Chapter I · THE RIGHT TO CHILDHOOD

It is no part of the aim of this chapter to prove that the right to childhood exists. That right follows from the existence of the Republic and must be guarded in order to guard its life which must perish if it should ever cease to be replenished by generations of patriots, who can be secured on no other terms than the full recognition of the need of long-cherished, carefully nurtured childhood for all the future citizens.

The purpose of this chapter is simply to indicate certain instances in which, the right to childhood having been recognized, an ethical gain has been achieved, and farther gains may be accomplished.

The noblest duty of the Republic is that of self-preservation by so cherishing all its children that they, in turn, may become enlightened self-governing citizens. The children of to-day are potentially the Republic of 1930. As they are cherished and trained, so will it live or languish a generation hence. The care and nurture of childhood is thus a vital concern of the nation. For if children perish in infancy they are obviously lost to the Republic as citizens. If, surviving infancy, children are permitted to deteriorate into criminals, they are bad citizens; if they are left illiterate, if they are overworked and devitalized in body and mind, the Republic suffers the penalty of every offense against childhood.

An unfailing test of the ethical standards of a community is the question, “What citizens are being trained here?”

Where young children die by thousands, the ethical standards of the community are, so far, bad. For science has long shown how to minimize infant mortality. The failure of a community to follow the teachings of science in this direction is a moral dereliction of the gravest character. The death from preventable disease of thousands of young children in the tenement houses of the city of New York, occurring year after year, from generation to generation, stamps the ethical standards of the metropolis as bad beyond belief. For the exposure of infants on the highways of China is not more obvious to the people of China, than the preventable mortality of infants in New York City has for years been obvious to the people of the United States. It is, moreover, one of the incredible things of our civilization that this excessive infant mortality, from generation to generation, is left to local boards of health and to local philanthropies, whose inability to cope with it its persistence has long conspicuously proved.

The legislation of the last few years, intended to secure improved housing for the people of New York City, although it is still wholly inadequate, constitutes one of the fundamental ethical gains of our generation. For it marks the beginning of that social protection of infant life without which the right to childhood is illusory; and for want of which thousands of potential citizens in the great cities have, within the last half century, been lost to the Republic.

It would seem at first glance to be a universally acknowledged right of the human being to receive during the first months of life food, clothing, shelter and nurture without even passive coöperation on its own part beyond swallowing food, wearing clothing and sleeping in a quiet, warm, clean place. Yet within one generation it has been necessary to enforce with fines and imprisonment, statutes and ordinances for the purpose of stopping large numbers of infants less than one year old from being used to contribute to the income of their owners by being exposed in the arms of begging women upon the streets of the great cities. The colder the night and the later the hour, the more overwhelming the appeal to the pity of the passer-by and the greater the pecuniary value to its owner (not by any means always its mother), of such an instrument for securing income.

Before the enactment of the statute which put an end in New York City to this misuse of infants, a belief was current that, if the public should cease to contribute to their support, starvation might be the alternative for both woman and child. But women and infants do not starve in New York. The suppression of this exploitation of infants is a clear gain for the moral sense of the community, not only because the lives and health of the babies are protected, but because a perverted and unwholesome outlet for unreasoning pity is cut off, and a higher form of reasonable care for childhood is substituted therefor.

Following babyhood, the years from the first to the seventh birthday are so far held sacred to sleep, play and rapid growth that most states exempt children during this period from compulsory attendance at school. The belief is generally held, that the strain of school life is excessive for the health and welfare of so many children at this age as to make compulsion of doubtful public benefit.

Young Children working in Tenement Houses.—Yet, in the spring of 1903, a kindergartner in New York City, on missing from her class an Italian brother and sister aged four and five years, and visiting them in their homes, was told by their mother that they could not be spared from their work to go to the kindergarten. They were engaged in wrapping colored paper around pieces of wire, to form the stems of artificial flowers which the family manufactured in their tenement home, the older sisters making the leaves and petals, and the other members of the group forming whole flowers and sprays.

The children were pointed out to the attendance agent who explained that, even under the statute of 1903, the compulsory attendance law exempted the younger child for three years and the older for two, assuming that each would then enter school on reaching the seventh birthday. The factory inspector, when the facts were brought to his attention, observed that the case did not appear to constitute a violation of the factory law, since the children were not receiving wages, and the group at work did not exceed the number authorized under the license to manufacture artificial flowers in their tenement home.

The question then arose whether such employment constituted cruelty under the statutes of New York. The danger attending taking the children and their parents into court upon a charge of cruelty was, that it might be found that this parental exploitation of young children within the home did not technically constitute cruelty in the judicial sense; and such a decision might then be construed by the colony of artificial flower makers as approval of similar employment of small children upon a scale even larger than at present. Or, such employment might be held to constitute cruelty, the children might be removed from the custody of their parents and sent, perhaps at the cost of the city, to one of the subsidized sectarian institutions, and a whole new series of hardships thus caused, not less grave than those already suffered by the children.

Such exploitation of very young children within the family circle is practised whenever manufacture in tenements is tolerated. These children are types of employees in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and all other cities in which tenement dwellings are turned into workshops. This form of domestic overwork of little children can be eliminated by the effective prohibition of manufacture in the tenements (a measure sure to be enacted within a few years in the interest of public health) and in no other way. Until this prohibition is enacted and enforced, there will be, wherever the needle-trades and other industries are carried on in homes, virtually no lowest limit above the age of three years for the employment of children in families. For children can pull out basting threads, sew on buttons, paste boxes and labels, strip tobacco and perform a multitude of simple manipulations as readily as they can learn the kindergarten occupations.

In Boston, the rigorous enforcement of the licensing-laws applied to homework has partially restricted this form of exploitation of young children; and has revealed the interesting fact that the ethical standard of the people of Massachusetts is higher in two important respects than that attained by other manufacturing communities. For the young children are incomparably better protected against domestic overwork by the partial restriction of manufacture in homes; and the officials appointed to watch over tenement-house manufacture are the only ones in the United States who know from ten years of experience that they are in no danger of being removed from office because of faithful performance of their arduous and often dangerous work.

Young Children in Domestic Work.—Far more difficult to reach by statute is the oppression of little girls under the burden of household drudgery at cost of school attendance. The Little Mothers’ Association registers one of the bitter ironies of child life in New York City. The girls whose dreary lives it cheers are under the legal age for working for wages. Many of them attend school just enough to save their parents from the penalties attaching to keeping a truant in the family, but so irregularly that progress with the class is impossible and school life is one long discouragement. For these children, whose exploitation is largely due to sheer parental shiftlessness and selfishness, that new provision must in the long run prove a godsend which now requires a child before beginning to work for wages, to show that it has completed the curriculum of the first five years of the public schools and has, within the last preceding school-year, attended school one hundred and thirty days. This measure places a premium, in the shape of wage-earning capacity at the fourteenth birthday, upon steady progress in school and, therefore, upon regular attendance. When this fact penetrates the minds of the parents, the “little mothers” will doubtless find less opposition at home to their efforts to escape from the baby, the washtub, and the scrubbing brush, and to take refuge in the schoolroom.

The statute thus reënforces parental duty and stays the pressure of drudgery upon defenseless children within the family. Unfortunately, it is too slight and indirect. The “little mothers” need direct help and protection almost as much as the tiny makers of artificial flowers in the tenements. The next step might well be the adoption of an objective standard applied to the child herself. If it were required that a girl must weigh eighty pounds and measure sixty inches in height, the test to be made with scales and measuring rod in the school, besides being able to read fluently and write legibly in the English language, before leaving school, the danger of oppression of little girls within the family circle would be greatly reduced.

