XI

Summarizing, briefly, the results of this investigation, the problem of

poverty as it affects school children may be stated in a few lines. All

the data available tend to show that not less than 2,000,000 children of

school age in the United States are the victims of poverty which denies

them common necessities, particularly adequate nourishment. As a result

of this privation they are far inferior in physical development to their

more fortunate fellows. This inferiority of physique, in turn, is

responsible for much mental and moral degeneration. Such children are in

very many cases incapable of successful mental effort, and much of our

national expenditure for education is in consequence an absolute waste.

With their enfeebled bodies and minds we turn these children adrift

unfitted for the struggle of life, which tends to become keener with

every advance in our industrial development, and because of their lack

of physical and mental training they are found to be inefficient

industrially and dangerous socially. They become dependent, paupers, and

the procreators of a pauper and dependent race.

Here, then, is a problem of awful magnitude. In the richest country on

earth hundreds of thousands of children are literally damned to

lifelong, helpless, and debasing poverty. They are plunged in the

earliest and most important years of character formation into that

terrible maelstrom of poverty which casts so many thousands, ay,

millions, of physical, mental, and moral wrecks upon the shores of our

social life. For them there is little or no hope of escape from the

blight and curse of pauperism unless the nation, pursuing a policy of

enlightened self-interest and protection, decides to save them. In the

main, this vast sum of poverty is due to causes of a purely impersonal

nature which the victims cannot control, such as sickness, accident, low

wages, and unemployment. Personal causes, such as ignorance,

thriftlessness, gambling, intemperance, indolence, wife-desertion, and

other vices or weaknesses, are also responsible for a good deal of

poverty, though by no means most of it as is sometimes urged by

superficial observers. There are many thousands of temperate and

industrious workers who are miserably poor, and many of those who are

thriftless or intemperate are the victims of poverty’s degenerating

influences.[83] But whether a child’s hunger and privation is due to

some fault of its parents or to causes beyond their control, the fact of

its suffering remains, and its impaired physical and mental strength

tends almost irresistibly to make it inefficient as a citizen. Whatever

the cause, therefore, of its privation, society must, as a measure of

self-protection, take upon itself the responsibility of caring for the

child.

There can be no compromise upon this vital point. Those who say that

society should refuse to do anything for those children who are the

victims of their parents’ vices or weaknesses adopt a singularly

indefensible attitude. In the first place it is barbarously unjust to

allow the sins of the parents to bring punishment and suffering upon the

child, to damn the innocent and unoffending. No more vicious doctrine

than this, which so many excellent and well-intentioned persons are fond

of preaching, has ever been formulated by human perversity. Carried to

its logical end, it would destroy all legislation for the protection of

children from cruel parents or guardians. It is strange that the

doctrinaire advocates of this brutal gospel should overlook its

practical consequences. If discrimination were to be made at all, it

should be in favor of, rather than against, the children of drunken and

profligate parents. For these children have a special claim upon society

for protection from wrongs in the shape of influences injurious to their

physical and moral well-being, and tending to lead them into evil and

degrading ways. The half-starved child of the inebriate is not less

entitled to the protection of society than the victim of inhuman

physical torture.

Should these children be excluded from any system of feeding adopted by

the state upon the ground that their parents have not fulfilled their

parental responsibilities, society joins in a conspiracy against their

very lives. And that conspiracy ultimately and inevitably involves

retribution. In the interests and name of a beguiling economy, fearful

that if it assumes responsibility for the care of the child of inebriate

parents, it will foster and encourage their inebriety and neglect,

society leaves the children surrounded by circumstances which

practically force them to become drunkards, physical and moral wrecks,

and procreators of a like degenerate progeny. _Then_ it is forced to

accept the responsibility of their support, either as paupers or

criminals. That is the stern Nemesis of retribution. Where an

enlightened system of child saving has been followed, this principle has

been clearly recognized. In Minnesota, for example, the state assumes

the responsibility for the care of such children as a matter of

self-protection. To quote the language of a report of the State Public

School at Owatonna: “It is for economic as well as for humane reasons

that this work is done. The state is thus protecting itself from dangers

to which it would be exposed in a very few years if these children were

reared in the conditions which so injuriously affect them.”[84] Whatever

steps may be taken to punish, or make responsible to the state, those

parents who by their vice and neglect bring suffering and want upon

their children, the children themselves should be saved.

