home a week for nothing if the boss would give them the work." 120 SELECTED ARTICLES When we sum up this sketch of the conditions of homework and place beside it an outline of the law, the two do not balance. On the one side are the unrestricted hours of work for women, the employment of children, and a scale of wages tending to slide downward. On the other side are elaborate provisions for regulating the sanitary conditions of home workrooms. We seem to have taken no thought of the industrial problem in- volved, namely, to establish a plane of competition which can- not be lowered by the exigencies or the needs of individual workers. We have left the manufacturer singularly free. Every other effective factory law lays the responsibility on his shoul- ders. In our regulation of homework in New York all that we do is to give him a list of addresses, and say, "We have inspected these tenements and found them sanitary. You may give out work to families living in them. You must not send work into any other houses." To point out possible methods of safeguarding the workers' freedom and increasing the manufacturers' responsibility in the homework system is beyond the scope of this address and be- longs rather to the discussion which will follow. It may be said, however, that the evils characteristic of home industries are but one manifestation of a condition prevailing in other systems of industry, whereby the worker is deprived of real freedom to con- tract. Advantage is taken of his needs to force him to accept the lowest possible wage. The extreme condition found to so large an extent on Manhattan Island is really but one striking example of a similar industrial servitude in factories as well as in homes throughout the country. To prevent such servitude is the child labor problem in home industries. Annals of the American Academy. 35: Sup. 152-4. March, igio. Child Labor in Canneries. Pauline Goldmark. Child labor which has no legal regulation is the subject of this meeting. The hosts of children employed in agriculture are included under this head, and one great industry which stands on the borderline between factory law and agriculture, namely the CHILD LABOR 121 canning industry, employing thousands of children unrestricted by any sort of legal regulation. It has had this freedom on account of its supposedly agricultural character. In New York State, in fact, an opinion of the attorney general specifically exempts work in the cannery sheds from the pro- tection of the labor law, on the ground that such work is not injurious. It is true that most of the occupations are carried on in the open air. The canners provide sheds where the prep- aration and cleaning of fruit and vegetables is done, such proc- esses as hulling strawberries, stemming cherries and plums^ stringing beans, cleaning tomatoes and apples, and husking corn. But here the resemblance to agriculture stops, for in speeding, intensity of application and long hours, cannery work is as exhausting as any other form of factory work. Canneries depend for their labor almost exclusively on women and children. On account of the perishability of their product and even more on account of the unorganized and irregulated method of securing their raw materials, these establishments work overtime, to a degree almost unprecedented in any other industry. It is not at all unusual for young girls and women to work for eighty or ninety hours a week. They have been known to work for eighteen hours of the twenty-four in certain canneries in New York State. In order to secure a sufficiently large labor supply when the country towns do not furnish enough workers, the canneries are calling more and more upon the cities. In New York State as well as in New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, there is a yearly exodus from the large cities of Italian and Polish families who seek this work for the summer months. Young and old alike work in the sheds. Mothers take their nursing children with them, and children from four years up have been found stringing beans. This is the crop that calls for most hand-work, as no machine has yet been invented that will string beans. Therefore, at the height of the bean season which often lasts for six weeks, the canners get their workers out at 4 A. M. and may keep them employed until midnight. The pay varies from one to one-and-one-half cents a pound. Under these conditions the immigrants are stimulated to work as lojig as they can stay 122 SELECTED ARTICLES awake, taking no time to attend to household matters or to the needs of their children. Moreover, the living quarters provided by the canners are of- ten shamefully over-crowded. Fifty people, including men, women and children, may be housed in an old barn ; or shacks may be erected of the poorest construction, allowing but one small room for a whole family of adults and children. Often several hundred persons live together in the utmost squalor lacking all the decencies of life, under unhygienic conditions that would not be tolerated in any city. Thus, the much-talked- of benefits of country life for city workers during the summer months are nowhere apparent. The children are pressed into the work, especially during the bean season, in order to add to the family income. Their little fingers are particularly dexterous in bean stringing. They sit close to mother or sister, working for hours at intense speed. They may be released to take a box of beans to the weigher, carrying for several hundred feet weights far too heavy for their tender years. At night it is a common sight to see a whole family of childi'en fall asleep over their work, while their parents stolidly keep on as long as the supply of beans holds out. Lack of sleep, exposure to inclement weather, and insufficient food add to these deplorable conditions. The deprivation of schooling is another serious evil. These families frequently do not return to their winter homes until long after the beginning of the school year, in some cases con- tinuing to work at late crops until Christmas. The younger children may be unemployed for months and rove around the country-side, neglected by their parents and uncared for by health or school officers. The local schools assume no re- sponsibility for them, and when they return to the city they have fallen far behind their regular classes. In a special inquiry in the schools of Buffalo, N. Y., the teachers gave distressing evidence as to the backwardness of the cannery children. They do not catch up with their classes before they are again carried off to the canneries early in June, becoming a burden to the public school and losing all the benefit of consecutive school life. In one school it was shown that seventy-seven children CHILD LABOR 123 under fourteen years of age were absent at the beginning of the fall term for this reason. The New York State compulsory education law requires ten months* attendance, yet thousands of these cannery children, who particularly need the assimilating influence of our public schools, are habitual truants. No local or state official concerns himself with these little strangers, who, though born in America, are likely to grow up as foreign as their immigrant parents. Is it not of immediate concern that these young boys and girls, future citizens of our country, should have proper supervision? The problem is presumably the same in all the states where canneries are found. It is an industry which is growing by leaps and bounds, dependent to a large degree upon the hordes of immigrant workers. No exact estimate has ever been made of the number of children employed. In one New York State cannery alone 300 children under fourteen years of age were found at work in Au- gust, 1909. Surely enough is known of the extraordinary extent of this form of child labor and the peculiar undesirable living conditions at many canneries, to call for further investigation and immediate legal restriction of the one great employing in- dustry that still stands outside of the factory law. Charities and the Commons. 19: 1405-20. January 18, 1908. Child Labor in New York City Tenements. Mary Van Kleeck. The following brief report gives the results of a joint investiga- tion made during the months from October, 1906, to April, 1907, into the labor of children in manufacture in tenement houses in New York city. The National Consumers' League and the Con- sumers' League of New York City, the National and New York Child Labor Committees, and the College Settlements Association co-operated in the undertaking. In the most thickly populated districts of New York city, especially south of Fourteenth street, little children are often seen on the streets carrying large bundles of unfinished garments, or boxes containing materials for making artificial flowers. This work is given out by manufacturers or contractors to be finished in tenement homes, where the labor of children of any age may be utilized. For the laws of New York state, prohib- iting the employment of children under fourteen years of age 124 SELECTED ARTICLES in factories, stores, or other specified work-places, have never been extended to home workrooms. In this fact is presented a child labor problem, — as yet scarcely touched, — namely: How to prevent employment of young children in home work in manufacture? So difficult has been the problem of regulating by law the conditions of employment in home workrooms, the advance in measures to protect children against premature toil in factories has had no parallel in provisions designed to regulate man- ufacture in tenement homes. Between these two systems of manufacture, — one carried on in factories and the other in the homes of the workers, — there are, therefore, some striking contrasts in the law. No maker of artificial flowers can employ in his factory any child under fourteen years of age, but he may give out work to an Italian family, in whose tenement rooms flowers are made by six children, aged two and one-half, five, eight, ten, fourteen and sixteen years. In another family Angelo, aged fourteen years, cannot work legally in a factory until he reaches a higher grade in school, nor can he work at home during hours when school is in session, but his little sister Maria, aged three years, because she is not old enough to go to school and because the home work law contains no prohibition of child labor, may help her mother pull bastings and sew on buttons. A public school teacher notices that Eva and Mary R., aged eleven and ten years, are pale and under-nourished, but although the compulsory education law supports her in re- quiring their attendance in school during school hours, she can- not prevent their making flowers at home from three o'clock until nine or ten at night. Many good citizens would demand the prosecution of a manufacturer who employed in his factory Tony aged four years, Maria aged nine. Rose aged ten, Louisa aged eleven, and Josephine aged thirteen years. For such an offence the employer might be fined $ioo for each child under fourteen years of age found at work in his factory. Yet public opinion has not raised an effective protest against the same em- ployer when he turns these children's home into a branch of his factory and gives them work in which even the smallest child in the family joins through long hours under a necessity as imperi- CHILD LABOR 125 oils in its demand for the constant work and attention of the child as would be the commands of a foreman in a factory. In brief, the law which regulates home work manufacture in New York city, contains no provisions to 'prevent the em- ployment of children nor to restrict the working hours of minors or women. It provides merely that work on certain specified articles (forty-one in number) given out by manufacturers or contractors, may not be carried on in a tenement living room, unless, the owner of the house has first obtained a license from the New York State Department of Labor. Any articles not named in the law may legally be manufactured in unlicensed houses. That the law in New York state does not protect more ef- fectively these child workers in tenement homes, is due not to a lack of opposition to premature employment of children, but to the impossibility of dealing with the problem merely as a child labor question apart from deep-rooted evils essential to the "sweating system," of which home work is an important part. The evils of the system, — intense competition among unskilled workers in a crowded district, low wages, unrestricted hours of work, irregularity of employment, and utilization of child labor, — are the very conditions which make the system possible and profitable to the employer. Any effective attempt to improve conditions must therefore be an attack upon the sweating system. The manufacturer or contractor, whose employes work in their home, escapes responsibility entailed by the presence of workers in his factory. He saves costs of rent, heat and light ; avoids the necessity of keeping the force together and giving them regular employment when work is slack. And by turning the workers' homes into branches of the factory, he escapes in them the neces- sity of observing the factory laws. Instead of the manifold restric- tions which apply to employes within the factory, he is here responsible only for keeping a list of his home workers and he may not send any goods, which are named in the home work law into a tenement which has not been licensed. Work In Licensed Houses To a casual visitor, the brightest side of home work would appear in the tenements on Sullivan, Thompson, Macdougal, • 126 ^ SELECTED ARTICLES Houston, and neighboring streets, among makers of artificial flowers. ;Many houses are "new law" tenements, in which pro- vision has been made for light and air. In many of them there is full compliance 'with the provisions of the home work law. It is therefore a neighborhood which illustrates well the limita- tions of the licensing system. So general is the custom of home work in this district that as one mounts the stairs in any one of these houses one finds on every floor, and in almost every apartment, families of flower- makers. On the top floor of a licensed house on Sullivan street two children, Angelina aged eleven years, and Katharine aged eight years, were at work helping an older sister make roses at eight cents a gross. The apartment was clean and light and the family prosperous, with an income of at least $20 a week from sources other than home work, — the wages of the father and two brothers. The older sister, aged eighteen years, worked at home rather than in a factory, so that she might help her mother with housework. So small was the pay for flowers that she forced her two younger sisters to work steadily after school hours until eight o'clock at night, in order that together they might earn eighty cents a day, the wages paid for making, counting and bunching 1,440 small roses. At the neighboring school it was found that both Angelina and Katharine attend- ed regularly, but that their marks in "proficiency" were lower than their marks in "effort and deportment." Of Katharine, the younger, the teacher said, "The child is very sleepy during school hours." Yet the children were obeying the compulsory education law, and their work was done in a clean house where the required framed license hung in the hallway. No statute was therefore violated by their employment. In the same house were several other children who made roses or violets or other flowers, of cheap grade: John B. aged thirteen years ; Jennie V. aged thirteen ; Jasmine aged fourteen, and James D. aged six, who lived in the rear apartment of the first floor, where high buildings nearby shut out the light so that it is necessary to keep gas burning in the rooms where work is done. Also Celia aged fourteen years, Julia aged ten, and Josie CHILD LABOR 127 aged six, who lived in the front apartment on the first floor, were helping their mother make violets at three and one-half cents a gross. They worked until 9 P. M. to finish between 1440 and 1700 flowers in a day, for which they were paid thirty-five or forty cents. In no case was the manufacturer violating the labor law in employing these children. Not only were these cases of child labor quite permissible under the present attempted legal regula- tion of home work, but even an increased stringency in those sanitary requirements which are the essential feature of the present law would probably not affect in any way this house or the work of these children, since sanitary conditions were satis- factory. The licensing system does not re-enforce the compulsory education law. If Sarah M., an Italian child aged ten years had not lived in a licensed tenement it would not have been so difficult for the school authorities to compel her parents to send her to school. After sixty days' absence and four fruitless visits from a truant officer she was found still working at home, sewing but- tons on corduroy trousers. The framed certificate in the hall showed that the house was licensed, and for this reason it was not possible to re-enforce the compulsory education law by pre- venting the child's employment at home. The family was very poor, there were four children younger than Sarah, and the father, an unskilled day laborer, was out of work. The possibiHty of working at home, without any interference by the inspectors of the Labor Department, placed a premium upon the child's truancy. The aid of a relief society was finally secured on the ground that a family who were obliged to depend upon the work of a child of ten years, were evidently not self-supporting and should be aided on condition that the child be sent to school as the law requires. But even after this, the society reported that it would be necessary to watch the family. For it was the busy season in the clothing trade, the time when every member of the home- workers' households is pressed into service to fill the contract- ors' orders. 128 SELECTED ARTICLES Work Where There Is Disease Although the present provisions of the home work law are intended to prevent manufacture in apartments where there is disease, by requiring immediate action by the State Department of Labor and the city Department of Health, the licensing system does not guard sufficiently against work where disease exists. After a house has been properly licensed, some member of a family of workers may be afflicted with tuberculosis, and the fact may not be reported either to the Board of Health or the Depart- ment of Labor. To guard against the danger of manufacturing articles under such conditions, would require constant watching of the shifting population of a New York city tenement. It is hardly to be expected that among the great crowds of possible home workers peopling a city block, each family can be watched by the over-burdened Labor Department upon which devolves, besides the work of factory inspection, the task of examining regularly more than 5.000 licensed tenements in Greater New York, and of detecting any work carried on illegally among the far greater number of unlicensed houses. The possibility of homework in an apartment where there is disease, and the employment of children under these unhealthy conditions, is illustrated by an Italian family referred to a relief society in the autumn of 1906. The house had been licensed in the preceding year, when the sanitary conditions presumably were satisfactory to the Department of Health, the Tenement House Department, and the Department of Labor, and there must have been no evidence of disease among the tenants. Yet in 1906 it was found that for weeks a family living in the house had been finishing clothing in the room where the oldest daughter, Vincenza. aged sixteen years, lay dying of tuberculosis. A visitor of the relief society found Rosina aged thirteen years, helping her mother and father in the work of finishing trousers. Since the arrival of the family in the United States seven years before, neither Rosina nor Vincenza had attended school, and neither could read or write. With the father ill of tuberculosis. Vincenza no longer able to work, and four younger children, aged eleven, seven, five and two years, to be cared for, Rosina, who had helped to support the family since she was six CHILD LABOR 129 years old, was now the chief w^age earner. Her brother, Giuseppe, aged eleven years helped in the sewing after school hours. But at the price of four cents a pair, for "felling" seams, finishing linings, and sewing buttons on trousers, all the workers in the family, — father, mother and two children, by united effort, could not earn more than four or five dollars a week. When the relief society aided the family, Vincenza was sent to a hospital, and Rosina for the first time in her life began to go to school. But she continued to sew at home after school hours. A later entry in the society's records reports that "Rosina and Giuseppe were busy at work finishing. Rosina said that she went to school regularly all day sessions, and that she and her brother helped at finishing after school." All that the law could do for Rosina was to add school work to the ceaseless toil in which she had spent her days since early childhood. In her work at home from the time she was six years old for a manufacturer of clothing no provision of the labor law was violated. After her eighth birthday, her