No modern community recognizes the old patria potestas, the Roman right of the father to put his child to death. But in the intimate circle of family life there lingers deeply rooted the belief in the right of either parent to exploit childhood for money, or for personal relief from work by the substitution of the child in the performance of domestic tasks. And the public conscience is slower to recognize the need of intervention in this than in any other form of cruelty.

With the statutory prolongation of childhood in the form of child labor laws, there emerges the need of assuring to the children the practical benefit due them with their legal immunity from work. In the Republic, childhood must be sacred to preparation for citizenship. Hence the public schools offer instruction in the interest of the community. But for the children here under discussion, mere offering is not enough. There must be compulsion incarnate in the attendance agent. Through this official the community enters the home, as it enters the workshop, the store and the factory, to enforce upon the adult the child’s claim to this high privilege. There is no longer discussion with the parent as to the advantage to himself accruing from the education of his child. The child’s right has been recognized and made a part of the life of the community.

This process of defending the child, by reason of its future citizenship, from ignorance imposed by the greed or thoughtlessness of parents has, since 1903, gone farther in the State of New York than in any previous year or any other state. For in New York, under the statute of 1903, a child must not only reach the fourteenth birthday and the normal stature of a child of that age (so certified by a special officer of the board of health appointed for the purpose) before beginning work in manufacture or commerce; it must also have been instructed in reading, writing, spelling, English grammar and geography, together with the fundamental operations of arithmetic including fractions, and must show that it can read fluently and write legibly in the English language.

An unforeseen and welcome result of this provision is the immediate discovery on the part of many Italian and Russian immigrant families that it is no longer profitable to import half-grown and illiterate young relatives from Europe; since such young importations now require about two years of steady attendance at school before they can be made pecuniarily profitable to their importers. Thus one of the ugliest growths of the padrone system of immigration is quite incidentally cut off at the root by the statutory protection of children from work while they remain illiterate.

Children in Street Occupations.—Within comparatively few years, little girls offered violets for sale in the streets of New York as they still offer in the streets of many cities flowers, pencils, chewing gum and other small articles. Thoughtless persons encouraged them with gifts as well as purchases, assuming perhaps starvation as the alternative to this ruinous employment. Now, happily, the penal code prohibits under heavy penalty all employment of this kind for girls under the age of sixteen years. In the interest of morals and decency, self-support by street-peddling is forbidden to girls six years longer than newspaper-selling is prohibited to their brothers, although the recent investigation of the New York Child Labor Committee justifies the belief that a similar prohibition, on the same grounds, is no less needed for boys.

Among American cities, Boston, New York and Buffalo are dealing systematically with very young children working as newsboys. In all three cities attempts are made to eliminate newsboys under the age of ten years. Merely to state this would seem to justify the effort and suggest farther restriction. Yet, in 1903, a representative of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children appeared before the Senate committee sitting at Albany, and protested against the enactment of a measure which proposed to go one useful step farther and extend the prohibition of street selling to the twelfth birthday.

In many cities, tiny newsboys may be seen on the streets at any hour of the day or night. Wherever the subject has not been closed by a prohibitive statute, that perverted reasoning is still widely accepted which assumes, quite without foundation for the assumption, a widowed mother or a disabled father for every such diminutive worker, and unhesitatingly places the burden of the decrepit adult’s maintenance upon the slender shoulders of the child. Over against the prevalence of this unfounded assumption, the sweeping prohibition of street work for children under the age of ten years registers a distinct ethical gain. It restores the burden of support in early childhood to the parents or to the community where it properly belongs.

A case arising in New York City under the “newsboy law” illustrates the point. A child was arrested charged with offering to sell papers without wearing the badge required by law. He was nine years and six months old. On the following day several newspapers printed headlines of which the following is typical: “Tiny Breadwinner arrested for Selling Papers.” Investigation showed the father to have deserted his family, the mother to have become insane, and the three children to have fallen into the direst need. Thanks to the “newsboy law,” immediate attention was drawn to them, the mother was taken to a hospital, the children were provided with homes, and the search for the absent father was begun. Without the law, what would have befallen the family? And what would be the ethical standard of a community which allowed the support of a family consisting of an insane woman, a child younger than himself, and an infant, to devolve upon a boy of nine years?

For more than one generation, it has been almost invariably assumed that there must be little newsboys, and that they must be objects of charity. The two facts, that they are regarded with surprise and disapproval by European visitors who investigate our educational theories and practise, and that the street trades uniformly contribute a wholly undue share to the population of our reformatories and industrial, truant and parental schools, have been ignored.

There have been newsboys’ homes, lodging-houses, banks, and clubs; newsboys’ picnics, public dinners, treats and even, from time to time, a theatrical performance for newsboys. The simple device of prohibiting the work of tiny children and making the privilege of selling papers on the streets, out of school hours, depend upon the good behavior and regular attendance of the candidate at school, registers a marked gain in reasonable kindness of the communities which have entered upon this humane course of action.

The boys in New York, Boston and Buffalo, who wear badges, indicating their right to sell papers, are now school boys authorized by their parents and the board of education to work, out of school hours, until ten o’clock at night. Every one of them is vouched for by a parent or guardian whose name and address is known to the board of education. There are no waifs or strays among them. They are not legitimate objects of pity or of charity. They are school boys in good standing. Just in proportion as the newsboy law is enforced, can a cheerful answer safely be given concerning them to the question, “What kind of citizens are being trained here?”

In these three cities, the next step will doubtless be taken in the direction of raising the age for beginning work to twelve years and restricting the working day to the hours between seven in the morning and seven at night. Ten o’clock at night is too late for children under the age of fourteen years to be at work upon the streets, and the law of Illinois demonstrates that seven o’clock is a feasible limit for the work of children under sixteen years in manufacture and commerce. Surely it is not too narrow a limit for children under fourteen working in the streets.

Telegraph and Messenger Boys.—A similar gain is greatly to be coveted for the telegraph and messenger boys who share with the newsboys the life of the streets and who have long been surrounded by the same sort of glamour in the public mind. Carrying messages, like selling papers, has seemed to the employing companies and to the thoughtless public to be “boys’ work,” as distinguished from men’s work, because boys can do it, and because they can be obtained more cheaply than men.

The test of the work, however, should be not whether boys can do it, but what it does to boys. Many occupations are injurious to children almost in proportion as they seem, from the commercial point of view, fitted to the abilities of children. To twist colored paper around pieces of wire in the manufacture of artificial flowers is within the power of a child of four years. And the labor of such children can be obtained virtually gratis by the employer under the system of manufacture in tenement-houses. This portion of the work seems, therefore, to the employer to be properly “children’s work” not “women’s work.” But to be kept steadily at work at that simple manipulation is ruinous for the body and mind of a young child, and, in the interest of the children viewed as future citizens, is to be utterly condemned and prohibited. In the same way, a girl of ten years can carry a baby in her arms, scrub a floor, and wash plain garments quite clean. But the girl who does nothing, all day long, day after day, but hold a heavy baby and carry it up and down stairs in a tenement-house; or who habitually lifts baskets of clothing, or kneels on a damp floor, gets off easily if she escapes lifelong curvature of the spine, or serious internal disorder, or tuberculosis, that blight of the working children.

So the very out-of-door variety and facility of the work of the messenger contributes to make the work unfit for young lads, almost in proportion as their youth, spryness and readiness to work for small wages make them appear to the employing company and the uncritical observer especially adapted to the occupation.