To the contention that society, having assumed the responsibility of

insisting that every child shall be educated, and providing the means of

education, is necessarily bound to assume the responsibility of seeing

that they are made fit to receive that education, so far as possible,

there does not seem to be any convincing answer. It will be objected

that for society to do this would mean the destruction of the

responsibility of the parents. That is obviously true. But it is equally

true of education itself, the responsibility for which society has

assumed. Some individualists there are who contend that society is wrong

in doing this, and their opposition to the proposal that it should

undertake to provide the children with food is far more logical than

that of those who believe that society should assume the responsibility

of educating the child, but not that of equipping it with the necessary

physical basis for that education. The fact is that society insists upon

the education of the children, not, primarily, in their interests nor in

the interests of the parents, but in its own. All legislation upon child

labor, education, child guardianship in general, is based upon a denial

of proprietary rights to children by their parents. The child belongs to

society rather than to its parents.

Further, private charity, which is the only alternative suggestion

offered for the solution of this problem, equally removes responsibility

from the parents and is open to other weightier objections. In the first

place, where it succeeds, it is far more demoralizing than such a system

of public support provided at the public cost, as the child’s

birthright, could possibly be. Still more important is the fact that

private charity does not succeed in the vast majority of instances. To

their credit, it must be remembered that the poor as a class refuse to

beg or to parade their poverty. They suffer in silence and never seek

alms. Pride and the shame of begging seal their lips. Here, too, the

question of the children of inebriate, dissolute, worthless parents

enters. Every one who has had the least experience of charitable work

knows that these are the persons who are most relieved by charity. They

do not hesitate to plead for charity. “I have not strength to dig; to

beg I am ashamed,” is the motto of the self-respecting, silent,

suffering poor. The failure of charity is incontestable. As some witty

Frenchman has well said, “Charity creates one-half the misery she

relieves, but cannot relieve one-half the misery she creates.”

It is impossible to enter here into a discussion of the question of

cost, but the argument that society could not afford to undertake this

further responsibility must be briefly considered. In view of our

well-nigh boundless resources there is small reason for the belief that

we cannot provide for the needs of all our children. If it were true

that we could not provide for their necessities, then wholesale death

would be merciful and desirable. At any rate, it would be far better to

feed them first, neglecting their education altogether, than to waste

our substance in the brutally senseless endeavor to educate them while

they starve and pine for bread. There can be little doubt that the

economic waste involved in fruitless charity, and the still vaster waste

involved in the maintenance of the dependent and criminal classes whose

degeneracy is mainly attributable to underfeeding in childhood, amount

to a sum far exceeding the cost of providing adequate nutrition for

every child. It is essentially a question of the proper adjustment of

our means to our needs. Otherwise we must admit the utter failure of our

civilization and confess that, in the language of Sophocles, it is

“Happiest beyond compare

Never to taste of life;

Happiest in order next,

Being born, with quickest speed

Thither again to turn

From whence we came.”[D]

[Illustration:

COMMUNAL SCHOOL KITCHEN, WHERE THE SCHOOL MEALS ARE PREPARED,

CHRISTIANIA, NORWAY

]

-----

Footnote D:

_Œdipus Coloneus._

III

THE WORKING CHILD

“In this boasted land of freedom there are bonded baby slaves,

And the busy world goes by and does not heed.

They are driven to the mill, just to glut and overfill

Bursting coffers of the mighty monarch, Greed.

When they perish we are told it is God’s will,

Oh, the roaring of the mill, of the mill!”

—ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.