work at home, in that it prevented her attending school, caused a violation of the compulsory education law. But the work in itself, so long as the family lived in a licensed tenement, was never at any time illegal until Vincenza developed tuberculosis. Nor was this and the danger to the public health from the presence of a communi- cable disease in the home workroom prevented by the Depart- ment of Labor or the Board of Health. Work in Unlicensed Houses Since it is the theory of the licen.sing system that no home work is to be permitted in any tenement until the Department of Labor is convinced that the premises are sanitary, it is clear that the existence of work in unlicensed tenements is evidence of failure in the law's enforcement. The day after Christmas, 1906, three child workers, Vito aged thirteen years, Maggie aged eleven, and Billy aged nine, were visited in a tenement on James street. Vito had just brought from a nearby shop ten dozen pairs of boys' trousers to be finished for the wage of four cents a dozen. The father, a plasterer, who can earn $1.75 a day, was idle, depending for a while on the earnings of his wife and chil- dren, whose wages were higher during holidays than when school 130 . SELECTED ARTICLES attendance interrupted their work. The family, consisting of father, mother and six children, of whom the youngest were aged six years, three and one, lived in two rooms for which they paid $11 a month. Home work was a regular means of. supplementing the father's irregular earnings, and it was the habit of the family to take work as often as possible from the contractor, whose shop was within a block of their home. Yet the house in which they lived had never been licensed by the Department of Labor, and landlord, contractor, and worker were all breaking the labor law. That any possibility of prosecution was remote from the minds of the workers was indicated by the fact that although the visit- ors were strangers, the family made no attempt to cjonceal the work. One other phase of home work needs illustration : namely, the kinds of manufacture which are legal even though carried on in unlicensed houses. In a tenement which the Department of Labor had refused to license, two Italian boys, Mario aged twelve years, and Louis aged nine, were found sewing by hand the small tapes under the buttons and buttonholes of fine kid gloves. The mother was a widow with four children, aged fourteen, twelve, nine and five years. They lived in one small room, for which they paid a rent of $7.00. Their combined earnings from home work were not more than sixty cents a day, and they were aided necessarily by a relief society. Since the Department of Labor had found the house unworthy of a license, the tenants could not legally make flowers or finish clothing, or produce thirty-nine other articles specified in the statute ; but because gloves are not named in the home work law their manufacture in tenement homes is neither prevented nor regulated. Excessive Working Hours The results of these investigations indicate the failure of the licensing system in several important directions. That the work of children aged five years and. less existed legally in tenement homes during the year when the Department of Labor was making an exceptional record in the enforcement of child labor laws in factories, is an indication of the failure of the licensing system to protect child workers. CHILD LABOR 131 Nor does our present attempt to regulate the conditions of home manufacture contain any provisions to protect women and young girls from working twelve to fourteen hours in a day. The inadequate pay received for home work creates an imperative necessity for long and exhausting hours of labor, and the law does not help to prevent these conditions. Notes like the follow- ing are scattered through the records of families who work in their homes : — Finishing nine overcoats at six cents a coat, working until 11 p. m. Finishing eight or nine pairs of trousers at eight and one-half cents a pair, working as steadily as possible from eight a. m. to ten p. m. Child works after school. Visitor found him at work at 9:30 p. m. Making nine gross flowers (five pieces in each flower) at eight cents a gross. Making one gross garters, hand and machine work, at fifty cents per gross. Mother works as steadily as possible from seven a. m. until ten p. m. In many cases girls employed during the day in a factory are asked to take work to be finished at home in the evenings, thus enabling the employer to take advantage of long hours of work without risk of prosecution, to which he would be liable if these young girls worked overtime in the factory. This form of over- time work has been found in such trades as millinery, clothing, including not only coats and trousers, but children's white lawn dresses and ladies' gowns, embroidery, neckwear, braids, en- velopes, buttons (to be sewed on cards), paper boxes, nuts (to be shelled and packed), and artificial flowers and feathers. It is an evasion of the law likely to occur in any trade adapted in any of its processes to home manufacture. Conclusions Approaching the problem of home work from the point of view of the workers, especially the little children, we see imme- diately that the central difficulty lies in the fact that this manu- facture is carried on in dwelling places, the homes of the work- ers, where the thorough enforcement even of sanitary provisions would require an army of special inspectors. Whereas prohibi- tion of child labor in factories is readily possible simply by ex- cluding any child from the factory building, within the home the separation of the child from the work is impossible, and the child's employment may easily be concealed. Because our legis- 132 SELECTED ARTICLES lation has been directed only to the attempted protection of the consumer against infection, we have been content to divide re- sponsibility between landlord, manufacturer, and worker, and proceed along the lines of attempted regulation. But when the health and welfare of the workers is considered, the problem is more complex. Legislation concerning industries carried on in dwelling places is clearly seen to constitute a problem quite dis- tinct from legislation regarding conditions within the factories. This form of manufacture profits no one but the employer, to whom it offers an escape from factory responsibilities. Instead of organizing a regular staff of workers, he utilizes the labor of unskilled foreign born workers and their children. He locates his shop near their homes, and during the busy season finds at his very doors, a sufficient force of workers willing to toil all night to finish a hurry order. Next week the "boss" may have no work to give them, and they dare not refuse the chance to earn every possible penny to-day. To the worker, home manufacture means unlimited hours of work, the employment of the children, and the turning of the already crowded living rooms into a branch of a nearby factory, for an employer who pays less than a living wage. For the consumer, home work involves the danger of infection from goods made in crowded living apartments. The nature of "sweating" is described in the Report of the New York Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1902 (p. 37). The report says The evils are starvation wages, excessive hours of labor, child labor, and unsanitary and unwholesome worltplaces. The cause is intense competition among employers of small capital and among unskilled laborers, of whom there is excessive supply, unrelieved by legislative regulation or collective action. It is for this reason that there are strong advocates of the prohibition of all manufacture in dwelling rooms, — ^a course of action based on the conviction that we cannot abolish the evils of home work while the system which invariably produces them is allowed to exist. Yet if the time be not ripe for such a policy, conditions de- mand now a strengthening of present attempted regulations. Undoubtedly much can be accomplished by using with unremit- tingly severity the Labor Department's power to refuse licenses CHILD LABOR 133 or revoke them, where sanitary conditions fall below an estab- lished standard. By raising the standard of sanitation (as is sug- gested-^n the last annual report of the commissioner of labor), the manufacturer would be forced to deal with workers main- taining a higher standard of living, and unwilling to work for so low a wage. In the same way, some cases of child labor, now found in the lowest class of tenements among the poorest fam- ilies, might be eliminated. Such a policy would require large funds for a sufficient force of inspectors to put a stop to work in unlicensed houses, and to inspect regularly all licensed tene- ments. To secure the appropriation of such funds there would be needed the constant force of an educated public opinion. Finally, such an expenditure of public money would not be justified unless the enforcement of the law could be accompanied by a constant study of conditions, and a consecutive, official pub- lication of facts, which would prove to the public the weakness or the effectiveness of its policy. McClure. 20: 435-44. February, 1903. Children of the Coal Shadow. Francis H. Nichols. So far as the conditions of his life are concerned, it makes no difference to the child of the Coal Shadow whether his parents born in Anthracite of Irish or Welsh parentage, and they have are Americans or foreigners. If they are Americans, they were known no world but the coal fields all their lives. If foreignej*s, they were recruited by some agent of the operators twenty years ago from among the poorest peasantry of Continental Europe, and emigrated thence directly to their present homes. In either event the child's parents are uneducated, their mental horizon is in everything bounded by the coal heaps, and their hope is the union. Every child of the coal fields who to-day is ten years old has lived through at least two great strikes. During these periods the indefinite and sullen discontent takes a concrete and militant form. There is talk by idle men of "the right of labor" and the "wickedness of riches." Deputies armed with rifles are guarding the company's property. A detachment of militia is encamped at 134 SELECTED ARTICLES the end of the street. The child's mother, whose face grows daily paler and more careworn, goes once a week to the District Local to receive a dollar or two of relief funds, with which she buys enough food to keep together the bodies and souls of her family. The child's father at night attends secret meetings of the union, and feels highly honored when the district organizer calls to whisper to him the password. The child learns that the worst crime a man can commit is to be a "scab," and that his noblest privilege is to join the union. The effects of the strike are directly felt by the children of the miner almost as much as by the miner himself. A case in point during the strike of 1902 was the prohibition of "coal "pick- ing." While the mines were working, the miner was permitted to buy coal at the colliery at a moderate price. Upon the declara- tion of the strike, this privilege was denied him. The miner's wife naturally turned for her supply to the mountain of culm be- side which she lived. The children of the villages began to fill their coal-scuttles from the heaps, that were the accumulations of years, and which had been always regarded as valueless refuse. But the company put up "No trespass" signs, and stationed deputies to see that not a pound of culm was removed. Impelled by their need for fuel, parties of children were sent out to steal coal on more distant culm heaps. Dangers and Hardships of the Work The coal so closely resembles slate that it can be detected only by the closest scrutiny, and the childish faces are compelled to bend so low over the chutes that prematurely round shoulders and narrow chests are the inevitable result. In front of the chutes is an open space reserved for the "breaker boss," who watches the boys as intently as they watch the coal. The boss is armed with a stick, with which he occasionally raps on the head and shoulders a boy who betrays lack of zeal. The breakers are supposed to be heated in winter, and a steam pipe winds up the wall ; but in cold weather every pound of steam is needed in the mines, so that the amount of heat that radiates from the steam pipe is not sufficient to be taken seriously by any of the breakers' toilers. From November until May a breaker CHILD LABOR 135 boy always wears a cap and tippet, and overcoat if he possesses one, but because he has to rely largely upon the sense of touch, he cannot cover his finger-tips with mittens or gloves ; from the chafing of the coal his fingers sometimes bleed, and his nails are worn down to the quick. The hours of toil for slate-pickers are supposed to be from seven in the morning until noon, and from one to six in the afternoon; but when the colliery is running on "full capacity orders," the noon recess is reduced to half an hour, and the goodnight whistle does not blow until half-past six. For his eleven hours' work the breaker boy gets no more pay than for ten. The wages of breaker boys are about the , same all over the coal regions. When he begins to work at slate picking a boy re- ceives forty cents a day, and as he becomes more expert the amount is increased until at the end of, say, his fourth year in the breaker, his daily wage may have reached ninety cents. This is the maximum for an especially industrious and skillful boy. The average is about seventy cents a day. From the ranks of the older breaker boys are chosen door-boys and runners, who work in the mines below ground. The number of boys who work in hard coal mines is im- perfectly realized in the rest of the United States. According to the report of the Bureau of Mines of Pennsylvania for 1901, 147,651 persons were employed "inside and outside the mines of the anthracite region." Of these, 19,564 were classified as slate- pickers, 3,148 as door-boys and helpers, and 10,894 as drivers and runners. The report makes no classification of miners by their ages, but I am convinced that 90 per cent, of the slate-pickers, 30 per cent, of the drivers and runners, and all of the door-boys and helpers are boys. In other words, a total of 24,023, or nearly one-sixth of all the employees of the anthracite coal mines, are children. Age Certificates and What They Amount To According to the mining laws of Pennsylvania, "no boy un- der the age of fourteen shall be employed in a mine, nor shall a boy under the age of twelve be employed in or about the out- side structures or workings of a colliery" (i.e., in a breaker). 136 SELECTED ARTICLES Yet no one who stands by the side of a breaker boss and looks up at the tiers of benches that rise from the floor to the coal- begrimed roof can believe for a minute that the law has been complied with in the case of one in ten of the tiny figures in blue jumpers and overalls bending over the chutes. The mine inspector and the breaker boss will explain that "these boys look younger than their ages is," and that a sworn certificate setting forth the age of every boy is on file in the office. Children's age certificates are a criminal institution. When a father wishes to place his son in a breaker, he obtains an "age blank" from a mine inspector, and in its space he has inserted some age at which it is legal for a boy to work. He carries the certificate to a notary public or justice of the peace, who, in consideration of a fee of twenty-five cents, administers oath to the parent and affixes a notarial seal to the certificate. Justifiable and Unjustifiable Perjury According to the ethics of the coal fields, it is not wrong for a miner or his family to lie or to practise any form of deceit in dealing with coal-mine operators or owners. A parent is justified in perjuring himself as to his son's age on a certificate that will be filed with the mine superintendent, but any state- ment made to a representative of the union must be absolutely truthful. For this reason my inquiries of mine boys as to their work and ages were always conducted under the sacred auspices of the union. Testimony "On the Level" The interrogative colloquy was invariably something like this : "How old are you?" Boy : "Thirteen ; going on fourteen." Secretary of the Local: "On the level now, this is union business. You can speak free, understand." Boy : "Oh. dat's a diffurnt t'ing altogether. I'm nine years old. I've been working since me fadder got hurted in th' ex- plosion in No. 17, year ago last October." A system of compulsory registration of births, such as exists in most of the other States of the Union, might settle the question of the ages of children, but, strangely enough, such CHILD LABOR 137 does not exist in the State of Pennsylvania. Without some such source of evidence, notaries and inspectors, knowing to a moral certainty the perjury, can prove nothing. Where the Daughters Work While the miner's son is working in the breaker or mine it is probable that his daughter is employed in a mill or factory. Sometimes in a mining town, sometimes in a remote part of the coal fields, one comes upon a large, substantial building of wood or brick. When the six o'clock whistle blows, its front door is opened, and out streams a procession of girls. Some of them are apparently seventeen or eighteen years old, the major- ity are from thirteen to sixteen, but quite a number would seem to be considerably less than thirteen. Such a building is one of the knitting mills or silk factories that during the last ten years have come into Anthracite. Underwear and men's socks are now manufactured in large quantities near many of the mining towns. The silk factories are usually offshoots of older estab- lishments in other parts of the country. Anthracite is away from the main lines of railroad ; it is at an unnecessarily long dis- tance from the markets where the product of the mill is sold ; the raw material used on the spindles and looms must be trans- ported from afar. Why the Mills Have Come to the Coal Regions The factory inspector will tell you, "The mills locate in An- thracite because they all employ girls, and girl labor is cheaper here than anywhere else." A glance at a "textile" map of Penn- sylvania will show that wherever there are miners, there cluster mills that employ "cheap girl labor." Besides silk and hosiery a local feminine industry is the manufacture of the fuses or "squibs" which are used in coal blasting. The statistics of the nine counties of Anthracite count up 11,216 "females" employed in them, 2,403 between twelve and sixteen years of age. The perjury certificate prevails for the girls, as well as the boys, and I estimate that 90 per cent, of the 11,216 females are girls who have not yet reached womanhood. They work ten hours a day, and the majority stand all of that time, having a chance to sit only in the noon "hour. This brings on a character- istic lameness in the girls during their first year at the mill. 138 SELECTED ARTICLES The report of the Secretary of Internal Affairs of the State places the "average daily wage of children between the ages of thirteen and sixteen" employed in the manufacturing of under- wear at forty-seven cents, in hosiery mills at forty-six cents. More Testimony "on the Level" Through a district organizer I was enabled to interview under union auspices a number of little girls who were em- ployed in a knitting mill. One girl of fifteen said that she was the oldest of seven children. She had worked in the mill since she was nine years old. Her father was a miner. As pay for "raveling" she received an amount between $2.50 and $3 every two weeks. Another thirteen-year old raveler had worked since the death of her father, two years before, from miner's asthma; her brother had been killed in the mine. The $3 she received every two weeks in her pay envelope supported her mother and her ten-year-old sister. A girl of fourteen had "looked over" stockings for two years. She was able to make about $4 every two weeks. A "looper" of fifteen received $6 every fortnight. She had worked for four years. Her father was a confirmed invalid. Yet all these children seemed to take great pride in assuring me that their "papers was all right and sworn to when we started to work." The breaker boss finds at the mill or factory a counterpart in the "forelady." This personage holds a prominent place in the civilization of Anthracite. It is taken for granted that the forelady must be habitually hateful, and in all controversies side with the proprietor against the rest of the girls. It is her duty to crush incipient strikes, and to do all in her power to "break" the union. She enjoys being hated by every one, and leads an isolated life of conscious rectitude for about $5 a week. "How many pairs of socks can a girl make in a day," I asked a forelady. "They can easy do forty dozen pair if they is good workers, but none of them is good. They all is kickers. That's what's the matter with them," was her reply. Boys' and Girls' Unions And they do "kick," both boys and girls. They are organized to "kick." The children have their unions as well as the grown CHILD LABOR 139 folk. Almost as soon as the breaker boy's certificate is accepted and placed on file in the colliery office he makes application to