Granted that one messenger or telegraph boy in a great city may have risen to a post of responsibility just as one newsboy in a thousand may have risen to distinction or to fortune, the public mind has been far too ready to assume the carrière ouverte aux talents for all these children; and sadly slow to perceive the truth which the juvenile courts are now revealing, that like the newsboys the messenger boys have long furnished a large contingent to the population of the truant-schools, the parental schools, and the reformatories.

Every judge of a juvenile court, at an early stage of his experience with delinquent boys, becomes impressed with the unfitness of work upon the streets as messengers and telegraph deliverers, for children. A judge told the writer that one-third of all the delinquent boys brought before him had, at one time or another, served the public as messenger boys. He regarded this as the most injurious, from the point of view of morals, of all the occupations open to children. Every reformatory institution which keeps adequate records of the previous history of the boys committed to its care, can shed a flood of light upon the demoralization of lads due to this service upon the streets.

The attention of the writer was first drawn to the injurious character of this occupation for young boys by the experience of a lad who was taken into service as a messenger in the morning and was sent, at noon, to the post-office with $170 to buy stamps for a great mail-order establishment. Intoxicated by the possession of a sum greater than he had seen in all his life with its meager supplies of money, the boy showed the notes to another lad upon the street, who suggested that instead of going to the post-office, the messenger should go to the races. Together they spent the afternoon betting at the race-tracks. The following morning the messenger passed from the ranks of the working children, in which he had been enrolled for one ruinous day, to those of the juvenile criminals recorded in the county jail.

The temptation involved in handling precious possessions not his own besets the messenger boy throughout his career. And the contact with disreputable people is not confined to chance acquaintances upon the streets, but inheres in the work itself, thousands of messages to such persons of both sexes being delivered every year by young lads who are constantly sent, in the way of business, to places of the existence of which more fortunate children are carefully kept in ignorance. The judge who presides over a justly famous juvenile court told the writer that in his opinion two-thirds of the messages delivered after eight o’clock at night in his city were carried by children to places of bad character.⁠[1] According to the penal code of New York messenger boys may be sent to the door of places to which no other child can be sent without involving the sender in the danger of criminal prosecution. Surely cynicism can go no farther than this!

All the circumstances attending the work of telegraph and messenger service render it especially unfit for young, growing boys. The irregular hours, and the still more irregular meals, picked up in the intervals of message serving and consisting commonly of bread or cake with the vilest coffee, contribute to sapped vitality and broken health. Such meals foster the craving which seems universal among workers upon the streets, for cigarettes and liquor. The incessant temptation to overcharge is in turn enhanced by the longing for these stimulants. The temptation to purloin money and to overcharge makes thieves of hundreds of children. The ease with which overcharges may be collected and the relative safety from detection sap the habit of honesty in nearly all messenger boys. The writer has had wide experience of working boys and has never known a messenger who did not, sooner or later, succumb to the temptation to overcharge. How completely a matter of course it is in the minds of the children, was shown by a boy who came to the head of a settlement in New York to ask her, in all simplicity, to help in getting him restored to the Lower East Side, whence he had been recently transferred to a district of offices in Broadway, where everyone, even the office boy, knows the tariff of charges for delivering messages. Among the women of the foreign colonies he had been able to overcharge at discretion. After being transferred, these illicit gains were cut off and he felt himself aggrieved by the reduction of his receipts, and set promptly and frankly about securing his restoration to the field of his former dishonesties, which it never occurred to him either to conceal or deny.

It is one of the ironies of our treatment of our future citizens that all the disadvantages of the messenger service are intensified at the Christmas holiday season. Work is brisker, inexperienced children are taken on, bundles are larger and heavier and correspondingly more wearisome to carry than at other times. Or they may be smaller, more precious and, therefore, more tempting to purloin. Waiting at the doors of dwellings is trying in the cold of Christmas days; servants are apt to be slow because of the unusual demands upon them; the contrast between the comfort, perhaps the splendor, of the interiors seen by glimpses and the meager surroundings and celebration at home—all these things make the Christmas experiences of the messenger boys bitter rather than cheering. On the other hand, people in general are inclined to be more confiding than usual; overcharging is easier, the fear of detection is even remoter than at other seasons.

All the foregoing disadvantages attach to the night service with even greater force than to the work by day. After 7 P. M. the work of the messenger service and telegraph delivery is peculiarly unfit for children and should be performed by men, never by minors; least of all by boys between the ages of ten and sixteen years. Yet it is these young lads who constitute the rank and file of the service at the present time; many of them only nominally fourteen years old while really much younger.

One evening, as the writer was leaving home to go to the railway station to take a midnight train, a boy eleven years of age brought a telegram for a member of the family announcing the successful performance of a surgical operation upon a relative in a distant city. As the boy’s route to the office involved passing the station, the writer suggested walking together. In the course of the conversation the boy said: “She didn’t take on at all about her message, that woman didn’t. The last message I carried was to a laundry and the girl was the cashier. When she seen her message she fell clean off the stool on the floor in a fit. Her mother was dead and no previous notice.” He referred to himself as one of the “death-message squad” and explained that between 11 P. M. and 5 A. M. the messages sent out from the office in which he was employed were chiefly “death-messages” and “come immediatelies.” On reaching the station, just before midnight, this child of eleven years said good-night and continued his walk across the Chicago River to one of the worst and most notorious regions of the Levee in which the office was conveniently located.

The stirring opportunities afforded by the life of the streets for boys at the age of the keenest thirst for adventure, together with the absence of personal oversight, conspire to lure the messengers to commit minor offenses. All these considerations taken together have effectually convinced students of the child-labor problem that the messenger and telegraph delivery service rank among the boy destroying occupations. Yet one telegraph company in the United States is probably the largest single employer of boys in the world, having had on its pay-roll in New York City alone, in 1902, 6,000 boys in order to keep its daily working force at 2,000 boys.

Let us assume that, in spite of all its disadvantages, some rare boy survived a long term of employment in the telegraph and messenger service and emerged with digestion unhurt by irregular meals and coffee drinking; nerves sound in spite of lost sleep and cigarette-smoking; character untainted by evil companionship and the overwhelming temptation to dishonesty. What has such a boy to show for the years he has spent in delivering messages? He has no trade, no craft, no skill of any kind, no discipline of mind or body to fit him for rising in any direction. The irregularity of his work has unfitted him for any sustained effort when he has passed the age for accepting children’s wages. One of the problems of the settlements is to find work for boys who have outgrown the messenger’s uniform. The lads have learned nothing which is of any value to them. There is no versatility in them which might make them desirable employees in the hobble-de-hoy age. Their eagerness to make a record of speed and promptness has all oozed away. They are no longer dazzled at the prospect of earning $4.00 a week. They know most exactly the purchasing power of the wages they are likely to receive, and balancing the fatigue and exertion against the pay, they simply sit still and wait for something to turn up, rather better pleased if nothing can be found for them to do. Not every boy is morally ruined by this work; but the earlier he enters upon it, and the longer he remains in it, the greater the probability of his ruin.

Every consideration adverse to the employment of boys as messengers holds with added weight against the employment of girls. On grounds of health the exposure to all sorts of weather is even worse for girls than for boys. Carrying heavy packages is most injurious for girls, and this is one of the purposes for which messengers are frequently called. Exposure to contact with all sorts of people is, if possible, worse for girls than for boys, and most undesirable for both. From the point of view of health and morals the employment of boys is sufficiently bad; and in the opinion of those who are best qualified to judge, should be discouraged in favor of the employment of men.

