Note 34 — Chapter VII · THE THIRD SCHOOL1 AND THE SOCIALISTS.

The chapter that concerns us next treats of the subsidiary businesses engaged in by school children. It goes without saying that in the cases where the wages of the father of the family must be increased by the labor of the mother, the children also must be put to work at an age at which they ought to have their leisure time for play. For though child-labor in factories is a little limited by legislation, it is still commonly practiced in household industry. Further most of the children of the proletariat must, in their free hours, do all kinds of work harmful to their physique and their morals. “It is plain to be seen how greatly the school-children are injured by engaging in additional work. Entirely aside from the harm they suffer in the matter of health, and from the fact that the tired children cannot give sufficient attention to the words of the teacher and that for many of them their instruction is as good as lost, is the great fact that their morals are in the highest degree endangered. Under the pressure of necessity, these children learn to grasp every advantage, whether allowable or not, and—not through their own fault, but through that of society—are precociously familiar with vice.”34 “Any one who examines these conditions will not be surprised that according to the statement of Superintendent Schönberger, out of 100 juvenile prisoners in the Plötzensee prison near Berlin, 70 had been employed during school days as breakfast-carriers, newsboys, messengers, bowling-alley-boys, etc., early in the morning, from half past four on, and in some cases still earlier, until school time, and in the afternoon either the whole time, or from four till half past seven or half past eight at night.”35