become a member of the "Junior Local," the members of which are all boys under sixteen. Their weekly meetings take place at night, and are conducted with the utmost secrecy, the members being admitted only by password. The monthly dues range from ten to twenty-five cents, in accordance with the wages received by the members. Every Junior Local has its full quota of officers, from pres- ident to corresponding secretary, elected semi-annually by the boys. To the weekly meetings of the Junior Local the regular Miners' Union of the district sends a representative, but he is not an officer of the Juniors; he acts only as referee and instructor. Education in the Coal Regions In the vicinity of every mining town is a district school, whose usual need of paint and general appearance of dilapidation gives evidence of its slight importance in the life of the community. According to the State law the schools of each township are under the exclusive control of a local board elected by the voters of the district. In a community where almost the entire popula- tion are miners the school board is necessarily composed of miners; the schools must be managed from the union miners' standpoint. The miner on the school board is no better educated than the rest of his kind, and while he may be opposed the- oretically to child labor, he regards its continuance as a neces- sity, and it is therefore his business to see that the school in no way interferes with a parent's prerogative of sending his child to the breaker or mill. The teacher must be in full sym-. pathy and accord with the union. If, as the result of going to school, a child should learn to question in the slightest degree the utterances of the union, then the teacher is at fault, because the union cannot be mistaken about anything. The State law provides for the appointment of "attendance officers, whose duty it shall be to arrest and apprehend truants and others who fail to attend school." In most mining towns such an officer is unknown. School boards may, under the law, "grant the use of school-houses for lyceums and other literary purposes." This is construed to mean meetings of the union, and 140 SELECTED ARTICLES in consequence everywhere in the coal region the school-house is the recognized headquarters of the Local. It is as often re- ferred to in this connection as an educational institution. An inquiry for a miner is very apt to be met with the response, "He's up to the school-house." The prevailing idea of the school in Anthracite is an institution where children may go when they have nothing else to do. Except during strikes, for the most part the pupils are less than seven years old. "Scab" Scholars and "Scab" Steam During the last strike a number of breaker boys took ad- vantage of the enforced idleness to obtain "two months of learning" by going to school ; but the ruling passion of their lives, their devotion to the union, found expression even here. It was the breaker boys who organized the school strikes which occurred in many mining towns. The "cause" was character- istic. The children discovered that some of the pupils were the children of bosses or non-union men, or suspected that the teacher's father or brother or sweetheart "was friendly with the scabs." A breaker boy who belonged to the Junior Local would call the school together at recess and address them. However young he might be he was well versed in the arguments of the union. He told the other pupils that "we must all hang to- gether now if we wish to assert our manhood." Such an orator always found ready listeners, and during the afternoon, when the teacher's back was turned and the door was open, the school would rise en masse and would walk out. At Plymouth a school strike was declared for another cause. By an arrange- ment with a neighboring colliery, the steam with which a school was heated was brought from the boilers of the power-house. During the strike the coal company employed in their engine-room some non-union firemen. When, on the first cold day of the term, steam was turned on in the school-house, the pupils struck because they "wouldn't sit in no room what was heated by scab steam." School strikes were usually of short duration because the leaders were promptly expelled, and their followers were too young "to get organized," as a school strike leader in McAdoo explained to me. This leader was perhaps the most remarkable character that CHILD LABOR 141 I met anywhere in the nine coal counties. He said that he was ten years old, and that he had worked in the breaker a year under a certificate which described his age as fourteen. He could neither read nor write. With tobacco juice evident about the corners of his mouth as he talked, he explained to me that "this school will never amount to nothing until it is organized." Although school strikes are usually deprecated by miners, sev- eral of them have told me that "they couldn't stand for having their children learning in the same room with a non-union child." Painfully ludicrous and pitiful as it all is, it is perfectly under- standable. The children of the Coal Shadow have no child life. The little tots are sullen, the older children fight; they rarely play, and almost their only amusement is, as we have seen, the union and the strike that is the logical result of the conditions of their existence. They have no friends. Their parents, driven by what they think is necessity, forswear them into bondage. Their employers, compelled by what they regard as economic forces, grind them to hatred. The State, ruled by influences, either refrains from amalgamating laws or corrective enforcement. The rest of the world doesn't care. So the shadow of the coal heap lies dark upon these "unionized" little ones as they grow up to be men and women. Within a few years the breaker boy will be a miner. It is the only trade with which he is familiar, and his lack of education will make a commercial or professional career for him almost impossible. He will have to live in Anthracite, because it is the only country where a hard-coal miner can follow his trade. The mill girl will marry early in life; her husband will be a miner. They will both be American citizens. They will remain in the Coal Shadow. Annals of the American Academy. 33: Sup, 73-8. March, 1909. Child Labor in the Textile Industries and Canneries of New England. Everett H. Lord. Ever since the first cotton mill was established in New Eng- land, a little more than a century ago, the textile industries have 142 SELECTED ARTICLES rapidly increased, and in the textile mills, which to-day are found in large numbers in every New England state, a large proportion of the operatives are young people. Probably in every factory town at least seventy-five per cent, of the children leave school as soon as they reach their fourteenth birthday, and al- most one hundred per cent, of those who leave at this time go to work in the mills. That some escape from school before they are fourteen and enroll themselves among the workers is undoubtedly true, but the number probably is not great. The problem of child labor in the textile mill of New England does not primarily deal with very young children. It is true that dur- ing the past year a boy of nine years of age was found work- ing in a Vermont woolen mill, .and that a considerable number of children under the legal age have been found from time to time in mills in IMaine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. These, however, are sporadic instances and cannot be considered as characteristic of the industry. Most manufacturers desire to comply with the law. They neither want children under fourteen, in their mills nor do they wish to become law-bVeakers. The few who have little respect for the law are likely to be deterred from employing children because of almost certain detection and consequent punishment. The children who get into the mills under the age of fourteen do so usually through misrepresenting their age. In Maine, for instance, the law has required only that the employer demand of the child a certificate of some sort. It may be a copy of the town clerk's record, or a baptismal record, or a passport, and some employers have occasionally accepted certificates of doubt- ful authenticity. When a child presents a paper covered with Syrian or Hebrew characters and assures the mill superintendent that the paper is his birth certificate, showing that he is over fourteen years of age, the superintendent may perhaps be excused if he relies largely upon the child's statement. In some cases, however, certificates obviously false have been accepted by employers, who have thus appeared to conform with the letter of the law. but have shown little regard for its intent. In other states the officials who have to pass upon the age of children have some- CHILD LABOR 143 times been similarly deceived, so that we have come to recognize as one of the most evident defects in our laws the method of proving the age of children. Until we can determine some other standard than that of years there will certainly be children of foreign birth considerably under the legal age at work in our mills and factories. A high educational test is likely to work hardship upon those children who come to this country at some- what advanced age and w-ho can hardly be expected to acquire in a year or two the English education demanded of children born on this side of the water. Perhaps some definite physical test, which shall show that the child is physically able to perform the work of the mill, without strict regard to the age in years, may be found to be the most satisfactory solution of this problem. The vital problem connected with the employment of children and young people in the New England textile mills is probably not the physical one. Beginning their work when at least four- teen years of age, working in mills and factories, where the hygienic conditions are usually fairly good, and fortified by the invigorating climate of New England, it is not probable that a large proportion of even the younger operatives suffer greatly in respect to their health. It is true that those who have a predisposition to tuberculosis may develop it sooner under the conditions which prevail in the factory; similarly those who are particularly disposed to any disease may sooner suffer from its effects if they are deprived of the advantages of outdoor life and exercise. It does not appear, however, from a comparison of the young workers in factories with children of the same age in our public schools that the factory workers suffer more than do the school children. The 3'oung factory workers do suffer, however, from woeful lack of education, and the evils consequent. Leaving the schools at fourteen, they take but little of the school training with them, and that little they are not likely to apply. Less than sixty per cent, of the children have completed the work of the grammar grades when they leave school. They have completed no course of study — they have only been in contact with some elements of culture, and have usually failed to absorb much from their con- 144 SELECTED ARTICLES tact. Like the college boy whose mother said that "he had not taken trigonometry, but had been exposed to it," they have been exposed to a little elementary academic culture, but few, indeed, have taken any of it with them when they have left the school. Even more serious than their slight academic education is their total lack of industrial training, for though most of the young workers rank considerably above the grade of illiterates, practically none of them have had any form of hand training or of the mental training which accompanies practical hand-work. This lack is felt keenly by many progressive employers, and in some of the mills of New England the employers are. at their own expense, providing industrial technical training for some of their young employees. The fact that in their mills the directive positions are practically all filled by men of foreign birth and ed- ucation, indicates somewhat the need for immediate industrial training of the young workers.- In these factories where the op- portunity is being given to some of the young employees to con- tinue theireducation the successof the experiment has been most encouraging. While the expense and the problems of super- vision and direction are likely to deter many manufacturers from undertaking anything of the sort, it may be that the in- creased value of the workman and consequent greater return promised for the future will tend to make instruction of this sort more general. If children must be allowed to go to work at as early an age as fourteen, the state should still retain some hold upon them for a part of their time, requiring and aiding them to continue their education along industrial and some carefully correlated academic lines, until they reach the age of seventeen. Investigations show that the children who enter textile mills remain in that industry, though they may and often do shift from mill to mill and from town to town. The work which is done in the mills is all of about the same grade and offers little to the adult wage earner; yet there seems to be no way out, and the workers continue their unskilled way, earning at thirty but little more than they did at fifteen and seeing before them a prospect of continually decreasing returns for their labors. The young workers are by no means altogether from the poorest homes. Many of them have parents who are in very comfortable cir- CHILD LABOR 145 cumstances and who could well afford to maintain their children until they had acquired a more complete education. Dissatis- faction with the school, a dissatisfaction to some extent justifi- able, added to lack of foresight and parental ignorance or indif- ference accounts for the presence of the vast majority of the children in the mills. They gain neither in efficiency nor in earn- ing power, but they have closed behind them the door to prog- ress in other lines of employment which offer a fair living wage, and have associated themselves with the least enter- prising class of our population. The state cannot remain in- different to the needs of this large body of young people who have in them the making of good citizens, but whose citizenship is too often spoiled in the making. The one industry in New England in which children are prac- tically without legal protection is the canning industry in Maine. By an unfortunate exemption the law relating to child labor is made inapplicable to any manufacturing establishment the mate- rials and products of which are perishable. It does not seem to have been considered by the legislators who established this standard that the children who were working in the canneries were al?o perishable. Surely it was not intended to rate chil- dren as cheaper than fish, for it is especially to the canning of fish that this law applied, yet that seems a logical deduction to draw. Along the eastern coast of Maine there has grown up a great industry in competition with the sardine packei-s of France and southern Europe. The herring, which are found in great numbers along the coast, when properly prepared and canned, serve as a fairly passable substitute for sardines, and go into the market under that name. Years ago I visited a canning factory in which there were packed three different products, French sardines, brook trout, and mackerel, all of them being known as herring before they were canned. The fish are gathered in seines and weirs, and are taken in motor boats to the nearest factories. As soon as a load of fish is received at the factory the herring are taken out, cut to the required size, and placed upon flakes for drying and cooking. The* cutting and flaking is commonly done by women and children. The fish 146 SELECTED ARTICLES must be cut and cleaned as soon as they are delivered at the can- neries. This may be in the early morning, or at any time during the day or evening, or even late at night. When a boat arrives, the cannery whistle blows for cutters, and whether they are at play in the streets or asleep in their beds matters not, the call must be obeyed, and the children go in troops to the shop. If work begins late in the day it may last until late at night, and in consequence it is not uncommon to see children of eight or ten years of age returning home from their work at midnight, per- haps to be called out again in the gray of the early dawn. The operation of flaking is simple, and the children's deft fin- gers often can do more than can adults'. The flaked fish are taken to the ovens, where they are cooked in steam ; then they are packed in the cans, a part of the work done entirely by women and children. The oil or mustard, or whatever flavor is to be given to the fish, is then placed in the cans, and they are passed through the topping machine, which is usually operated by a man and one or two boys. None of the work is particularly exhaust- ing, and the rooms are usually open to the air. At the same time, the operatives frequently work long hours, as it is customary to can all the fish which may be at hand before stopping. In the busy seasons the factories sometimes run fifteen or sixteen hours ^t a stretch, and women and children remain as long as the factory is open. The surroundings, especially in the cutting room, are likely to be disgustingly dirty, but they are perhaps not unhealthful. The chief menace to the health lies in the irregularity of work and corresponding irregularity of home life. It is impossible to say how many children are working in these canneries, but as a conservative estimate I should say that during the busy season not less than a thousand children under fourteen years of age are so employed. There are a good many children as young as eight or nine who work in the flaking rooms. These little ones do not always remain throughout the entire day, but as they are paid by the piece some of them stay until they have earned enough to satisfy them for the day, and then go to their homes. Others, either because of their own desire or be- cause they may be required to remain, work as long as the fish CHILD LABOR 147 last. I have found one child of only five working in the packing room, usually employed as long as the other workers, and earn- ing from eight to twelve cents per day. In many of the sardine factories much machinery is used ; the law does not require the safeguarding of this machinery as it does in other factories, and a child worker has to take upon him- self "the risks of his employment." If he is injured, the employ- er is not liable for damages. In one instance, recently repor.ed, a girl, only nine years of age, lost her hand while playing about a drier. Xo damages could be recovered ; the girl was supposed to know that the machine was dangerous, and had no business to be playing near it. Sardine canning is a seasonal industry, and this is urged by some as extenuation for the employment of children. They say the children are engaged only during vacation seasons, and so are not necessarily deprived of school facilities. The season, how- ever, lasts from April 15 to December 15, leaving only four months of the year when the children are free from the call of the factory. As a matter of fact, I believe that this seasonal employment is one of the worst features of the business, involv- ing as it does a long period of idleness, and setting before the children the example of their elders, who quite commonly rely upon their season's work for their entire support. Spending the winter months in idleness and dissipation, the parents are not likely to insist upon sending their children to school during these free months, and the children are certain to acquire ways of irregularity which are fatal to worthy industrial habits. The moral atmosphere of the sardine factory is far from wholesome. Washington County, in which nearly all the can- neries are located, is reported to have had more juvenile crim- inals in its courts during the past twenty years than any other county in Maine, and probably seventy-five per cent, of these young criminals have been sardine workers. Few of them are native born ; indeed, few of them have permanent residence in the county or the state. The industry attracts a low grade of workers from a wide section, many coming from Canada. This makes the problem much more difficult for the local town au- thorities; their schools are not prepared to receive great numbers 148 SELECTED ARTICLES of children from other localities, and so the truant officers sel- dom visit the factory camp. The old residents look upon the factory workers with a good deal of contempt, and feel unwilling to interfere in their behalf. The churches find the problem so hopeless that they have largely abandoned it, and until the state extends its protection there seems little prospect for improving the present evil conditions. Annals of the American Academy. 