It is reported that President Eliot once notified the Harvard Square office of the Western Union Telegraph Company that the rule of the college must be observed which forbids women without escort to visit the dormitories. The occasion of this notice was the experiment which this company had been making in several places, Cambridge among the number, with employing girls instead of boys as messengers. As most of the business of the Harvard Square office is done with students, the experiment at that point was immediately abandoned. Everywhere, the consumer can do what President Eliot is reported to have done, namely, make the conditions upon which the companies can retain the patronage and custom essential to their business. To do this, however, the customers must act in large numbers. It is because President Eliot speaks for hundreds of patrons that his decision is final for the company. It rests with the friends of the children to urge upon the general public the feasibility of selecting the kind of messengers to be employed. Certain business offices in New York City are already doing this. They have notified the local messenger service that small boys will not be accepted, messages and packages will not be entrusted to them. To these customers, the companies send only large boys. In the same way, persons who telephone calls for messengers, can, by taking thought, stipulate for a large boy. It is particularly important to do this at night.

When a sufficient number of persons register public opinion in this and other practical ways, the tiny messenger boys will disappear from the streets of the cities as the infants misused for begging purposes, the shivering little girls offering violets for sale, and the baby newsboys, have vanished from the streets of New York City. Legislation was required to banish each one of these groups of little victims of the streets, and before legislation could be enacted, and enforced, public opinion had to be educated. The future citizen most in need of vigorous enforcement of existing statutes and of strenuous public and private protest against his present way of life, is the little messenger boy. On no one does the denial of the right to childhood act more cruelly than upon him.

Hitherto, only initial steps have been taken in the direction of legislation. Ohio prohibits the employment of boys under sixteen years of age, and of girls under eighteen, after 7 P. M. But the law is not, in general, well enforced, and the writer has seen young boys and has heard upon trustworthy authority of young girls being employed, in that state, late at night. Illinois prohibits the employment of boys and girls alike after the hour of 7 P. M. In New York State the enforcement of the law for the protection of the messenger and telegraph boys is, unfortunately, left to the local boards of health, and the statute is, therefore, largely nugatory.

With the effort to secure better statutory protection of the children, there should be a general movement for the employment of men in these capacities. Why should telegrams, messages and packages be entrusted to persons of less efficiency than the letter carriers employed by the government of the United States? Letters are usually less urgent than telegrams, less valuable than packages. Why, then, should the public consent to be worse served in the delivery of telegrams, messages and packages than of letters? Even in the delivery of letters, children are sometimes employed by the United States post-offices, indirectly through contracts with the messenger companies, which send out pitifully small boys at all hours of the night to carry letters bearing special delivery stamps. It is a perverse practise which here also entrusts the especially urgent letter to a bearer of less than the ordinary trustworthiness, a practise against which the liveliest protest might well be made wherever it occurs.

Wherever there is a one-armed man out of employment who possesses the other qualifications for the messenger service now ordinarily offered by children, the advantage to the community derivable from giving the opportunity for a livelihood to such an unfortunate is so obvious that it would doubtless be admitted by everyone. The need here, however, goes much farther than this, embracing the employment of sound men as well as of one-armed men, in the interest incidentally of the efficient service of the community, but primarily in the interest of the children, the future citizens whom the Republic cannot permit to be sacrificed in the performance of tasks intrinsically unfit for childhood.

Children in Retail Trade.—Boys who enter upon employment in retail trade at the age of fourteen years, are at the foot of the ladder of commerce upon which some of them will rise to competence and success. In New York such boys must have attended school one hundred and thirty days during the last preceding school year, must have received instruction in reading, writing, spelling, geography and English grammar. They must be familiar with the fundamental operations of arithmetic, including fractions. They must not only prove themselves fourteen years of age by producing a birth or baptismal certificate, but must be of the normal development of children of that age and in good health, in the opinion of the examiner of the board of health, who issues the certificates without which they cannot be legally employed. Their working day is limited to nine hours and must be arranged to end not later than ten o’clock at night. Boys who meet these requirements but have not yet completed the work of the first eight grades of the public school, must attend night-school six hours a week during sixteen weeks each year until the sixteenth birthday, unless the curriculum is meanwhile completed.

This is believed to be the most enlightened statute yet enacted for the protection of boys entering upon employment in commerce; and so far as the issuance of certificates is concerned, it has been administered conscientiously and effectively. During the months of October and November, 1903, approximately 2,000 children who applied to the board of health of New York City for certificates were refused them, either because they could not prove that they were fourteen years of age, or because they did not meet the educational requirements. Unfortunately, there is as yet no appropriation made by the city for the salaries of mercantile inspectors to enforce the law by following the children into the stores frequently and regularly. Since, however, the names and addresses of the children, with the statement whether or not papers have been issued, are forwarded by the board of health to the school officials, the lack of mercantile inspectors is in part compensated for by the search made by the school authorities for children thus shown to be out of school.

It is probable that there is a close connection between the unusually high wages paid to children in retail trade in New York and the restrictions upon their work, both being in excess of the wages and restrictions common elsewhere. Children of the grade of intelligence here described are worth better pay than younger, more ignorant children; and when they meet all the requirements of the law and have their papers in order, they are at a certain slight premium compared with children of the same age in communities where the workers are left subject to the unrestricted competition of younger children.

On the other hand, such restrictive legislation tends to stimulate the use of systems of mechanical cash-carrying; for the higher wages of the protected children are worth saving. This is clear gain for the merchant, the children and the community; for the work of cash-children is the least desirable of all the phases of retail trade. The act of carrying cash is in itself a gross temptation, sharply accented by the suddenness of the child’s transition from the meager possessions of the tenement-house family life to the bewildering richness of a great store. The amounts pilfered by children are usually so trivial that it is rarely thought worth while for the employer to prosecute the offender. A child who has been guilty of petty thieving is usually dismissed and replaced by another. But in the life of the tenements and the stores nothing is hidden; and on the following day all his associates know what has happened and the brand of the thief is upon the offender. Every reduction in the number of children required for the performance of this work is, therefore, a gain for the morals of the working children.

The best measures yet enacted for the protection of girls in retail trade are wholly inadequate. The law above described as applying to boys in New York applies to girls also, except that girls are not required to attend night school. But this is not enough. In the interest of the public health and morals there is quite as good ground for prohibiting the employment of girls under the age of sixteen years in retail trade as in peddling in the streets. Girls cannot be kept in the close air of stores eight or more hours a day, without suffering a loss of that vitality which it is one of their most important functions during the years between ten and sixteen to store up for the uses of motherhood later on. The disadvantages arising from confinement in close air increase in proportion as growing girls are kept standing, or are subjected to crowding and excitement.

Girls are, of course, subjected to exactly the same temptations to pilfering as boys. Moreover, they are more at the mercy of the men under whose direction they work. An immoral floorwalker or head of a department possesses appalling power for evil over the lives of the girls who are subject to his direction. The public at large enjoys the freedom of every city store; and the position of little girls offering violets to all passers on the streets, is essentially not very different from that of the young employees in retail trade. There is also enforced association with older employees who may or may not be of good character, and the readiness of girls at the most impressionable age to adopt the tone of the more striking among their older associates. Finally, there is for young girls none of the steadying influence that arises for boys out of the prospect of moving upward in the line of promotion. For girls the work which they perform before the sixteenth birthday is usually a makeshift for the sake of the immediate weekly wage which they earn at quite as great risk to their future as the messenger boys. On behalf of the girls under the age of sixteen years employed in retail trade only the most adverse reply can be given to the question, “What kind of citizens are being trained here?”

Meanwhile, pending the enactment of a measure which shall place retail trade in the same category as street peddling for girls under the age of sixteen years, the shortening of the hours of work by the statutes of 1903 in New York and Illinois marks a substantial gain.