33: 278-86. March, 1909. Condition of Labor in Southern Cotton Mills. Lewis W. Parker. Criticism of southern mill conditions is usually directed to two subjects, viz., the general character of the employees and secondly, the proportion of child labor. As to the first, it can only be said that from the evidence of well-advised and impartial students, the character of the employees is being steadily raised, and is superior to that in their former life. This is the verdict of such investigators as Miss Gertrude Beeks, secretary of the welfare department of the National Civic Federation; of Mrs. Ellen Foster, a well-known authority in sociology, who as an employee of the government, made a report to the President of the United States to this effect; of Dr. P. H. Goldsmith, the minister of the historic First Church in Salem, Massachusetts, who whilst a native of the South, has spent most of his adult years in the North. In a series of articles appearing in 1908 in the "Boston Evening Transcript," Doctor Goldsmith wrote as follows: "The only just comparison is between their present and their past state. In going through mills of the Piedmont section recently, I invariably saw the best-looking people, the most intel- ligent workmen, the brightest and happiest children, and cheeks possessing the most color, in the factories of longest estab- lishment." The same conclusion is reached by Professor Few in the article referred to. With regard to child labor, there is no doubt that at certain stages in the development of the industry the proportion of chil- dren in the mills was unduly large, and was unfortunate. The reasons for this, however, were two-fold. In the first place, when the family came to the mill village, the older members CHILD LABOR 149 of the family were unfit for the most skilful parts of the work. The father had acquired habits whi(;h made it impossible for him. to be active and quick enough to be a spinner or wea\^r. His fingers had been so gnarled and roughened by agricultural work as to be unsuitable for the tying of small threads. He could earn only the wage of the common laborer, and no one could supply the places in the factory requiring an active and nimble finger, except the younger members of the family. Again, these could be secured at low wage, and many manufacturers were misled into the belief that a low wage was necessarily an inci- dent to a low cost of production. In the progress of the in- dustry, and in the succession of years, a new generation is growing up, and the mills have found it practicable and ad- visable to supplant the younger children by youths and adults. The proportion of children of tender age — say fourteen years and under — in employment in the mills now, for the reasons above, is very much less than it was five or ten years ago, and this proportion, irrespective of legislation, will continue to grow less. The child is the most expensive employee that the mill has. From the writer's experience, the mill can well afford to pay more per piece or per machine for work done by the adult than for similar work done by the young child. A spinner, for instance, who is paid by the machine, or by the "side," as it is called, taking, in print cloth numbers, say twelve sides, is a much more economical employee to the mill than a child who is paid the same price per side and who takes only four or six sides. The results to the mill of the day's work are much better in the case of the adult than the child, and experience in this has tended of itself to decrease the number of children in employ- ment. In addition to this fact, the bettered circumstances of the family have tended to the same efifect. In the pamphlet referred to by Mr. Kohn. he says, "With the increase of wage there has been a corresponding decrease of employment of children. This effect will continue until in my judgment the proportion of objectionably young children in the mills will altogether cease." I differ, therefore, altogether from those who would proclaim that there is a constant increase of the employment of children in southern cotton mills. My conclusion would be exactly the 150 SELECTED ARTICLES reverse and this conclusion will be borne out by the census of the United States, I believe, as it is by careful statisticians such as Mr. Kohn. The latter, in referring to the question of employ- ment of children in South Carolina said, "The more I study the question, the more I become convinced that the tendency of the outsider was to exaggerate the number of children in the mills, and the tendency of the mill presidents was to keep the children out of the mills, if for no other than for economic reasons." That the manufacturers of South Carolina are sincere in their desire and intention of keeping the young children out of the mills is proven by their course with regard to legislation. No persons in the state have been more persistent in their advocacy of a general compulsory school law than have the manufacturers. With the election of each new legislature for the past six or more years, these manufacturers have presented to the legislature a petition, seeking the enactment of laws re- quiring the compulsory education of children. At a meeting of the Cotton Manufacturers* Association of South Carolina, held but a few weeks ago, a resolution was adopted, memorializing the legislature to pass a compulsory school law, requiring the attendance of all children under the age of fourteen years, and stating that in the judgment of the manufacturers, such a law would be the most effective child labor law which could be passed, and furthermore stating that if such a law were passed, the manufacturers would make no objection whatever to the passage of a child labor bill forbidding the employment of chil- dren, in cotton mills, under the age of fourteen. In other words, the manufacturers have believed, in common with many thinking people in other communities, that a compulsory educa- tion law was a proper and necessary incident to a child labor law, and have urged the enactment of the two bills at the same time. At the present time, the child labor law in South Carolina prohibits only the employment of children under twelve. The manufacturers of the state are willing to raise this age limit to fourteen, if legislation to this eflfect be accompanied by a com- pulsory school law. In any event, there can be no question in the mind of any impartial student of conditions that there is a steady decrease in the proportion of children employed, and this CHILD LABOR 151 decrease will continue for the reasons outlined. It is most un- fortunate that many who are honestly seeking the prohibition of child labor should find it necessary to greatly exaggerate its present evils. For illustration, a very general impression has been created by writers upon and critics of southern cotton mills that it was usual in all the southern states to work children at night. Just criticism of this practice may be made of some states, but as to South Carolina, the incorrectness of such a view is apparent, when it is known that there are practically no mills in South Carolina operating at night. The writer thinks that he is familiar with the large proportion of mills in the state, and certainly lives and operates mills in that section in which the industry is most thriving, and in which the largest number of plants are located. Yet, to his knowledge, there is not in the counties of Spartanburg, Anderson and Greenville, in which are a large majority of the spindles of the state, a single mill operat- ing at night, and he knows of but two plants in the whole state — and these are of but comparatively small size — which operate at night. The manufacturers have not sought to prevent legisla- tion prohibiting the employment of children at night, and with- out objection on their part, and indeed, on their recommenda- tion, there was passed several years ago a bill prohibiting the employment of children under the age of twelve, between the hours of seven p. m. and six a. m. ; and there is now pending before the legislature a bill, which is meeting with no objection on their part, prohibiting the employment of children under the age of sixteen years between such hours. The condition of the employee in southern mills is steadily improving, and the percentage and number of young children in employment is steadily decreasing. These two results must be a cause of congratulation to the people of the whole Union, as unquestionably they are to the people of the southern states. These results have been certainly to a very large measure con- sequent upon the work of the manufacturers themselves. In conclusion, I would quote again from the article of Pro- fessor Few, already referred to, in which he says, "Much still remains to be done, but this is not going to be done by crude, unfair or evil-minded agitators, or by well-meaning but ill-in- 152 SELECTED ARTICLES formed sentimentalists. The working out through actual ex- perience, step by step, as is being done by the mill referred to, of the hard problems of factory life, is worth more than any amount of vague theorizings of idealists." Outlook. 78: 982-5. December 17, 1904. Child Labor in Eastern Pennsylvania. Peter Roberts. The industries in which young children are employed in the State of Pennsylvania are those of silk, hosiery, cotton, woolen, tobacco, candy, box, umbrella, school slate, rope, wire, nut and bolt, lock, etc. Nearly all these factories are located, east of Harrisburg, and of the forty thousand children under sixteen years of age employed in this State, eighty-five per cent, labor in mills and factories located in twelve counties east of our capital. No child under thirteen years of ag&can, according to law, be regularly employed, but in every industrial center where children are to any extent employed the consensus of opinion among labor leaders and professional men is that the law is evaded. A labor leader in Lancaster said, "I'll swear by a stack of Bibles as high as the Lutheran church that there are scores of children under thirteen years of age in these factories." In Allentown child labor is at a premium while men walk the streets unable to get work. A silk manufacturer of this city said, "All silk-throwing plants ought to get out of Allentown, for child labor is too scarce." In Reading a hosiery manufacturer said, "We cannot get all the boys and girls we need in our factories." Employers, when asked, "Do parents try to secure employment to children under age?" invariably answered, "Yes." Superintendents of pub- lic schools, in centers of textile industries are uniform in their testimony that a certain percentage of parents take their children from school when they are only ten, eleven, or twelve years of age and send them to the factory or mill. Physicians who practice among employees in mills and factories are unanimous in their testimony that children are employed before they are thirteen years of age. Lawyer Craig, of Lebanon, said, "Stop ignorant and greedy parents from committing perjury when they take out certificates of employment to their children." Dr. CHILD LABOR 153 Davies, of Lancaster, said, "Execute the laws now in force before you attempt to pass others." Is this expression of public sentiment justified? In every in- dustrial center there are humane and patriotic employers, but they must compete with sinister and heartless men who regard all consideration for tender children seeking employmexit as '"sentiment" which has no place in business relations. In every large city there are factories of ill repute, wherein conditions are wretched, wages low, and the moral atmosphere degrading. I visited one of these where six hundred employees labored, sixty- five per cent, of whom were under sixteen years of age. Six months ago a strike had occurred in this factory. I asked a boy seventeen years old if they had won it; his reply was, "No; the kids defeated us." Among these employees it would be easy t6 select a score or two of boys and girls under thirteen years. The deputy factory inspector has sent home as many as thirty em- ployees from this mill in one day, but within a week most of them were back again. The two wards from which the employer draws his labor supply are the most congested in the city, and one of them is being rapidly filled by an influx of Slavs and Italians. A public school superintendent, who has taught in these two wards for fifteen years, said, "It's an impossibility to stop the exodus of boys and girls to the mills before they are thirteen years of age." He had conducted night school for many years in these wards, and fifty per cent, of the boys attending them were doing primary work. In the town of Freeland I met three sisters coming home from the silk-mill. Each of them began to work when she was twelve years of age. The superintendent of public schools in this borough said, "Boys and girls leave my schools in large numbers from ten to twelve years of age. Some leave be- fore they are ten years." In my visit through silk and hosiery mills, rope and school slate factories, cigar and candy establish- ments, I saw anaemic children, under the legal age, with frail constitutions, working sixty hours a week. Some of these were stunted and deformed, whom competent physicians would send to hospitals rather than have them work ten hours a day in a vitiated atmosphere for three cents an hour. Do not factory inspectors know this? Yes; but their hands are tied by political influence. When Gus Egolf, of Norristown, 154 SELECTED ARTICLES was appointed deputy factory inspector last June, he turned out in one week two hundred children illegally employed in his district. In one borough of eight thousand population he sent home fifty children from factories. When Deputy Factory In- spector Betchel was appointed last June, over five hundred children illegally employed were found in Berks County alone. In one borough he sent home forty-five children from nine to twelve years, who were employed contrary to law. He prosecuted the Mayor of the city of Reading for illegally giving two boys certificates of employment. The Mayor paid a fine of thirty-one dollars. He also successfully prosecuted an Alderman for the same offense in the same city. In another city the factory in- spector tried to prosecute an Alderman who issued certificates of employment to children not legally qualified to work. He did not succeed, for the reason that no Justice of the Peace would try a "brother officer." One factory inspector candidly admitted that he could not discharge his duties in the town in which he resided; if he did, he would commit political suicide within six months. Another factory inspector successfully prosecuted an influential employer. The suit cost the employer four hundred dollars, and the inspector his office. The Central Labor Union of Lancaster prosecuted the leading factory in the city for employ- ing children contrary to law. The case has never been tried, and the officers of the union cannot find out the reason why. Sometimes factory inspectors "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." A poor organ-grinder in one of our cities was fined twenty-five dollars and costs for employing a boy not thirteen years of age to help him ; in the same city a factory, wherein nine hundred persons labor, has from fifty to sixty children employed contrary to law, but this transgressor has not been prosecuted. Another storekeeper was prosecuted for employing a girl under thirteen years of age, and in the same city scores of girls are employed under that age, and nothing is done about it. The heads of large factories are invariably a power in the politics of the town or city wherein they reside, and the factory inspectors are appointees of the "machine." Many employers and parents, by deception, defeat the in- spector's purpose. In a large firm employing over seven hundred CHILD LABOR 155 persons, who were scattered over the four floors of the massive building, it was affirmed that the smaller boys were sent from one floor to the other when the officer made his inspection. In a silk factory employing about two hundred hands, a few boys were stowed away when the inspector made his visit. The officer was informed of this, and ofi the following day he returned to the factory and discharged the boys. Employers generally de- mand certificates from children under sixteen years of age, and most children employed under thirteen years enter "the factory or mill because their parents swear falsely in order to get the "per- mit." Factory Inspector Leiserring said that ninety per cent, of the parents who send their children to factories and mills will perjure themselves in order to get their children to work at an early age. Each inspector whom I interviewed cited instances where parents had two children working, with certificates show- ing only four or five months difference in their ages! One child, of proper age, would secure a certificate and give it to a younger brother or sister. In Allentown, South Bethlehem, Norristown, etc., a large foreign-born population is found. The sons and daughters of these Slavs and Italians go to the factories and mills, and both the public school authorities and the factory inspectors confess that they are unable to check the greed of these parents. The test required by law, that children under six- teen years of age must know how to read and write the English language intelligently, is not rigidly applied. Some employers transgress the factory laws of the State in working children under sixteen years of age and adult females more than sixty hours a week. The chief transgressors in this respect are the silk and hosiery mills, the cigar, school slates, box, and umbrella factories. These industries have their busy seasons, during which the employees work overtime. In one factory little girls were kept working from one o'clock till eight without respite — a continuous stretch of seven hours. Sometimes one department in a large factory falls behind the others, and the employer offers a premium to the employees to "catch up." Under this pressure I saw boys under fifteen years of age work- ing fourteen hours a day. The mother of three young girls who worked overtime said, "It's from bed to work and from work to 156 SELECTED ARTICLES bed." These children got up at six o'clock in the morning, and worked till eight o'clock in the evening. When questioned about the time they had for the noonday meal and how they used it, one of the girls said, "I take a nap when I can on the bales." Can any one say what thirteen or fourteen hours a day means to these young boys and girls? In my investigation I saw two or three of the wrecks. One young girl in her seventeenth year had been earning nine dollars and ten dollars a week, working from seventy to seventy-five hours. She had done it for three years, and is now broken, in health and spirits. Another girl, eighteen years of age, having worked for six years in a silk-mill, said. "I used to be stout and strong, but now I'm poor enough." Dr. Weaver, of Easton, who has for the last ten years practiced among the operatives of a hosiery-mill which employs some twelve hundred hands, said: "Girls, when they have been in that mill from twelve years of age to twenty, are not much good after." Upon girls of tender years the blight of factory life falls heaviest. The boy may be stunted or he may grow dispropor- tionately, but the effect upon the more delicate organism of the female is disastrous and cruel. Sixty hours a week is more than the average child of tender years can stand, but add another ten hours overtime and the pressure works disastrously. Dr. Samuel Davies, President of the State Board of Health of Pennsylvania, said: "Factory girls soon wilt, and they ill dis- charge the functions of maternity." Is it surprising? Another wrong to tender boys and girls employed in silk-mills is night work. This is confined to silk plants installed in the anthracite coal fields. In Allentown, Reading, South Bethlehem, Lancaster, etc., children do not work nights, for employers cannot get children enough to operate their plants in the day. Mr. Car- diff, manager of a silk-throwing plant in South Bethlehem, said "The coal fields is the ideal place for a silk-throwing plant; you get cheap rent, cheap coal, cheap labor, and the parents don't object to have their children work nights." Not in any other industrial center in eastern Pennsylvania are young girls employed in night work. Ten or fifteen years ago night work for girls was unknown in this State. The evil arose when the silk-throwing plants were built in anthracite CHILD LABOR i57 communities; and as these enterprises multiply, the number ot tender children employed at night increases. A plant in Di'ckson City, employing some three hundred hands, draws its labor supply from a radius of two miles, and young girls not sixteen years of age work twelve hours for five nights in the week. When an employer was asked, "Do they work as well by night as by day?" he answered, "No. They don't sleep in the day, and when midnight comes they get drowsy and the waste is larger." I saw little girls going to and fro before scores of revolving spindles, having their short dresses tied with a cord to keep them from being entangled in the machinery as they stretched on tiptoe to catch the broken thread. And these little girls in short dresses, standing before these whirlers — some of them making twenty-hve thousand revolutions a minute — from 6 p. m. to 6 a. m., get drowsy. It means more waste — the waste of nerve and tissue of future mothers in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In another factory some little boys watching the spindles kept a box near by, for they could not well catch the broken thread unless they had something to stand on. The Empire Silk Mill of Wilkesbarre discontinued night work for girls, and a man living in close proximity to the mill gave the reason: ''We couldn't sleep. The girls came out at midnight, walked the streets, shouted, screamed, jumped on our porches, etc. It was terrible. What mischief one would not think of doing another would. So we protested, and the manager dis- continued night work," That was in a city, but there are twenty silk-throwing commission houses in small mining towns of from four thousand to twelve thousand population where girl employees can run during the midnight meal hour without disturbing the rest of those living in these thinly populated communities. Behind it all is the greed of employers. The owner of a small silk-throwing plant said, "By working day and night I get my money for three per cent." Another man- ager, who recently transferred his plant from Paterson to a mining village, said 'T save from sixty to seventy per cent, in wages by coming here." I asked, "Have you a sufficient supply of labor?" He answered, "Twice as much as I need." Under these conditions is it likely that humane considerations 158 SELECTED ARTICLES will deter these men from working this cheap labor day and night? Before the silk manufacturers transferred their plants to these mining towns there was little work here for girls to do. Their coming has been a material aid to our people, and no one can gainsay the benefit conferred by them upon many communities in their struggle for subsistence. Males only are employed in the mining industry. Mine employees, as a rule, have large families, and the increase to the family income from the wages of girls working in factories and mills is needed and is put to good pur- pose in most homes. No intelligent person will protest against a diversity of industries entering into our towns. Each one of our boroughs offers inducements to manufacturers to come with- in its borders. Employment to girls of sixteen years and over is a physical and moral good. But what is argued for is that boys and girls from ten to fourteen years should not be agents of production; that it is a crime to work them seventy and seventy- five hours a week ; and that a law should be passed in the next session of our Legislature making it a crime to employ any boy tinder sixteen years and any girl under eighteen years between 7 p. m. and 6 a. m. in any industry. American Journal of Sociology. lo: 299-314. November, 1904. Has Illinois the Best Laws in the Country for the Protection of Children? Florence Kelley. Is it true that Illinois now has the best laws in the country for the protection of the children? There are two objective tests which can be applied in seek- ing an answer to this question. One test is that which is afforded by the decennial census of the United States, which reveals the effectiveness (or the incompetence) with which the states are dealing with the education of their children, by re- vealing the numbers and the percentages of the children be- tween the ages of ten and fourteen years, in each of the states, who can read and write. The second test is an annual one and is applied locally by each community for itself. This is the departure of the pupils CHILD LABOR 159 from the schools, their age, and their recorded acquirements at the moment of departure. Where pupils virtually all complete the work of eight years of the curriculum of the public schools, the laws for the pro- tection of the children are thereby shown to be working ef- ficiently. It is claimed by citizens of Colorado that this is the case in the schools of Denver. Where, however, the pupils fall out of school after finishing the work of the first, second, third, and fourth years, as appears to be common in many large manufacturing centers, Chicago among the number (where only a minority of the pupils complete the work of the first five years of the public schools), there the laws for the pro- tection of the children appear to need further amendment. Let us apply these two objective tests to the laws of Illinois. It is by no means ancient history that between 1890 and 1900 Illmois fell from the sixth to the fifteenth position in the scale of the states, when they are graded according to the ability of their children between the ages of ten and fourteen years to read and write. This means that up to the year 1900 fourteen states had proceeded more effectively with the task of abolishing illiteracy than Illinois. These states are Nebraska, Iowa, Ore- gon, Ohio, Kansas, Indiana, Connecticut, Utah, Massachusetts, Michigan. Washington, Minnesota. Wisconsin and New York. In 1910 this test will be applied again. It will be a matter of the highest interest to observe whether Illinois will then have re- gained the points in the scale of the states which were lost in 1890-1900. If the statement is correct that the laws for the pro- tection of her children are the best in the country, it is reason- able to suppose that the fact will then manifest itself in the total abolition of illiteracy among children of sound mind who have been in the country as much as one school year. It may be urged that the relative illiteracy is not a fair test of the excellence of the laws for the protection of children; for the agricultural states of the Northwest, having neither vast foreign immigration nor highly developed manufacture and commerce, are confronted by no such task as the education of the immigrant children who flood Chicago and are tempted to remain illiterate by reason of the opportunities for employ- i6o SELECTED ARTICLES ment for all comers. Granting, for the sake of argument, that the task of Washington, or of Nebraska, may be lighter than that of Illinois, what is to be said of the present relation of Illinois to New York? Why should New York stand higher in the percentage scale than Illinois? Why should it have, in fact, only 704 more illiterate children between the ages of ten and fourteen years than Illinois? New York has more immi- grants, more manufacture more commerce of the character which absorbs the labor of children ; why then, should it have only 704 more illiterate children between the ages of ten and fourteen years and stand higher in the percentage table than Illinois? The answer to this is that its laws have long been, and still are, better than those of Illinois in one important particular; namely, the requirement that children under the age of sixteen years must be able to read and write English before they begin to work in manufacture. This law has been in force since 1892. For twelve years, therefore, the schools of New York city have been flooded with pupils between the ages of six and sixteen years, eager to learn to read and write English in order to be able to go to work. And the results are visible in the decen- nial census of 1900. The second test — the departure of the pupils from the schools and their recorded acquirement at the moment of de- parture—can be applied at any moment in any city, by a scrutiny of the rolls of the different classes in the public schools. Colorado requires the completion of the work of the first eight years of the public schools, or an equivalent in work done in other schools or at home. The pupils must be ready to enter the high schools. An examination of the rolls, showing the age and the class reached by all the pupils at the time of leaving school, would settle the question of school attendance between Colorado and Illinois. It is much to be wished that such an examination might be made in both states, but especially in Chicago. jSIeanwhile it is obvious that that statute which requires them to complete the whole work of the first eight years of the schools affords better protection to the children than that which. CHILD LABOR i6i like the statutes of Illinois, merely requires pupils to attend school until they reach the age of fourteen years, regardless of what they learn or fail to learn, and supplements this per- functory attendance by the demand that such as have not learned to read and write must thereafter attend a night school. Reading fluently and writing legibly are very elastic terms. Childrens are sometimes described as able to read fluently when they can repeat in parrot fashion a few lines of the first reader. It is related that, after a change of administration in New York city, the reader used for testing children who came to get their "working papers" was changed by the examiner at the office of the board of health, and many children failed during the next week because they had been taught by their older brothers and sisters to read just that portion of the pre- vious reader which had been used for years as the test for all comers. In Chicago the writer has known many pupils who dropped out of the third-year class in the schools, nominally able to read, but so little habituated to reading that after two or three years they had wholly lost the art. New York, while requiring a smaller amount of completed school work than Colorado, goes much farther in this direction than Illinois; for New York requires that, before leaving school, pupils shall have had, since the thirteenth birthday, 130 days' attendance in school, in which they must have received instruction in ''reading, writing, geography, English grammar, and the fundamental principles of arithmetic up to and includ- ing fractions." This is the w^ork which a child would normally complete who entered school at the age of six years and was regularly promoted to the age of twelve years. The statute having taken effect in 1903, it appears that the number of pupils is very large who have spent the years in school, but have not completed the required work and achieved the required promotions. Excellent as is the effect of the statutory requirement of specified school work to be completed before the child leaves school, in stimulating efforts of teachers, superintendents, and members of the board of education, it is perhaps more far-reach- i62 SELECTED ARTICLES ing in its influence upon parents of pupils who are to be wage- earners, inducing them to keep the children in school with greater regularity than ever before, in order that they may not miss the required promotions and thus be detained in school after the fourteenth birthday. The laws of Colorado and New York by this means place a premium upon regularity in attend- ing school from the day of entrance at the age of six years, saying virtually to the parent: "Your child must go to school until the sixteenth birthday. If, however, you keep him up to his work so well that he completes a certain portion of the curriculum by the time the fourteenth birthday arrives, he may then leave school and begin to work." Both states enforce fines and imprisonment upon parents who disobey the compulsory- attendance law. The parent is thus treated in both these states according to the methods of the best modern pedagogy — the reward of virtue and the penalty of evil-doing following rationally upon the line of conduct selected by the parent. Illinois, on the other hand, ends the term of compulsory schoqj attendance at the age of fourteen years for all who can read and write, and requires beyond that merely attendance at night school. Thus, although parents are punished by fine or imprisonment if pupils play truant, exactly as in New York and Colorado, they have none of the stimulus, such as fathers in those states enjoy, for getting the pupils forward through a required amount of school work. While Illinois punished three hundred parents in one year for the truancy of their children. New York and Colorado (while they, too, punished parents of truants) were stimulating thousands of fathers, mothers and children to regular school attendance on the part of the children in order that these might complete the allotted task by the arrival of the fourteenth birthday. One of the proverbial difficulties in the way of the perfect enforcement of child-labor and compulsory-education laws is that of proving the age of the child which is alleged to be fourteen or sixteen years old, and therefore exempt from further school requirements or restrictions upon its work, while in truth the child may be but eleven or twelve years old. CHILD LABOR 163 The demand that the child must, in addition to being fourteen years old, have completed a certain amount of school work is found, in practice, to strengthen the age restriction of the child labor law very effectively. Of what use is it for a parent to swear falsely that a lad is fourteen years of age when he is eleven, if he must continue in school until he has finished the work of the first five years, or the first eight years? The temptation to perjury on the part of parents is thus reduced, to say nothing of the borrowing of passports and other records. New York state, however reinforces the age requirement of the child-labor law still further by having every child ex- amined by a physician of the local board of health, who signs and files in the office of the board a statement that the child is, in his opinion, of the normal stature of a child of fourteen years, and is in good health. This is an excellent safeguard for the undersized, anemic children who are clever and faith- ful enough to finish the work of the first five years of the curriculum in five or in six years, and whose greedy parents would gladly turn the achievement to account, not by giving the child the due reward of its faithfulness in the shape of more opportunity for school life, but by crowding it into a sweatshop or the messenger service. When thus tested by the two available objective tests — the decennial census and the departure of the children from school, considered in connection with the age af which they are permitted to go and the acquirement required at the time of leaving — Illinois appears not to have the best laws in the country for the protection of the children. There are, however, some further comparisons which can profitably be made. A law which far excels any in force at the present time in its effective defence of the interests of childhood is the unique statute of Colorado which defines the delinquencies with which a child under the age of sixteen years may be charged, and holds the parent, guardian, or other adult person responsible who contributes to the delinquency of a child. Excellent as is the truancy law of Illinois, it is limited in its operation to the seasons when the schools are in session. i64 SELECTED ARTICLES But the delinquencies of children know no such limitations. Boys commit petty offenses out of school hours, on Saturdays, Sundays, and during vacation. Moreover, the compulsory- education law of Illinois ceases to take effect upon a child when he reaches the fourteenth birthday, unless, being illiterate, he may be required to attend a night school until he has either learned to read and write, or reaches the age of sixteen years. If a boy in Chicago buys cigarettes wherewith to stupefy himself and render his school attendance useless, the truancy law is of little value to him. If he spends the hours after school in picking coal from a railroad track, at. the risk of his life,, it is not the truancy law which meets his case. What such boys need is the protection of a law which would bring into court the mother and the cigarette dealer, in the case of the former; and the railway officials who fail to police their tracks, together with the family who profit by the child's thefts, in the case of the latter. The law of Colorado holds responsible, for all the delinquen- cies of all the children until they reach the age of sixteen years, all those adult persons who contribute to such delinquen- cies. If a boy fetches beer for the family, the man who sells him the beer and the family who send him to fetch it are alike held responsible. If a boy carries telegrams to a disreputable house, the operator who sends him is liable to a fine or to jail for £i year. 'The boy who steals rides on a coal train involves the conductor in his delinquency; and the junk dealers find it unprofitable to purchase junk from children whose detection involves a year in jail for the adult partici- pant in their offenses. The child in Colorado thus has the fullest benefit of a rigid compulsory-education law, and also of this wide-embrac- ing inforcement of adult responsibility. Colorado goes beyond the enforcement of parental responsibility, and includes with it adult responsibility. Whoever contributes to the delinquency of a child is responsible before the law of Colorado. The statutes of Illinois possess several points of unques- tioned excellence, none of which are, however, peculiar to CHILD LABOR 165 themselves. One of the best requirements is that children shall not work after 7 o'clock at night. This is excelled by the Michigan statute which prohibits the employment of chil- dren after 6 P. M. Another ©xcelient point is the legal limit of eight hours imposed upon the working day of children under the age of sixteen years. This provision, however, is found in the laws of Colorado, Arizona, Montana, and Utah, as well as in those of Illinois. An admirable provision in the laws of Illinois is that which prohibits the employment of children in occupations dangerous to the health. This also is common to the laws of Massachusetts, Ohio, Colorado, and several other states. Among the most important laws for the protection of chil- dren are those which deal with child-labor. No form of child- labor is more injurious than the street occupations. In five years of residence in New York city the writer has not seen one girl under the age of sixteen years engaged in selling papers, or any other articles, upon the streets, or in begging. Can as much be said for Chicago? This absence of girls from the street trades is due to the very rigid provision in the penal code holding parents and guardians responsible for girls, and guilty of cruelty when they are permitted thus to work under the age of sixteen years. Under the statute of 1903, newsboys under the age of fourteen years are required to wear badges loaned to them by the board of education of New York city. They must not work under the age of ten years, or during school hours, or after 10 o'clock at night. They must be able to read and write. They receive their badges (gratis) in connection with licenses, for which the parents must apply with the children, and for the children's compliance with which the adults are held responsible. A similar law of Massachusetts is in force in Boston. Have the laws of Illinois any such provisions? There is no good measure for the protection of children in laws of Illinois is that which prohibits the employment of other states also. But there are several excellent provisions missing frotn the Illinois laws which could be embodied in them with immense advantage to the children of Illinois, i66 SELECTED ARTICLES To recapitulate briefly: It appears that the laws of Illinois for the protection of children are excelled by those of twenty states, which require their children to attend school to the age of fifteen or sixteen years, while Illinois permits all who can read and write to leave school at the age of fourteen years, merely demanding attendance at night school of those between fourteen and sixteen years who have not yet learned to read and write. They are excelled by those of two states (Colorado and New York) which require pupils both to reach the age of fourteen years and also to complete a certain amount 'of school work before leaving school. They are excelled by those of New York in numerous respects, among which one • is the requirement that children before beginning work shall be de- clared by a physician of the local board of health to be of normal stature of a child of fourteen years and in good health; and another is that requirement, which has been on the statute books of New York since 1893, that children, before beginning work, be able to read and write. The number of children at work in Illinois grows by leaps and bounds. The demand for children's work presses un- ceasingly as the improvement of machinery renders the children available and the increasing immigration furnishes them by thousands to meet the demand. To pause in the process of improving the laws for the protection of the chil- dren means the growth of illiteracy and child-labor. To gain upon these evils, new and progressive measures must be adopted year after year, as rapidly as public opinion can be educated. To be satisfied with less than the best would be unworthy of the third greatest state and the second city in the republic. If, however, Illinois is to rise again from the fifteenth to the lost sixth place in the scale of the states, as shown in the census of 1890-1900; and, still more if Illinois is to acquire that which she has never yet possessed, namely, standing in the front rank of the states which take enlightened care of their children, it will be necessary to avoid all vainglorious boasting and face the facts as they are, realizing that a large CHILD LABOR 167 task awaits the legislature. For it will be necessary to enact comprehensive measures, covering the following twelve im- portant points: 1. A required amount of the work in the curriculum of the public schools to be covered by all the children, either in the public schools or in private schools, or in some other manner (in institutions or at home), preferably the work of the first eight years, as in Colorado. 