So far as they are enforced, they will make an end of such spectacular cruelty as the writer witnessed, in December, 1902, a few weeks before their enactment. Returning late at night from the long rehearsal of the Musical Arts Society, at Carnegie Hall, some ten days before Christmas, and forced to wait for a car at Broadway and Grand street, she found there at eleven o’clock a dozen little girls, between ten and fourteen years of age. They proved to be neighbors and eagerly poured forth the story of their day. They had reported for work at 7:30 in the morning, the stores opening at eight o’clock. They had had scant time for luncheon, and worked again until supper time. Then, in one store they were given ten cents each and in another store a meal ticket. Several meal tickets proved worthless because there was nothing left to eat at the late hour at which the children were allowed to stop working. After supper, all had worked again until ten o’clock when they had been sent home. After waiting half an hour for a car, it was proposed to walk home together; but one little girl sat down on the curb stone, crying and saying that she could not walk, if she never reached home. The others stayed with her in the cold of December with midnight approaching, little victims of the cruelty that, year after year, travesties the Christmas season.

A boy well known to the writer described as follows his experience of the shortened working-hours: “I fill a bin with packages, ready for the driver to put on his wagon. I begin at seven and work all day. A wagon goes out at eight in the evening. Then I fill my bin for the driver to put in his wagon, ready for the morning, the first trip. I stay by the bin until ten, waiting for the last parcels bought just before closing time to come down to me. When the store closes at six, the last of these come down by ten. Then I can go home. When the store used to be open until eight I went home at midnight. When it was open until ten, I went home at two in the morning. But when I am ready to go home, the little gatherers come around, gathering up paper, string, broken toys, and all the rubbish that accumulates on the floor in the holiday rush. When the gatherers have finished, the scrubbers come along and clean the floors, and the gatherers generally go home about the same time as the scrubbers, two hours later than I go home.”

Henceforth, no child under the age of sixteen years can be legally employed after ten o’clock at night in New York or after seven o’clock in Chicago. The change for the children employed in the retail stores in Chicago, to be derived from this new statute, is illustrated by another winter-night observation of the writer made some years ago when returning from the Auditorium after the usual Christmas rendering of the Messiah. The oratorio had been long, there had been delays, and it was nearly eleven o’clock when the cars turned the corner at Adams street to go west and then southward. There were the usual grip-car and two trailers of the cable-train then used on the streets of Chicago. All were quite empty when they stopped. When they started again, all were crowded with children and half-grown girls from the great department stores. Many of the children could not get inside the cars, but stood huddled on the platforms and the grip-car, exposed to the falling snow after their long day in the overheated air of the stores. Some of the little girls fell asleep, others clung to straps, laughing or crying hysterically. All had gone to work in the early morning; all expected to return to work—some at seven o’clock the next morning, others at eight.

The writer and her companion were the only adult passengers, and when they left the car the weary children continued their journey with only the gripman and conductor. Some of them would go to the end of the car-route, and then stumble wearily through deep snow in the winter midnight far across the prairie to their homes.

Children in Manufacture.—The presence of children in mills began with the division of labor, and the development of machinery driven by steam. It was a feature of the civilization of the nineteenth century, but reached no large dimensions in the United States before 1870. Since then it has increased and continues to increase wherever no counter order is given by restraining laws rendered effective by alert and organized public opinion.

It has been shown that the end of childhood and the beginning of toil is an undetermined epoch. Even where, as in New York and Illinois, manufacture and commerce are closed to children under the age of fourteen years, street-life, tenement-work and the drudgery of the “little-mothers” may occupy the earlier years. In less enlightened states, manufacture and commerce are open to children at an earlier age, until in Georgia⁠[2] there is no statutory protection.

As to the age at which children may begin to work in manufacture, the evolution of the public conscience may be observed at every stage, from the utter absence, as in Georgia, of all statutory care even for children aged five, six and seven years, to the highest point yet achieved of carefully cherished childhood under the statutes of New York and Illinois.

In 1903, the legislature of Georgia met twice and at each session refused after long deliberation to enact a statute restricting the employment of children in cotton mills. There is, therefore, no limit below which children may not be employed if manufacturers can make use of them. The writer has seen children at work in a Georgia mill who were pitifully stunted if they were eight years old. There is, in Georgia, no restriction upon the hours of work, and usage calls for eleven hours in twenty-four. It was, therefore, due merely to the good will of their employer, that these little boys and girls were not required to form part of a shift of workers at night. Georgia, by these repeated votes of her legislature in 1903, has taken a stand ethically lower than that of England in 1802, when Sir Robert Peel’s act was adopted; although industrially Georgia is one of the most modern of states if tested by the purely material standard of the equipment of her mills.

The same Georgia legislature of 1903 which refused to prohibit the work of children less than ten years of age, enacted a law declaring any man a misdemeanant who permits his young children to work in a mill while refusing work which may be offered him. Cases arising under this law, however, seem already to have demonstrated its futility as a measure for the protection of the children. For the fathers arraigned under it found no difficulty in proving that they occasionally did some casual work, enough to exempt them from all penalties.

Thus Georgia ranks with Oklahoma in placing no restriction upon the exploitation of children. Oklahoma, however, has no manufacture and little commerce; while the cotton mills of Georgia are doubling their spindles with bewildering rapidity, and new villages grow up along the line of the Southern Railway almost between spring and autumn.

South Carolina has adopted a curious compromise according to which children under the age of eleven years were not to be employed after May 1st, 1904, and children under the age of twelve years not after May 1st, 1905. There are such exemptions in favor of widows, whose children may work on reaching the tenth birthday, as may reasonably be expected to induce many wives of worthless husbands to pose as widows among the shifting populations of the mill-villages.

Alabama prohibits the employment of children in cotton mills before the twelfth birthday (always with the exception of orphans and the children of widows) and restricts work at night expressly to those children who have reached the age of thirteen years. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth birthdays both boys and girls may legally work eight hours at night.

Similar laws, but without the restriction upon night work, are in force in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Missouri. Louisiana prohibits the employment of girls in mills before the fourteenth birthday, but permits boys to work at the age of twelve years. Texas prohibits the employment of illiterate children under the age of fourteen years; those who can read and write may work at twelve, both boys and girls.

The practical value of all these laws to the children and to the community is slight because there are neither inspectors to enforce them, nor schools to receive the children if they were effectively banished from the mills. The chief worth of the statutes is that they register the growing conviction of the community that children must receive some modicum of protection.

For the children they are not wholly valueless, because when a measure for the safeguarding of childhood is enacted, certain employers obey it simply because it is there, irrespective of penalties and inspectors. Less scrupulous employers also obey it in many cases because they are advised by counsel that they will be liable to the child’s family in heavier damages in case of accident to a child employed illegally, such employment constituting in itself negligence on the part of the employer, while a child under the legal age for employment may be held by a court to be incapable of contributory negligence. In still other cases, accident insurance companies decline to insure children employed in violation of the law. Hence a body of usage begins to form as soon as a child labor law is enacted; and in the long run, only the ignorant and the viciously contumacious have to be brought to obedience by the prosecuting and enforcing authorities.

From this point of view these recent statutes of Alabama, North and South Carolina, Texas and Virginia are to be regarded as cheering ethical gains; for they mark a change in the public conscience with regard to the sacredness of childhood and promise a continuous process of education of parents and employers such as has taken place in several Northern states during the past thirty years and is still going forward.