2. Required school attendance to the age of sixteen years, except for children exempted after compliance with the fore- going school requirement. 3. A physician's examination of all the children at the time of beginning work, and the filing of a signed statement of a physician of the local board of health that at the time of the examination the child is of the normal stature of a child of fourteen years and in good health. 4. School physicians, with powers much enlarged beyond those of the present medical visitors of the Chicago schools. 5. School nurses provided by the local board of health. 6. Special classes in the schools on a large scale, not only for the deaf and crippled as now, but for all the recently im- migrated children over the age of ten years, and for the pupils who are subnormal, but not idiotic. 7. Play centers under the charge of the local board of education. 8. Branch libraries in the public school, to reinforce the school work in the English language. 9. Regulation of the street occupations for children under the age of sixteen years, prohibiting the employment of girls. 10. The Pennsylvania prohibition of the employment of boys under the age of sixteen years underground in mines. 11. The Colorado law enforcing adult responsibility for the delinquency of children under the age of sixteen years'. 12. The admission to the electorate of the womeh of the state, in order that the mothers, the teachers, and the rest of the women interested in children may help with the enactment and the enforcement of laws for the welfare of the children. i68 SELECTED ARTICLES Annals of the American Academy. 25: 459-66. May, 1905. Test of Effective Child-Labor Legislation. Owen R. Lovejoy. Effective legislation may be tested by either of two stand- ards: the ideal or the practical. It is not ideally effective un- less it adequately protects childhood from the various forces which either blindly or selfishly prey upon its birthrights. The proprietor of a large glass-blowing establishment recently stated with frankness the adaptability of children to this busi- ness and naively added: '"The work takes a little fellow that's nimble and can handle himself." As long as we perrnit this industry or any other to take "the little fellow" for its own interest, regardless of his higher value to himself and to society, we are far from applying this standard of effectiveness. Hold- ing this as the ultimate aim we must approach it practically. From this second viewpoint legislation is effective if it carries within itself the possibility of enforcement, however low or high its standard may be. It is sometimes supposed that low standards as to age, physical fitness, educational effi- ciency, and laxness as to the number of hours children may be employed, are standards that can be maintained without difficulty. Investigation proves, however, that the tendency to transgress is stronger against low than against high standards. In Rhode Island, where a twelve year age limit is legal for work in the mills, and school children of twelve may be granted a certificate to labor upon the recommendation of the over- seer of the poor, it would seem that a standard so low would invite universal obedience. On the other hand it is found that there are townships in which no effort is made to enforce even this minimum requirement, and children ten and eleven years of age are found in the mills, while of the twelve year old children only a few appear ever to have heard of such an article as an age or schooling certificate. In Pennsylvania, where the only educational test is of the ability to read and write simple sentences in the English language, many communities are to be found in which numbers of entirely illiterate children are employed, the intellectual standard being so low as to invite CHILD LABOR 169 a contemptuous indifference to it by those authorized to apply its provisions. Legislation, to be effective, must express the collective will of the people. I might call it the "composite" will of the people, for it must be neither the idealistic opinion of the re- former, nor the opinion of a self-centered commercialism. In these days of betrayed legislation it is difficult to determine whether the statute laws are really the voice of the people. If they are, and still are hopelessly inadequate for the pro- tection of childhood it is useless to immediately attempt ad- vanced legislation. The only remedy is to enlighten and edu- cate public opinion to a proper appreciation of child values. But if the legislation is found to be lower than the plane of pubHc opinion, then it must be changed in conformity with that opinion and w'ith certain well-defined principles, A comparison of two townships in the same state, under the same laws, showed that while in one township the law was almost entirely ignored and children were sacrificed by a corn- bination of parental ignorance and industrial greed, in the other township both parents and employers joined with the school authorities in maintaining a standard quite above the legal requirements and, although the age limit for factories is twelve years, and the maximum age for compulsory school attendance is thirteen, with special exceptions for a lower age, the chil- dren of the community regarded fourteen years as the minimum age to leave school and enter the factory, and but few children under that age were to be found in the several large textile mills of the township. A few of the principles to be recognized in testing legisla- tion are the following: I. Legislation regulating child labor must harmonize with other legislation affecting the same class in society. The aim is not just to keep the children from working, but to produce intelligent citizens. To this end we must legislate in harmony with the school laws. The school law is as much a matter of concern as a child labor law itself. It is child legislation we are seeking. An effective statute will then provide authority 170 SELECTED ARTICLES for the investigation of all children within the limits of school age. Because of loose construction the duty of the truant officer is often interpreted as limited to the investigation oi truancy on the part of children already on the school roll. This leaves an enormous body of children unaccounted for. The superintendent of schools in one Rhode Island township affirms that there are in that township 1.168 children of school age of whom there is absolutely no official record and no way of accounting for them, while the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee is responsible for the statement that "in Philadelphia alone there are, after deducting those physically unable to at- tend school, 16,100 children between the ages of eight and thir- teen out of school," and it is not unlikely that a thorough investigation would prove similar conditions in other of our large cities. These armies of children may be in the factories, they may be on the street; they fall through between the tru- ant officer and the factory inspector because of this lack of harmony and completeness in the laws. To be effective, legis- lation must take account of all the child life in the community. Also in the educational requirement for labor the standard should agree with the school law. Because of the influx of foreign population the war is beginning to wage hotly over the English qualification. From the standpoint of American citi- zenship I think I am right in saying that the surest way to make a compulsory educational qualification ineffective is to substitute the words "any language" for the words "English language." as is at the present time seriously proposed in one of our Northern States. Not only should these laws harmonize in order to be effective, but there is required the most complete harmony be- tween local child labor committees and the educational forces, or the best legislation will fail. II. Effective legislation will be based on industrial, rather than geographical boundaries. Where the same industries under similar conditions prevail, the difficulty of securing adequate legal protection in one state is increased if in a neighboring state a lower standard is maintained. The fact is clearly proven CHILD LABOR i/i by a field study of the glass industry in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio and the pan-handle of West Virginia. Ohio has a fourteen year age limit for the employment of children, Pennsylvania a thirteen year limit, West Virginia a twelve year limit. Ohio prohibits the employment of children under sixteen at night, Pennsylvania permits the employment at night of children of thirteen, while West Virginia permits children twelve years old to work at night. The effect of such a situation is that the manufacturer in Western Pennsylvania, when approached on the subject of the restriction of night labor for children, replies with a threat to move over into West Virginia if such a law is enacted, thus frightening legislators into inactivity, while in Eastern Ohio, along the boundary line, which is thickly dotted with glass factories children are confessedly employed at twelve and thirteen years of age at night upon the plea that the industry cannot compete with West Virginia and Pennslyvania if the law were rigidly enforced. The unity of the entire ''Pittsburg District," including Eastern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania and Northern West Virginia, in commercial and industrial interests, suggests the necessity of such legislation governing child labor as shall recognize this similarity of conditions, rather than the arbitrary division of state boundaries. The present high standard of legislation on child labor cannot be made effective or be maintained in Ohio unless West Virginia adopts a higher standard than the present, and Pennsylvania takes an advanced step toward the restriction of night labor. in. The law must provide adequate machinery and agencies for its enforcement. The law regulating the employment of news- boys in New York City has failed through two defects to estab- lish the purposes of these who advocated better legislation for these little street merchants. The standard is too low, permitting boys of ten years of age to earn their livelihood on the streets, because the public can hardly be expected to take a lively interest in the enforcement of a law for the protection of chil- dren nine years of age, which offers no protection to those of ten! But where the standard is highter the law still fails at 172 SELECTED ARTICLES the point of method of enforcement. Un-imiformed school officials should be empowered to carry out the provisions of this statute and an appropriation sufficient to warrant the employment of a large force of such officers should be readily granted. The uniformed policemen, already burdened by duties popularly regarded as more appropriate to the strength and disposition of a quasi-military force, are hardly to be expected to arrest ten-year-old newsboys and drag them to the police station for the crime of selling newspapers under age. Even if they were so disposed, those of us who remember the days of boyhood are aware that a small urchin can detect the approach of a stalwart policeman at as great a distance as the policeman can see the boy. In states providing that certificates of age and educational attainments may be granted by notaries public it has been found frequently true that such officials, having no interest in the matter beyond the collection of the pittance allowed for the clerical work, h^ve reduced the law to a formality, issuing certificates to any who applied regardless of the facts, and cases are on record in which the notary was actually incompe- tent to determine whether the applicant was able to read and write simple sentences in the English language. The law must also provide for sufficient tenure of office and sufficient remuneration for those appointed to enforce its provisions. It need not surprise us to find that truant officers whose duties call them to cover a territory of thirty or forty square miles, with a population of above 25,000, and who are paid a salary of $200 a year, are not uniformly the most competent people in the community, or those to whom the sacred office of monitor to childhood should be committed. IV. Legislation should definitely prohibit not only the employment of young children but their permission to work. The name of every person working on the premises, whether that person is officially employed or is simply "permitted or suffered to work," should appear on the roll of the firm or corporation. Otherwise factory inspection is a farce. In states failing to make this definite prohibition little CHILD LABOR 173 children, sometimes pitifully young, have been found in the mills and factories working as helpers of older members of the family. They are not technically employed, the employer has no official knowledge of their presence in his factory, they receive no wages and are not counted among the workers, but the fruits of the toil of these infants appear in the wages of the mother or sister, and their little fingers are thus early niade bread winners for the family. V. The responsibility of duties in respect to the law must be made to rest upon the strongest members of society rather than upon the weakest. Laws which would otherwise prove effective are vitiated by the failure to recognize this simple principle. The law in Pennsylvania provides that no child under sixteen can be employed unless he presents a certificate sworn to by his parent that he is thirteen years of age or over, but no proof is required from the parent to substantiate the affirmation or oath. The law thus construqted invites perjury. In many localities the parents concerned are those whose own experience is utterly devoid of knowledge of the value of an English education or an American standard of living, whose conception of the value of a child is measured by his present earning capacity. To issue an age certificate to a child, based on the unsupported oath of such a parent is to subject that parent to a temptation which falls heaviest upon the weakest and which increases in direct proportion to the parent's in- capacity to withstand it. And, finally, we shall perhaps best understand the close rela- tion our problem bears to other of our great social problems by a consideration of some of the alleged reasons for employing young children, and which help to render legislation ineflfective. The excuse most frequently met is the plea for the "poor widow" who will be left without support if her little boy and girl are taken from the factory or store. In every community '^hc is found, and the advocates of her cause are both numerous and powerful. Men of commanding position in the community, as business men and as philanthropists, openly avow the justice of the employment of children of tender years, in labor 174 SELECTED ARTICLES that dwarfs the body and stifles intellectual growth, because the poor widow would suffer for bread if they were to be emancipated. The plea is a plausible one, but the facts do not justify its claim. Only a small proportion of those whose little children are employed at hard labor are ''poor widows," and for these we dare believe society can better afford to make adequate and honorable provision, recognizing their service to the community in the care of their own young, rather than that the young, the only real wealth the community can boast, should be made a meat offering to the hunger of the parent. Let us forever put to shame this brazen slave-master of child- hood which poses as philanthropy by showing that whatever the sacrifice, the children of our generation shall not be made the means of livelihood to any member of the community. Let us publish the revised version of the offerings dedicated to our modern temple of industrial prosperity, and as we sit over against the treasury and see the great and the wealthy cast in their stocks and gold and machinery, let us not fail to see the poor widow who comes, misguided it may be by the industrial superstitions of her day, and casts her two little children into the roaring temple of industry. As they fall, fall beyond re- covery, well may we exclaim, as did the Master at that other temple, "I tell you she has cast in more than they all, for they of their abundance have cast in, but she of her want hath cast in all that she had, even her very life!" Proper and systematic methods of relief will prevent the loss of a child's future value to society for the sake of the paltry ninety-three cents a week, the wages actually found to be paid to young children to-day in some of our prosperous northern mills. . Another excuse is that expressed by one glass manufacturer who affirms that he employs young children partly for the purpose of teaching them a trade. The establishment of public trade schools will take away this excuse and will furnish a con- structive program of the largest possibilities. The best way to make legislation effective is through the children themsdves. They want to go to work. They prefer the factory to the school. There is a sense of personal independence in the young child who can look upon himself as an economic factor in the life CHILD LABOR 175 of the family. We must so develop our educational system, not through detention schools, not through penal institutions; but through the regular public channels of education, as to feed this practical instinct and cause the child to feel that the training he receives is practical, that he is really gaining that which will advance him materially faster than the same time spent in shop or factory. A little boy met at daylight a few weeks ago as he came out into the frosty morning from one of our New England factories, was asked if he preferred the factory to the school. *'Sure," was his quick reply; "de school ain't no good; dey only learn you to write pictures, dat's all; dat's all dey ever learnt me!" He was earning $1.10 a week for ten hours a day, two days in the week, and loafing the other days. He left school from the first grade and was entirely illiterate. I do not m^an to suggest that his criticism was just, for he was too limited in experience to be competent for expert judgment, but confessedly to "learn" a boy "to write pictures" when he had passed to his thirteenth year and is large enough to have an economic value in a mill, leaves some- thing to be desired. Nor do I mean that we should limit our schools to technical training, but that we should provide at least enough to establish the connection in the child's mind between education and industrial productivity. This summary of the varied causes of the ineffectiveness of legislation, gathered from the experience of a field study of the problem, is intended only to point the path to that ideal standard of legislation suggested at the first — an expression of collective will of the people so high in principle and so per- fectly adapted to realize itself in fact that it shall accomplish the adequate protection of all children. Annals of the American Academy. 