History repeats itself in the exemptions embraced in the new Southern laws. It was as recently as 1903 that New Jersey and Wisconsin repealed provisions authorizing the employment of orphan or indigent children earlier than other children. Wisconsin had formerly placed the invidious task of granting permission for such children to work upon the county judge, and New Jersey upon the factory inspector. Judges are but indifferent investigators of indigence, and rely in these cases upon the opinion of the factory inspector, who is thus distracted from his legitimate duty of inspecting factories to inspect family relations and poverty. In Kentucky this evil provision still exists, but public opinion is so thoroughly aroused in favor of abolishing it, that repeal in the near future seems inevitable. Under the exemptions embraced in the new Southern child labor laws, the tendency for every child deserted by its father, and for every illegitimate child who would be a cost to the community, to be accounted an orphan and, therefore, liable to exploitation in a cotton mill, may reasonably be expected to manifest itself.

At the opposite end of the scale of morals and enlightenment from the action of Georgia, is the recent history of legislation in Illinois, which exhibits an interestingly rapid gain in recognition of the claim of childhood to immunity from responsibility of an industrial and financial nature. Before 1885, the industrial demand for the labor of children existed in that state only to a limited degree. Children were available for the street trades, the retail stores, offices, etc., but manufacture was of a character offering little opportunity for the use of children’s labor. Textile industries were almost unknown and only the glass-bottle trade found boys indispensable. In 1894, the first full year in which the inspections were made under the state factory law of 1893, there were found at work in the factories and workshops, 8,130 children under the age of sixteen years. In 1895, the number rose to 8,624. In 1897, the statute was extended to embrace children engaged in commerce, and the factory inspector’s report for 1902 showed more than nineteen thousand children at work under the age of sixteen years, in manufacture and commerce alone, not including the children in mines and the streets of the cities.

The first child labor law of Illinois prohibited the employment of children under the age of fourteen years in mines. This was enacted in response to the efforts of the miners’ unions. It provided for no exemptions. This effort of the miners has achieved a substantial gain for the ethical activity and perception of the people of Illinois. No one would now venture to argue in favor of employing young boys under ground in that state, while boys of twelve years may still legally work in the coal mines of Kansas, and in all mines in Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina. In 1890, an ordinance of the City of Chicago prohibited the employment in manufacture or commerce of any child under the age of ten years “unless there be dependent upon such child any sick or infirm parent or adult relative.” The legislature of 1891 prohibited the employment anywhere in the state of a child under thirteen years of age with the same startling proviso. In 1893, all employment of children under the age of fourteen years was prohibited in manufacture but permitted as before in commerce. In 1897, the minimum age for employment in commerce was raised to fourteen years and thus made uniform with the minimum already established for mining and manufacture. All exemptions were abolished. Tested by experience the administrative part of the statute proved weak and again comprehensive amendments were adopted in 1903. As the law now stands, a child under the age of sixteen years may not work after seven P. M. nor longer than eight hours in one day and forty-eight hours in one week. Nor may a child under the age of fourteen years be employed or permitted or suffered to work in mining, manufacture or commerce. These provisions are unspoiled by any exemptions whatever. Moreover, a child under the age of fourteen years must attend whatever school he is in throughout the full term, comprising a fixed minimum of 110 days in the school year.

Illinois has thus faced, more boldly than any other American state, the fact that children to the age of sixteen years are different from adults and must be differently treated in industry. The new laws throw upon the community the burden of maintaining all those sick and disabled parents and dependent adult relatives whom, as late as 1890, the state entrusted to the precarious efforts of the children ten years old or less.

A significant measurement was immediately made of the resultant burden to the community. Miss Jane Addams, of Hull-House, asked the Chief Inspector of Factories to report to her the names and addresses of all children under fourteen years of age who had been employed under the more lax old law and were now deprived of employment by the enforcement of the more rigid new law, and whose mothers were widows. This was done. In the period between July 1st, when the law took effect, and October 26th, fourteen cases in Cook County, which embraces Chicago, and six cases in the rest of the state, had been found in which this form of hardship appeared to occur. The twenty families were investigated with the utmost care, in coöperation with the Bureau of Charities of Chicago. In the end, three families in Cook County and five in the remainder of the state proved to be in need of the equivalent of the wages which a fatherless child less than fourteen years of age had been earning. The task remained of raising money to be used as scholarships for these children until they should reach the fourteenth birthday. The wages earned by the children were from two to four dollars a week; and they ranged in age from twelve years and six months to thirteen and a half years. The period for which the scholarship was needed varied, therefore, from six to eighteen months; and the total amount for each child varied between $104 and $200 distributed over a period of eighteen months. The necessary money was secured in coöperation with the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the payments are made weekly on Saturday, on presentation of the written statement of the principal of the public school that the child’s attendance has been regular and satisfactory. This adequate volunteer aid, supplied by a few persons, shows once for all how slight is the basis for the widely expressed fear lest hardship be inflicted far and wide, by prolonging the period of childhood to the fourteenth birthday.

The results of this Illinois experiment in furnishing scholarships for children who had worked under the age of fourteen years and were deprived of wage-earning by the operation of the more stringent new law clearly demonstrate that children have not, to any considerable degree, been contributing to the support of their families. It is impossible that they should do so. The community must inevitably support in some way, well or ill, all its dependent members. But in the cruel belief that this burden could be placed upon the young children, thousands of them have, during the past thirty years, been deprived of the rights and privileges of childhood.

The state which accepts the plea of poverty and permits the children of the poorest citizens to labor prematurely, accepts the heritage of new poverty flowing from two sources; namely, on the one hand, the relaxed efforts of fathers of families to provide for them, and on the other hand the corruption of weak children by inappropriate occupations which involve temptation beyond the child’s power of resistance, and the exhaustion of strong children by overwork. It is exactly the most conscientious and promising children who are worked into the grave or into nervous prostration, or into that saddest state of all, the moral fatigue which enables a man to sit idly about for years while his wife or his sister, or his children support him.

Hence it appears that there is need of shifting the accent of the current method of caring for dependent widows and children by public and private philanthropy. If the orphan child, by virtue of his future citizenship, has a claim to sustenance, education, freedom from exploitation (his labor being contraband), and a corresponding duty to go regularly to school, then there should be systematic harmonious provision for this. Such a child should not be left to the precarious provision of sporadic private charity. Why should such children not receive scholarships dependent upon regular attendance and good behavior, and provided out of the school-funds?

The Glass-Bottle Industry.—The urgent need for the present stringent law of Illinois can, perhaps, best be made clear by a somewhat detailed description of the children in one trade as it was found to exist ten years ago.

When the first factory law of Illinois was enacted, in 1893, it prohibited the employment of children under the age of fourteen years in factories and workshops. For children employed in the glass-bottle works, this provision, until the present year, when the new law made this method more difficult, was successfully evaded by dissolute men and women who gathered in orphan and deserted children from the poorhouses of five counties adjacent to that in which stands the city of Alton, and from the orphan asylums in St. Louis, and made affidavits as “guardians” of the children that the lads were fourteen years of age when they were really from seven to ten. The “guardians” then proceeded to live upon the earnings of the children which were, in 1893, forty cents a day for small boys and sixty cents for larger ones. One “guardian” controlled the wages of several boys. In some cases the “guardians” and their wards lived in shanty-boats along the Mississippi river, drawing their floating habitations well up into the mud of the river bank for the winter, and floating away for the summer, when the glassworks closed. During this enforced holiday the “guardians” and the children lived precariously by fishing and berry-picking, the children profiting by the fact that the glass-blowers could not endure the heat of the ovens during July and August.

The earnings of the glass-bottle blowers depend somewhat upon the speed of the boys who fetch and carry for them. These lads are, therefore, kept trotting at the highest speed which a child can maintain for several hours. In making inspections of the glass-bottle works, the writer found it impossible to get from a boy a consecutive statement as to his name, address or parentage. A boy would say, “My name is Jimmie;” and then trot to the cooling oven with his load of bottles and returning say, in answer to a fresh question, “I live in a shanty-boat;” then trot to the moulder for another set of bottles and returning say, “I’m going to be eight next summer,” and so on. Among twenty-four lads questioned during one night-inspection, not one ventured to pause long enough to put together two of the foregoing statements. And the eye of the boy interrupted in his work was always fastened anxiously upon the blower for whom he was working. The blower did not pay the boy, who was carried on the payrolls of the company; but when a boy was detained for the purpose of questioning, a shrill whistle sounded and the boy would say to the inspector, “Don’t you hear him doggin’ me?”

The load of bottles which a boy carries at any one time is not heavy and there is no lifting to be done. Hence such work is commonly described by employers as “light and easy.” But the circumstances attending the work, the surroundings amid which it is done, fill the words with grim sarcasm. The sustained speed required of the children and the heated atmosphere render continuous trotting most exhausting. An hour’s steady trotting in pure air tires a healthy schoolboy, of seven to fourteen years; but these little lads trotted hour after hour, day after day, month after month, in the heat and dust.

There was no restriction upon night work. Any boy who was eligible for work at all, was used indifferently by night or by day; and pitifully little children were found at work at two o’clock in the morning. Often a sleepy child, stumbling among fragments of white-hot glass, received serious burns; and bandages were more common than among any workers that the writer has seen in the course of many hundreds of inspections. Indeed, loss of time while recovering from burns received during their work constituted one of the grievances of the “blowers’ dogs,” of whom several were found in their homes convalescent from burns and other illnesses incident to their occupation. Mothers complained bitterly, too, of the loss of coats and shoes by burning when the boys collided with each other in the course of their work, the burden of each being glass heated just below the melting-point.

At the close of the day’s work or the night’s work, the children went from the heat and glare of the glass-ovens into the cold and dark of the morning or evening. They went, with the men with whom they worked, to the nearest saloons to buy the cheap drinks which were freely sold just across the street from the works. All the boys used tobacco, usually chewing it, those of seven and eight years of age doing exactly what the men did by whose side they spent their working hours. As seen and heard at their work, and at the closing hour, when they left the works, these children were stunted, illiterate, profane, obscene, ruined in body and mind before they entered upon the long adolescence known to happier children.

The sharp contrast between the heat of the glass-ovens and the frost of the winter mornings, produces in the children, wearied by hard work, rheumatism and affections of the throat and lungs, from which many of them die before reaching the age of apprenticeship. Of those who survive, virtually none succeed in attaining the position and wages of a skilled glass-blower. Their health would be inadequate to the strain, even if the career were open to them. But it is not open; for an old rule of the union limits closely the number of apprentices to each hundred glass-blowers and fixes the age of apprenticeship at seventeen years. The coveted privilege of apprenticeship is commonly reserved by the blowers for their own sons, whom they do not employ as “dogs” but keep to the age of seventeen years, either attending school or working in some less destructive occupation than glass-bottle making.

When in 1893 the first efforts were made to enforce the child labor law in the glassworks at Alton, the employers and the press foretold dire sufferings for the widows dependent upon their children’s earnings. The writer, as responsible head of the factory inspectors, by request of the governor of Illinois, made an investigation of the general conditions of life of the children and their families, aside from the work which they did in the glass-ovens.

It soon became clear that the opening for the employment of young children served continuously to attract to Alton a most undesirable population from many places in Illinois and neighboring states. Thus the first three alleged widows who were visited, had all come from other places for the express purpose of living upon the earnings of their wretched, illiterate sons, supplemented by the gifts of the charitable. One was found living in a tent with three children, the two younger ones being regularly neglected while the mother and the older boy worked in the bottle works. Another “widow” did washing, which was insufficient for the maintenance of herself and three children. Her husband had been sent two years before to an asylum, an incurable patient. A trifling, continuous addition to her earnings would have enabled her to keep her boy in school; but the charitable people of Alton contributed to the partial support of her family while the glass-works exploited her boy at wages below the point of present subsistence, and with no acquisition of skill such as might make him self-supporting in later years. If the boy had not worked, though of school age and illiterate, the mother feared that the charitable gifts might be wholly cut off. There appeared to be good reason for her fear, as the mayor of the city stated to the writer that he had, himself, sent to the glassworks in search of work, a widow and her little boy under the legal age for working, when the mother appealed to him for help. The third of the “widows” was blind, and her husband, blind also, was in an asylum. She lived in a shanty-boat with her four little children. Of her two boys aged seven and nine years who worked at the glassworks, one was blind in one eye. When the husband was sent to an asylum, the family was placed in its boat by the county authorities and told not to return. They accordingly floated down from a point above Plymouth to Alton where, although the two little boys immediately found work, the mother promptly applied for relief which was refused on the ground that “her able-bodied sons” should support her. In the family of a laborer who was working for eighty cents a day, the consumptive wife and baby were found shivering over a drift-wood fire in a dilapidated boat, while two boys aged eight and ten years worked at the glassworks. The family had floated down the river in the autumn for the sake of sending the children into the glassworks. A worn-out and dissolute glass-blower who had a pension of eight dollars a month and five children under the age of fourteen years, had recently married a widow with six children under fifteen years. Father, mother and the eleven children were living in a tent between the river and the works, where several of the children were employed, some by night and some by day, so that the beds in the tent were used by different children, one set rising to go to work when the others returned to sleep.

All these families—and they are merely a few examples of a large population which they typify—had been sent or brought to Alton in order to meet the demand of the glassworks for cheap child labor. They were a permanent charge upon the charitable people of the city. In no single case did the earnings of the little boys really support the family and relieve the community even immediately and temporarily of that burden. There was child labor and charitable help, and in most cases, chronic pauperism besides, with every prospect that the overworked, ill-brought up boys would themselves be speedily added to the ranks of the tramps or the invalids.

Under the recent rigorous prohibition of the employment of children under the age of sixteen years after 7 P. M., the possibility of exploiting such young children as were found at work in 1893 is much reduced. Under the provision which requires the oath of the parent to be corroborated by the signed statement of a responsible person in a recognized school, that the child is fourteen years of age, has attended school and can read fluently and write legibly, such exploitation must be still farther reduced.

What then, is it reasonable to expect in the immediate future for such dependent families as those above described? Certainly Alton can no longer serve as so powerful a magnet drawing them to itself. The local authorities of the various cities and counties can no longer ship to Alton all those dependent families which happen to include a young boy under the age of fourteen years. The artificial aggregation of pauperism in one place may be expected to diminish. A number of scattered communities will each have its own few dependent families of this class to sustain until the children attain the qualifications of age and education which the state stipulates. That these families can be induced to keep their children in school by means of a very modest scholarship for each child, has been conclusively shown by the experiment recently conducted in Chicago.

For many years, the opportunity for exploiting young children in Alton tended to collect there a disproportionately large body of dependent families. Then the presence and number of these families served as an argument for the necessity of continuing to exploit the children. The artificially accumulated mass of poverty perverted the minds of many otherwise kindly persons who failed to see that a pauper family is no less a pauper family because it is using up and wearing out by premature labor a young child who, if cherished and trained for a few years, would subsequently be able to support his family and redeem it from pauperism.