29: 115-24. January, 1907. Child Labor and the Nation. Albert J. Beveridge. The purpose of this republic is to make a better type of manhood and womanhood. The reason for free institutions is that they develop nobler human characters than any other institutions develop. The meaning of a democratic form of 176 SELECTED ARTICLES government is to make people happier and better, and to make life more worth the living. The glory of this Nation is not in the exhaustless fertility of our far flung valleys and plains; not in the amazing wealth of o'\t mines of coal, and iron, and copper and gold; not in our tremendous aggregation of riches; not in our vast network of railways; not in our astounding commerce and trade. All these are splendid; but these are not the chief sources of our pride. No, the supreme glory of the American people is a pure, clean, independent citizenship — a type of manhood and womanhood, sound of body, clear of mind, stout of heart, aspiring of soul. And to become such a human being as that is the absolute right of every boy and girl under our flag, and any system which prevents any American boy or girl from realizing that ideal is a crime against humanity and treason against liberty itself. And yet, such a system is in operation this very night. This very night this crime against humanity and free institutions is be- ing committed. As I speak to you, thousands and thousands of little children are at work in cotton mills, in glass factories, in the sweat shop, and, every day, on the breakers of the mines. Their bones are not yet hardened, their muscles still are water, their brains are still the brains of mfants. They are in that period which should be the period of the first beginning of their growth, the period when the whole foundation of their life's de- velopment should be laid. And yet, the very materials for that foundation are being for- ever shattered. Their normal growth is being stopped, their bones made crooked, their backs bent with the stoop of age, their minds stunted, their characters malformed. Weak nerved, vicious souled, they are being made degenerate by a system of greed, as foolish as it is wicked. For a child to work upon the farm is a good thing if he is not forced to labor beyond his strength. I would even go so far, although many might object to it, as to say, as our honorable President once put it — advocate the teaching of children to work properly as a part of their education. But the child labor which I denounce is the child destroying labor of the factory, the sweat shop and the mines. CHILD LABOR I77 This maiming of the bodies of the American children goes forward. This murder of infant characters and souls is being committed, this perversion of citizenship is being done to-night; and in committing their offense against God and man, an even greater crime is committed against free institutions themselves. For child labor is daily pouring into the mass of American citizenship streams of social and political poison which will be felt for ill in this Republic as the decades pass. As these children reach what should be the conditions of maturity, if they have not already been put in their graves, they become unthinking enemies of society — irreclaimable enemies, because the injury that has been done to them can never be undone, nor this cost repaid. When they grow up and compare themselves with other young men and women, they clearly see, and even more keenly feel, that they are inferior — inferior in body, inferior in mind, inferior in soul, not inferior naturally, but made inferior by the slavery of their infancy. They feel that they have been robbed, not robbed of money, not robbed of property ; but robbed of intellect, health, character, of life itself. And so they become, all over the land, living engines of wrath against human society itself. When the lords of gold tremble for the safety of their widespread invest- ments, let them remember that child labor is daily creating an element in this republic more dangerous to their physical prop- erty itself than ever was packed in dynamiters' bombs. This danger is not only manifest in incendiary fires, and all the manifestations with which we are so familiar, but it will soon manifest itself in votes to the destruction of the very purposes and reason for which this government of free and equal men was founded. I think I understand personally exactly how these young men and women who, as Dr. Adler said, had been exhausted in their youth, feel when they attain manhood. I myself began physical labor earlier than twelve, hard labor — too hard for any child of eighteen or nineteen. But after all, that was in the open air, in the field, beautiful with the waving banners of the corn, and fragrant with the smells of the brown earth, upturned by the ploughshare; it was on the grades of railways with great, gross, rough, but vital and kindly men about me, it was in the logging 178 SELECTED ARTICLES camps, with the majesty of the woods about me. It was bitter work; it was too heavy for any child, but, after all, over me by day always was the marvelous blue of God's splendid dome or the glory of his clouds, or over me by night the eternal stars kept their sentinel watch and always there was the pure and unpolluted atmosphere to breathe, and through it all, now and then, was the uplifting influence of religion, and finally a college, and then all those influences of the true and the beautiful and the good in life. And yet, in spite of all that, I do not like to think of the years from twelve to nineteen, because it makes me bitter. But sup- pose my work had not been in the open air? Suppose it had been in the cotton mills of Georgia, or the sweat shops of New York, or the glass factories of West Virginia, or on the breakers of the mines of Pennsylvania? Suppose I had been forced to breathe the poison and had acquired the low vices and habits which always result from such physical and nervous degeneracy. Even if, as it is, a senseless and unreasoning resentment begins to burn in my breast, what would have been my condition of mind if I had lived the life that the child slaves of America are living to-night? Our papers contain much resentment if one anarchist is found among our European immigrants. Yet, we are at work creating the same sort. And this not the worst; for these young men and young women, who as children are overworked, through their veins running the poison of an unthinking hatred, become the fathers and mothers of degenerate children. These go to work at the same system that made their parents incapable of having perfect children, made them the ancestors of a race of degenerates. These are the facts. This is the truth, and I say to you to-night, as I have been saying all over this country for the last three months, that this making of possible anarchists and degenerates in America has got to be stopped. We cannot leave it to the states to stop it. They cannot stop it if they would, and they would not stop it if they could. In the states, for example, where this social disease is most violent, the great manufacturing and mining interests are so powerful that they prevent the passage of any thorough or eff"ective state law. CHILD LABOR 179 or they do what is a great deal worse, secure the passage of a mutilated law, leading the people to think that their legislature has done all they could, and still the evil goes on. And often, in these states, when a good law is passed, these same interests re- main still so powerful with the Executive Department that the law is not executed, and the evil goes on. Even if one state or a dozen states were to pass excellent laws and thoroughly enforce them, not much would be accomplished, because the evil would exist in other states, and still go on. And even if in one, or a dozen states, good laws were still executed, the business man in the good state would be at a disadvantage to the business man in the bad state, because the latter could employ cheap child la- bor, and the business man in the good state could not employ cheap child labor. .And so. by this system of trying to end a national evil by segregated legislation, the very quality of the .A.merican citizen is destroyed. Here, I think, is the generalization which decides what the state should do and what the Nation must do. It is this, when an evil is a national evil, it must be cured by a national remedy. Where the evil is purely local — where it is confined to one state and no other — that state might possibly be left to cure it. For example, if child labor existed in no place in the United States except in Ohio, then we might, perhaps, consider the question of leaving to Ohio herself the curing of this evil. But if child labor is scattered all over the land, if some states are clear of it, and others are foul with it, then it becomes a subject for the com- bined intelligence and massed morality of American people to handle. And even if every state in the Union but two or three were to remedy the evil effectually, still those two or three states would be pouring streams of bad citizens into the whole Nation, and the whole Nation would be affected by them, because every citizen is a citizen, not of one state only, but the Nation as a whole. And so we see clearly that this matter cannot be left to the states to handle, first, because they cannot act uniformly, and do not — never have on any subject, not on any subject. Second, they cannot act effectively, even if they were so disposed. Third, where one state acts well, and another state acts ill, the business i8o SELECTED ARTICLES man in the latter state has the advantage of the business man in the former state. And finally, if there is only one state where the infamous practice is carried on, it is still daily pouring pol- lution into the whole body of American citizenship. I have heard it said the past week in conversation on the floor of the senate — it is something I am rather familiar with, after seven years down there — "Let us not be in a hurry about this thing." Let us be in a hurry to pass a currency bill, and in a hurry pass something of that kind, but let the children go. They say, "Well, after a while, in time, the states will all have a uni- form law, uniformly executed, by uniformly good, safe and honest governors." Well, if such an impossible day should ever come, we know that it would be a generation from now ; and in the meantime, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Ameri- can children would go on ; in the meantime, the character and souls of hundreds of thousands of American children would be ruined ; in the meantime, other hundreds of thousands of Ameri- can children would be forever degenerate — made into engines of wrath, and the parents of still other hundreds of thousands engines of wrath. Shall this infamy go on? Shall this undermining of the very foundations of free institutions be permitted just to please some well-meaning theorists on the one hand, and some selfish dema- gogues and millionaires already over-rich with unrighteous wealth on the other hand? Shall the slaughter of the innocents and recruiting of this swelling army of degenerates continue while we endlessly debate, in Congress and elsewhere, the wis- dom of curing a national infamy by a national law? Why, what is this Republic for? What are free institutions for? Why did we ever establish this Nation of liberty? What does the flag mean? What do all these things mean, if they do not mean the making of a splendid race of clean, strong, happy, noble, exalted charactered men and women. The life of one American child, the making of one American citizen is worth one hundred years of academic discussion about the danger of the American people curing national evils through national gov- ernment. We hear it said that we are going too far in the curing of national evils by national laws. But isn't the contrary true? CHILD LABOR i8i Have we not been straining the other theory in preventing and delaying the nation from remedying the evils of the nation? Why should the barrier of the states be interposed in the national reform of the national evil of child labor? To be sure, that same barrier was raised against the meat inspection bill, but the aroused conscience of the American people swept it away. To be sure, it was raised against the pure food bill, but the American people said that the health and lives of them- selves, their wives and their children were more important than some theory which did not eflfect them. Last session we passed unanimously the national quarantine law. Its purpose was to protect the ports of our Gulf states, and our Pacific states, from yellow fever and bubonic plague. It was an absolute, unqualified and admitted denial of the rights of those states. For one hundred years each one of them had had its own quarantine laws. And yet, from the very beginning, the practical human folly of it was seen, because if yellow fever is kept out of the ports of one state and let in through the ports of another state, it affects the people of both states and the whole republic, for yellow fever is no respecter of state lines. Yellow fever crosses the boundaries of state without stopping, just as the telegraph and the railroad, and our agencies of good cross state lines without stopping. Very well, if the theory of state rights was yielded by the states that most insisted upon them in order to pass the quarantine law designed to prevent yellow fever which kills possibly twenty people in twenty years, cannot it also yield to the national child labor law to stop that crime which kills and ruins hundreds of thousands of American chil- dren every year? At the great meeting of the Young Men's Christian Associa- tion for Western Ohio and Eastern Indiana, held at Richmond, Indiana, a few weeks ago, I formally gave notice that at the beginning of the present session, I would introduce a bill which would cut the heart out of this evil from ocean to ocean, and that, having introduced it, I would fight this session and the next ses- sion, and every other session so long as I was in public life until it was passed. I say to you to-night that I have redeemed that pledge. I have introduced that bill, and I repeat to you that I i82 SELECTED ARTICLES shall fight for it this session as I fought for the meat inspection and pure food bills last season, and will fight the next session, and the session after, if its enemies can for so long delay it, until it shall be passed. It is a very simple bill, a very brief bill. It provides that the carriers of interstate commerce, the railroads and the steamboat lines, shall not transport the products of any factory or mine that employes or permits the labor of children under fourteen years of age. It provides for any officer of a factory or mine, who violates that act, the punishment of a money fine and a sentence in the penitentiary. I spoke about the difference between this and the meat bill, and I will confess that I drew them on different theories. I will try to make it clear to you why, although it is a complicated legal question. As a matter of fact, the constitution, which was made for the people and not for the lawyers, is a very simple in- strument. And upon that point I wish to say that the American people were not made for the constitution ; the constitution was made for the American people. It is our servant; we are not its servants. The difference between the meat inspection bill and this bill is just this, the meat bill goes directly to the evil and says to the packing houses in Illinois, "If your products are intended for interstate commerce, if you are preparing them to ship into another state, that is enough, railroad or no rail- road, you must submit to the inspection of these products and the sanitation of these factories by the agents of the American people's national government." I at first thought of drawing this bill on these lines, and saying, "Be it enacted, that no factory or mine whose products are intended for interstate commerce shall employ children under fourteen years of age," and then providing a fine and penalty. I did not do it. I will frankly say here, in confidence among ourselves — there are only about four thousand of us here and I am sure what I say will not get out — for tactical reasons : first, because it takes hard work to get any of these bills through — we never would have gotten the meat inspection bill through in the world but for that mighty storm of wrath which the revealed facts aroused from ocean to ocean, from CHILD LABOR 183 Mexico to the Dominion, and even as it was, they pulled nearly all the teeth out of the bill— we got all back but two— and we almost gained those two when we finally passed the bill. I did not follow the strict analogy of the meat bill in the child labor bill, first because a plausible though not valid constitu- tional argument could be made against such a bill as that. Second, because I feared that the great factory interests of the south, New Jersey and of Maine, the great mining interests everywhere, would all combine together and join the great packing interests, and they would not only defeat this bill, but possibly overthrow the meat bill, too. It will be a hard struggle with the individual interests alone, and I do not particularly care to tackle them in combination with all the other trusts there are in the country at the same time. The other day in the senate somebody said, "I wonder" — and then looked very profound — "whether the men who drew the interstate commerce clause of the American Constitution ever contemplated any such thing as we are doing?" Why certainly they did not. Read the debates on the interstate commerce clause in the national convention, one hundred and twenty-five years after they were made. I remember Mr. Pinckney, one of the ablest men, said, in discussing this clause, "The interstate com- merce clause was designed so that one state would not override the other." He said, "The interests of New England are and always will be rum and fish." He said, "The interests of the Southern states are and always will' be cotton and indigo ; the great agricultural centers of the country are and always will be New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and New York is the only one that is a manufacturing center that will be affected by free trade." It was under such debates as that that the interst^e commerce clause of the American Constitution was formed. But I have always believed that every one of the saving clauses in that instrument, just as I believed that everything else that "has occurred in American history was directed from above. And when I have thought about that interstate commerce clause — how it enables the people, who are one people with one flag, to deal with each other, I have felt how true were the words of i84 SELECTED ARTICLES Emerson in that immortal poem, "The Problem," and how true it was when applied to the interstate commerce clause: The hand that rounded Peter's dome, That crowns the hills of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not- free, He builded better than he knew. So this bill, which proposed in a national way to stop this national evil, is so drawn that its entire constitutionality is freely admitted by its foes. It is so simple and effective that both its friends and enemies alike concede that it will stop the evil in every great factory and mine throughout the entire republic. It is resisted upon the following grounds: First, that perhaps, as a matter of policy, we are going a little too fast and too far in the expansion of national power to the curing of national evils Second, it is said that the evils of child labor are greatly overdrawn, and as one member of the house the other day said, "This is, after all, only a storm blown up by some of those re- formers;" and, third, it is a mighty good thing for the child to have it work. Now these are the three arguments that are made against this bill. These are the points you will see discussed in the newspapers. These are what you will sec in the reports of the debates in Congress. In Washington all the public men are for every reform of every evil — "if it exists," they say. They want to be sure that it "exists," you know. Many of the worst enemies of reform are apparently for it, but earnestly against any effective method of handling it. One of the most effective ways of defeating any great reform meas- ure is for its enemies to divide the real friends of the reform into different groups, each earnestly contending as to which is the best of several different methods of curing the evil. It was the favorite tactics of the great Napoleon on the battlefield to so maneuver as to get the armies of the enemy separated into smaller armies, and then subsequently attacking them and de- feating them successively. But the legislative Napoleons do bet- ter than that. They not only get the real friends of the reform divided into little groups, each sincerely attached to a different method of effecting the reform, but they so maneuver as to get these groups of real friends of the reform contending among CHILD LABOR 185 each other, wasting time, and energy, and strength, instead of uniting for a common cause against a common enemy and achiev- ing a common triumph. And wherever the enemies of a reform have got its friends in that condition their victory is assured. My friends, the time has come when we have got to get right down to earnest business in this great cause. We have got to appeal to the intelligence, the hearts, the morality of the Ameri- can people. We have got to arouse and marshal public opinion upon this measure, and when you make such an appeal to the American people they will not fail us, for they never have failed to respond to such an appeal. And when the American people make their will known to Congress, Congress will act. There is just one thing that will unfailingly move the Ameri- can senate, and that is the concentrated and crystallized will of the American people spoken in terms that will not be denied. Oh! these American people — that they shall be increasingly the mightiest power for righteousness and human helpfulness in this world, is the passion of my life. Let us all do what we can to help make thern so. We glory in the men of Concord and Valley Forge, and we justly glory in them. Let us then be worthy of their deeds and their memories, and cast from our Nation the body of this death to which it is bound. Only so shall our flag be unsullied; only so shall we indeed be "a people whose god is the Lord;" and only so shall this "government of the people, for the people and by the people" not perish from the earth. Annals of the American Academy. 