It is no small ethical gain to clear up the confusion of mind which led persons of all sorts to explain that the children who worked at the glassworks were so intrinsically and inevitably bad that nothing could be done with them in the way of education or of reform. The use of stimulants by young boys, which inevitably followed overwork and evil example, was very generally attributed to the hopelessly bad native character of the unhappy children; as were the foul language, filthy personal habits and propensity to gambling common to old and young employees. Every citizen of Alton who talked with the writer about the boys working at the glassworks, dwelt upon the bad character of the children, calling them “tough” or “dissolute” according to the habit of speech of the person. The suggestion of abolishing the work of such children, dispersing the army of little offenders, distributing them through the schools with which many of them were totally unacquainted, making schoolboys of the whole body of children of compulsory school age—the line of action taken by Boston, New York and Buffalo with regard to the dissolute young newsboys upon their streets—this simple recognition of the right of childhood to school-life and immunity from toil, never found expression on the part of one person with whom the writer came in contact in a long and active study of that prosperous city. The mayor actively promoted the employment of children under the legal age for work. An important officer of the board of education was a member of the glass manufacturing company, and was of the opinion that the employment of a truant officer and the enforcement of the compulsory education law would inflict an intolerable burden of poverty upon the community. The secretary of the associated charities, who was a minister, and the superintendent of the poor, also a minister, agreed that nothing could be done which would make it appear that the glassworks had been employing pauper labor, and therefore they could not undertake to furnish scholarships for the children whom the factory inspectors turned out of the glassworks because they were under fourteen years of age. Only teachers of the primary schools expressed regret at losing some of their brightest and best behaved little boys out of the lowest grades to go to work “among those drinking, swearing, gambling ragamuffins at the works.”

It is clear gain for a community to be freed from such obliquity of moral vision as this; to be forced to face its own burden of sins of omission and commission against the children of its poorest and most dependent citizens; to be constrained to take upon the broad shoulders of the adult population that burden of maintenance which children cannot carry, even though in the cruel effort to force them to do the impossible they may be crushed body and soul as hundreds of children have been crushed and ruined in the beautiful and prosperous city of Alton.

In Southern New Jersey, in Western Pennsylvania, wherever the glass-bottle industry attains a high state of development, the same tendency is observable. Dependent families are, as it were, enticed to bring their young children to work in the glass-bottle factories. When a large number of such families have come, the demand for still more young boys leads to the importation of detached lads. Then the presence in the community of an undue proportion of dependent persons, young and old, serves as a reason for deferring legislation restricting the employment of the youngest children and providing for their education.

There is nothing either accidental or passive in this process. Although the manufacture of glass is one of the industries most highly protected by the tariff for many years past, and although the wages of glass-blowers are protected by a most influential and all-embracing union, yet employers and glass-blowers have, in at least two states, worked together to keep the children from receiving any adequate legislative protection. In Illinois for ten years the glass manufacturers were successful in their unwearying efforts to prevent the enactment of a provision restricting night work to persons over the age of sixteen years. And even when the present enlightened measure was finally passed, in 1903, this was done against the protest of the manufacturers and of a glass-bottle blower who appeared before the senate committee at Springfield in opposition to the bill. In New Jersey, in 1904, there was the same conflict, the glass-bottle blowers’ union as such urging the passage of a law prohibiting night-work for children, and the glass manufacturers nevertheless securing for the opposition the support of a state senator at Trenton, who had once been a blower, and who succeeded in getting stricken out of the bill this most valuable of its provisions, despite the united efforts of the labor organizations of the whole state, and of the Children’s Protective Alliance, comprising forty societies for the protection and welfare of children.

In Pennsylvania, in March, 1903, the Western Pennsylvania Association of Glass Manufacturers voted at a public meeting held in Pittsburg to keep a committee at Harrisburg throughout the session of the legislature to prevent the enactment of a measure prohibiting night-work for children and all employment of illiterate children. So successful was this committee that the friends of the bill were not even granted a hearing before the senate committee to which the bill was referred. In all these cases the arguments used were identical. Poverty must not be intensified by prohibiting the employment even of the youngest and most illiterate children.

Fortunately, the friends of the working children have at last succeeded in bringing to light the hypocrisy of this plea. It has been shown that for a series of years the glass manufacturers of New Jersey and Ohio have imported children from other states. Charitable institutions and child placing agencies have been appealed to to furnish detached boys and have done so in more than one case. Children have been sent from one state to another to meet the demand. It is now only a question of time until all the legislatures which have to deal with this child destroying trade shall take the same view which Illinois and New York have taken; and shall say that the state can better afford to part with such an industry than to sacrifice to it hundreds of children every year. And when they do this, no state will lose its glass-bottle industry; but the installation of mechanical contrivances to supplant boys will go forward just as cash carriers are now supplanting cash children, and as the telephone is replacing the telegraph and messenger boy in many suburbs. In some occupations child labor by its very cheapness to the employer actually hinders the use of devices which are costly in the initial installation; and it is believed that the glass-bottle industry is one of these.

The glass-bottle industry illustrates one significant phase of child legislation in this country; namely, the long default of philanthropy on behalf of the wage-earning children. We have had no Lord Shaftesbury devoted to the child workers and coöperating with the organizations of workingmen in the interests of the children. To the organizations of labor are due all the earlier statutes for the protection of the working children, and this protection has been left wholly to the trades unions until within a very few years. In certain industries this has been done effectively, as in the cigar trade where the introduction of machinery is only now leading to a large influx of children. In other industries, the adaptability of children has been so great as to render the unions powerless to protect them adequately either by legislation or by refusing to work with them. Conspicuous among these are the textile industries. In still other trades, the wages of the worker have been made to depend in some degree upon the interlocking work of children, and in these the difficulties attending progress towards adequate guarding of childhood have been most conspicuous of all. Such is the glass industry. Here the wage of the blower of bottles, lamp chimneys, drinking glasses and many other small objects depends largely upon the speed with which children as moulders and carriers coöperate with him. Hence the blower has a strong money interest in the employment of nimble children in abundance.

It is vastly to the credit of the workers in the trade that, through their organizations, they have made a struggle covering the last quarter of a century for statutory prohibition of night work for children. And it is easily understood how their efforts have here and there been foiled by a weak brother proving open to the persuasions of the employers and ready to appear before legislative committees on behalf of the farther work of children in the same old way.

It is, however, sadly true that workingmen are not always experienced in the drafting of bills, and that some of the measures which they have advocated have proved non-enforceable when enacted. Moreover, they have in several conspicuous cases been induced to contribute actively, though unintentionally, to the nullification of the statutes the enactment of which they had secured, by accepting as responsible heads of the factory inspection departments men whose sole qualification for the position was their professional devotion to the cause of trade organization. Two classic examples of this are the chief factory inspectors of Pennsylvania and Illinois during the closing years of the nineteenth century. In the former state the unions acquiesced in the utterly incompetent administration of the department of factory inspection because the chief inspector had been for several years an officer of the Glass Workers’ Union of the Pittsburg district, although he effectively blocked every effort to improve the laws with regard to the employment of children at night or while illiterate. The chief inspector of factories of Illinois from 1897 to 1901 had been, previously to his appointment, for twenty-seven years on the pay roll of the Illinois Glass Company at Alton. Throughout his term of office there were no prosecutions for violations of law by glass manufacturers, nor was the child labor law of Illinois amended. Yet no effort seems to have been made by any trade organization to secure his removal and the appointment of an effective official.

Within five years philanthropic people, notably many organizations of women, have systematically worked for the enactment and enforcement of child labor legislation, usually in coöperation with the state and local organizations of workingmen. Just in proportion as this coöperation develops will the gains on behalf of the working children become permanent; and the coöperation, itself, is a process of education for both philanthropists and workingmen.

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