31: Sup. 56-8. May, 1908. What Constitutes Effective Child Labor Laws. Effective legislation dealing with child labor involves many differing elements including the child, the parent, the employer, the officials charged with the duty of enforcing the statutes, and finally the community which enacts laws, provides schools for the children- when they are prohibited from working, supports and authorizes officers for the enforcement of the laws, pre- scribes penalties for their violation, assists dependent families in which the children are below the legal age for work. In the i86 SELECTED ARTICLES long run, the effectiveness of the law depends upon the con- science of the community as a whole far more than upon the parent and the employer acting together. With the foregoing reservations and qualifications duly em- phasized, the following summaries are believed to outline the substance of the effective legislation which it seems reasonable to try to secure before the close of the year 1910. They deal only with provisions for the child as a child, taking for granted the provisions for fire-escapes, safeguards for machines, toilet facili- ties and all those things which the child shares with the adult worker. An effective child labor law rests primarily upon certain def- inite prohibitions among which are the following: Labor is Prohibited (i) for all children under the age of fourteen years, (2) for all children under sixteen years of age who do not measure sixty inches and weigh eighty pounds,* (3) for all children under sixteen years of age who cannot read fluently and write legibly simple sentences in the English language, and have not completed the curriculum of the first eight years of the public schools, (4) for all children under the age of sixteen years, between the hours of 5 p. m. and 8. a. m., or longer than eight hours in any twenty-four hours, or longer than forty-eight hours in any week, (5) for all children under the age of sixteen years in specified occupations dangerous to life, limb, health or morals. The Child Effective legislation requires that before going to work the child satisfy a competent officer appointed for the purpose, that it (i) is fourteen years of age, and (2) is in good health, and (3) measures at least sixty inches and weighs eighty pounds, and * This measure is not now specified in any statute though it is implied in the statutes of several states. CHILD LABOR 187 (4) is able to read fluently and write legibly simple sentences in the English language, and (5) has attended school a full school year during the twelve months next preceding going to work. The Parent Effective child-labor legislation requires that the parent (i) keep the child in school to the age of fourteen years and longer if the child has not completed its required school work, and (2) take oath as to the exact age of the child before letting it begin to work, and (3) substantiate the oath by producing a transcript of the official record of the birth of the child, or the record of its baptism, or some other religious record of the time of the birth of the child, and must (4) produce the record of the child's school attendance, signed by the principal of the school which the child last attended. The Employer Effective child-labor legislation requires that the employer before letting the child begin to work, (i) obtain and place on file ready for official inspection papers showing (a) the place and date of birth of the child substantiated by (b) the oath of the parent corroborated by (c) a transcript of the official register of births, or by a transcript of the record of baptism, or other religious record of the birth of the child, and by (d) the school record signed by the principal of the school which the child last attended, and by (e) the statement of the officer of the Board of Education or the Board of Health designated for the purpose, that he has approved the papers and examined the child. (2) After permitting the child to begin to work, the employer is required to produce the foregoing papers on demand of the school-attendance officer, the health officer and the factory inspectors. i88 SELECTED ARTICLES (3) In case the child cease to work, the employer must restore to the child the papers enumerated above. (4) During the time that the child is at work, the employer must provide suitable seats, and permit their use so far as the nature of the work allows; and must (5) post and keep posted in a conspicuous place, the hours for beginning work in the morning, and for stopping work in the middle of the day; the hours for resuming work and for stopping at the close of the day; and all work done at any time not specified in such posted notice constitutes a violation of the law. The total number of hours must not exceed eight in any one day or forty-eight in one week. The Officials Effective legislation for the protection of children requires that the officials entrusted with the duty of enforcing it (i) give their whole time, not less than eight hours of every working day, to the performance of their duties, making night inspections when ever this may be necessary to in- sure that children are not working during the prohibited hours; and (2) treat all employers alike, irrespective of political con- siderations of race, religion or power in a community ; (3) prosecute all violations of the law ; (4) publish annual reports full, clear and printed promptly for general use and as a basis for legislation. The quarter- ly bulletin issued by some states is a valuable register of efficiency and means of education for the public. The School The best child labor law is a compulsory education law covering forty weeks of the year and requiring consecutive attendance of all the children to the age of fourteen years, and until sixteen years, unless they have meanwhile completed a specified portion of the curriculum, as preferably eight years. It is never certain that children are not at work, if they are out of school. In order to keep the children, however, it is not enough to compel attendance — the school must be modified and adapted to the needs of the recent immigrants in the North and CHILD LABOR 189 of the poor whites in the South, affording instruction which ap- peals to the parents as worth having, in lieu of the wages which the children are forbidden to earn, and appeals to the children as interesting and attractive. No child labor legislation can be regarded as effective which does not deal with these facts. The vacation school and camp promise reinforcement of the child labor laws, which are now seriously weakened by the fact that the long vacation leaves idle upon the streets children whom employers covet by reason of the low price of their labor, while parents, greedy for the children's earnings and anxious lest the children suffer from the life of the streets, eagerly seek work for them. Nothing could be worse for the physique of the school child than being compelled to work during the summer; and the development of the vacation school and vacation camp alone seems to promise a satisfactory solution of the problem of the vacation of the city child of the working class. The Community Effective child labor legislation places upon the community many duties, among which are (i) maintaining officials — men and women — school-attendance officers, health officers, and factory inspectors, all of whom need (a) salary and traveling expenses, (b) access at all reasonable times to the places where children are employed, (c) Dower to prosecute all violations of the statutes affect- ing "working children, (d) tenure of office so effectively assured that they need not fear removal from office in consequence of prose- cuting powerful offenders; (2) imposing penalties so reasonable in relation to the nature of the offense and the ability of the offender as to appeal to the sense of justice of officers concerned and make the work of enforcement not unduly difficult; (3) maintaining schools in which to educate the children who are prohibited from working; (4) maintaining vital statistics, especially birth records, such that the real age of native children may be readily as- certained ; 190 SELECTED ARTICLES (5) maintaining provision for the adequate relief of depen- dent families in which the children are not yet of legal age for beginning work. More important, however, than the enactment of the foregoing provisions is the maintenance in the community of a persistent, lively interest in the enforcement of the child labor statutes. Without such interest, judges do not enforce penalties against offending parents and employers; inspectors become discouraged and demoralized; or faithful officers are removed because they have no organized backing, while some group of powerful indus- tries clamors that the law is injuring its interest. Well-meaning employers grow careless, infractions become the rule and work- ingmen form the habit of thinking that laws inimical to their interest are enforced, while those framed in their interest are broken with impunity. Upon parents there presses incessant poverty, urging them to seek opportunities for wage-earning, even for the youngest chil- dren; and upon the employers presses incessant competition, urging them to reduce the pay-roll by all means, fair and foul. No law enforces itself ; and no officials can enforce a law which depends upon them alone. It is only when they are consciously the agents of the will of the people that they can make the law really protect the children effectively. Annals of the American Academy. 31: Sup. 59-62. May, 1908. Standard Child Labor Law. The best provisions of the law of Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin have been included in the Standard Child Labor Law which follows: Be it Enacted, etc., as follows: Sec. I. No child under fourteen years of age shall be em- ployed, permitted or suffered to work in, or in connection with, any factory, workshop, mercantile establishment, store, busi- ness office, telegraph or telephone office, restaurant, bakery, hotel, apartment house or in the distribution or transmission of merchandise or messages. It shall be unlawful for any CHILD LABOR 191 person, firm or corporation to employ any child under four- teen years of age in any business or service whatever, during any part of the term during which the public schools of the district in which the child resides are in session. Sec. 2. No child between fourteen and sixteen years of age shall be employed, permitted or suffered to work in any factory, workshop or mercantile establishment unless the person or corporation employing him procures and keeps on file and accessible to the truant oflficers of the town or city, and to the inspectors of factories, an employment certificate as hereinafter prescribed, and keeps two complete lists of all such children employed therein, one on file and one conspicuously posted near the principal entrance of the building in which such children are employed. On termination of the employment of a child so registered, and whose certificate is so filed, such certificate shall be forthwith sur- rendered by the employer to the child or its parent or guardian or custodian. The inspector of factories may make demand on an employer in whose factory a child apparently under the age of sixteen years is employed or permitted or suffered to work, and whose employment certificate is not then filed as required by this article, that such employer shall either furnish him within ten days, evidence satisfactory to him that such child is in fact over sixteen years of age, or shall cease to employ or permit or suffer such child to work in such factory. The inspector of factories may require from such employer the same evidence of age of such child as is required on the issuance of an employment certificate; and the employer furnishing such evidence shall not be re- quired to furnish any further evidence of the age of the child. In case such employer shall fail to produce and deliver to the inspector of factories within ten days after such demand such evidence of age herein required by him, and shall thereafter continue to employ such child or permit or suffer such child to work in such factory, proof of the giving of such notice and of such failure to produce and file such evidence shall be prima facie evidence in any prosecution 192 SELECTED ARTICLES brought for a violation of this article that, such child is under sixteen years of age and is unlawfully employed. Sec. 3. An employment certificate shall be approved only by the superintendent of schools or by a person authorized by him in writing, or, where there is no superintendent of schools, by a person authorized by the school committee; provided that no member of a school committee or other person authorized as aforesaid shall have authority to ap- prove such certificate for any child then in or about to enter his own employment, or the employment of a firm or corporation of which he is a member, officer or employee. . Sec. 4. The person authorized to issue employment certif- icate shall not issue such certificate until he has received, examined, approved and filed the following papers duly executed: (i) The school record of such child properly filled out and signed as provided in this article. (2) A pass- port or duly attested transcript of the certificate of birth or baptism or other religious record, showing the date and place of birth of such child. A duly attested transcript of the birth certificate filed according to law with a registrar of vital statistics, or other officer charged with the duty of recording births, shall be conclusive evidence of the age of such child. (3) The affidavit of the parent or guardian or custodian of a child, which shall be required, however, only in case such last mentioned transcript of the certificate of birth be not produced and filed, showing the place and date of birth of such child; which affidavit must be taken before the officer issuing the employment certificate, who is hereby au- thorized and required to administer such oath, and who shall not demand or receive a fee therefor. Such employment certif- icate shall not be issued until such child further has per- sonally appeared before and been examined by the officer issuing the certificate, and until such officer shall, after making such examination, sign and file in his office a state- ment that the child can read and legibly write simple sen- tences in the English language and that in his opinion the child is fourteen years of age or upwards and has reached CHILD LABOR 193 the normal development of child of its age, and is in sound health and is physically able to perform the work which it intends to do. In doubful cases such physical fitness shall be determined by a medical officer of the board or depart- ment of health. Every such employment certificate shall be signed, in the presence of the officer issuing the same, by the child in whose name it is issued. Sec. 5. Such certificate shall state the date and place of birth of the child, and describe the color of the hair and eyes, the height and weight and any distinguishing facial marks of such child, and that the papers required by the preceding section have been duly examined, approved and filed and that the child named in such certificate has appeared before the officer signing the certificate and been examined. Sec. 6. The school record required by this article shall be signed by the principal or chief executive officer of the school which such child has attended and shall be 'furnished, on demand, to a child entitled thereto. It shall contain a statement certifying that the child has regularly attended the public schools or schools equivalent thereto or parochial schools for not less than one hundred and sixty days during the school year previous to his arriving at the age of fourteen years or during the year previous to applying for such school record and is able to read and write simple sentences in the English language, and has received during such period in- struction in reading, spelling, writing, English grammar and geography and is familiar with the fundamental operations of arithmetic up to and including fractions. Such school record shall also give the age and residence of the child as shown on the records of the school and the name of its parent or guardian or custodian. Sec. 7. The local board of education or the school com- mittee of a city, village or town, shall transmit, between the first and tenth day of each month, to the office of the factory inspector, a list of the names of the children to whom certifi- cates have been issued. Sec. 8. No boy under the age of sixteen years and no girl under the age of eighteen years shall be employed, suffered or per- 194 SELECTED ARTICLES mitted to work at any gainful occupation more than forty- eight hours in any one week, nor more than eight hours in any one day; or before the hour of seven o'clock in the morning or after the hour of five o'clock in the evening. Any child working in or in connection with any of the aforesaid establishments, or in the distribution or trans- mission of merchandise or messages, who refuses to give to the inspector his or her name, age and place of residence, shall be forthwith conducted by the inspector to the office of the judge of the juvenile or probate court for examination. Every employer shall post in a conspicuous place in every room where such minors are employed a printed notice stating the hours required of them each day of the week, the hours of commencing and stopping work and the hours when the time or times allowed for dinner or for other meals begin and end. The printed form of such notice shall be furnished by the State Inspector of Factories, and the em- ployment of any minor for longer time in any day so stated shall be deemed a violation of this section. Sec. 9. Whoever employs -a child under sixteen years of age, and whoever having under his control a child under such age permits such child to be employed in violation of sections one, two, or eight of this act, shall, for such offense, be fined not more than fifty dollars; and whoever continues to employ any child in violation of either of said sections of this act after being notified by a truant officer or an inspector of factories thereof, shall for every day thereafter that such em- ployment continues, be fined not less than five nor more than twenty dollars. A failure to produce to a truant officer or inspector of factories any employment certificate or list required by this act shall be prima facie evidence of the illegal employment of any person whose employment certif- icate is not produced or whose name is not so listed. Any corporation or employer retaining employment certificates in violation of section five of this act shall be fined ten dollars. Every person authorized to sign the certificate prescribed by section five of this act who knowingly certifies to any CHILD LABOR 195 materially false statement therein shall be fined not more than fifty dollars. Sec. 10. Truant officers may visit the factories, workshops and mercantile establishments in their several towns and cities and ascertain whether any minors are employed therein contrary to the provisions of this act, and they shall report any cases of such illegal employment to the school committee and to the inspector of factories. Inspectors of factories and truant officers may require that the employment certificates and lists provided for in this act, of minors employed in such factories, v^orkshops or mercantile establishments, shall be produced for their inspection. Complaints for offenses under this act shall be brought by inspectors of factories. Sec, II. No child under the age of sixteen years shall be employed, permitted or suffered to work at any of the following occupations: Sewing machine belts, in any work- shop or factory or assisting in sewing machine belts in any workshop or factory in any capacity whatever; adjusting any belt to any machinery; oiling, or assisting in oiling, wiping or cleaning machinery; operating, or assisting in operating, circular or band saws, wood-shapers, wood-jointers planers, sand-paper or wood-polishing machinery; picker machine, or machines used in picking wool, cotton, hair or any upholster- ing material ; paper-lacing machines, leather-burnishing ma- chines, burnishing machines in any tannery or leather manufact- ory; job or cylinder printing presses operated by power other than foot ; emery or polishing wheels used for polishing metal ; wood-turning or boring machinery ; stamping machines used in sheet metal and tinware manufacturing; stamping machines in washer and nut factories; corrugating rolls, such as are used in roofing and washboard factories; steam boilers, steam machinery, or other steam generating apparatus; dough brakes or cracker machinery of any description; wire or iron straightening machinery; rolling mill machinery, punches or shears; washing, grinding or mixing mills; calender rolls in rubber manufacturing; laundering machinery; passenger or freight elevators; nor in any capacity in preparing any com- 196 CHILD LABOR position in which dangerous or poisonous acids are used; manufacture of paints, colors or white lead; dipping, dyeing or packing matches; manufacturing, packing, or storing powder, dynamite, nitro-glycerine, compounds, fuses or other explosives; manufacture of goods for immoral purposes; nor in any tobacco warehouse, cigar or other factory where tobacco is manufactured or prepared; nor as pin-boys in bowling alleys; nor in or about any distillery, brewery, or any other establishment where malt or alcholic liquors are manufactured, packed, wrapped or bottled; nor in any hotel, theater, concert hall, drug store, saloon, or place, of amuse- ment wherein intoxicating liquors are sold; nor in any other employment that may be considered dangerous to their lives and limbs, or where their health may be injured or morals depraved; nor shall females under the age of sixteen years be employed in any capacity where such employment compels them to remain standing constantly. mCt /IXpjt^ 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. JAN 1 g 19gS 8 ^ REC'D LD J A N 7'66-8AH IWHHH9K Mi iW Mf 08'97 JUN O^igofi LD 21A-60w-10.'65 (F7763sl0)476B General library University of California Berkeley LIBRARY U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES CDSflDlDE^^