I

It is a startling and suggestive fact that the very force which

Aristotle, the profoundest thinker of antiquity, regarded as the only

agency through which the abolition of slavery might be made possible,

served, when at last it was evolved, not to destroy slavery, but to

extend it; to enslave in a new form of bondage those who hitherto had

been free. Aristotle regarded slavery as a basic institution and saw no

possible means whereby it might ever be dispensed with, “except perhaps

by the aid of machines.” He said, “If every tool ... could do the work

that befits it, just as the creations of Dædalus moved of themselves, or

the tripods of Hephæstos went of their own accord; if the weavers’

shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need of

apprentices for the master workers, or slaves for the lords.”[85] When

more than two thousand years had passed, a machine, a wonderful, complex

tool, almost literally fulfilling his conditions, was invented.

We speak of the power-loom as Cartwright’s invention, but in truth it

was the joint production of numberless inventors, most of them unknown

to history, and some of whom lived and labored long before Aristotle sat

at Plato’s feet in the great school at Athens. Looking at a modern

power-loom in one of our great factories not long ago, I asked the name

of the inventor, which was readily enough given. But as I watched the

marvellous mechanism with its many wheels, levers, and springs, I

wondered how much of it could be said to have had its origin in the

brain of the inventor in question. Who invented the wheel, the lever,

the spring? Who invented the first rude loom, reproduced, in principle,

in the wonderful looms of the twentieth century? No man knows. We do not

know the name of the inventor of the loom figured in all its details

upon the tomb of the ancient Egyptian at Beni Hassan;[86] we do not know

who invented the loom which the Greek vase of 400 B.C. depicts,—a loom

which, so William Morris tells us, is in all respects like those in use

in Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the latter half of the nineteenth

century.[87] Many thousands of years ago, in the simple tribal communism

of primitive man, the great bed-rock inventions were evolved. Thousands

of years of human experience led up to the ribbon-loom which, in the

early part of the sixteenth century, brought sentence of death upon the

poor inventor of Danzig[88] whose very name has been forgotten. This

ribbon-loom was a near approach to the wonderful tool of which Aristotle

dreamed as the liberator of enslaved man.

The work of improvement went on, and the power-loom came; “weavers’

shuttles were to weave of themselves” in a well-nigh literal sense. The

great machine tool became an accomplished fact. It had been forged upon

the anvil of human necessity through countless centuries. But the

revolution it wrought, or, rather, the revolution of which it was the

expression, was not a revolution of liberation. A hundred and twenty

years have elapsed since then, and still the prophecy of freedom has not

been fulfilled; there are still “slaves for the lords.”

“Fast and faster, our iron master,

The thing we made, for ever drives,

Bids us grind treasure and fashion pleasure,

For other hopes and other lives.”

Children have always worked, but it is only since the reign of the

machine that their work has been synonymous with slavery. Under the old

form of simple, domestic industry even the very young children were

assigned their share of the work in the family. But this form of child

labor was a good and wholesome thing. There may have been abuses;

children may have suffered from the ignorance, cupidity, and brutality

of fathers and mothers, but in the main the child’s share in the work of

the family was a good thing. In the first place, the child was

associated in its work with one or both of its parents, and thus kept

under all those influences which we deem of most worth, the influences

of home and parental care. Secondly, the work of the child constituted a

major part of its education. And it was no mean education, either, which

gave the world generation after generation of glorious craftsmen. The

seventeenth-century glass-blower of Venice or Murano, for instance,

learned his craft from his father in this manner, and in turn taught it

to his son. There was a bond of interest between them; a parental pride

and interest on the part of the father infinitely greater and more

potent for good than any commercial relation would have allowed. On the

part of the child, too, there was a filial pride and devotion which

found its expression in a spirit of emulation, the spirit out of which

all the rich glory of that wonderfully rich craft was born. So, too, it

was with the potters of ancient Greece, and with the tapestry weavers of

fourteenth-century France. In the golden age of the craftsman, child

labor was child training in the noblest and best sense. The training of

hand and heart and brain was the end achieved, even where it was not the

sole purpose of the child’s labor.

But with the coming of the machine age all this was changed. The

craftsman was supplanted by the tireless, soulless machine. The child

still worked, but in a great factory throbbing with the vibration of

swift, intricate machines. In place of parental interest and affection

there was the harsh, pitiless authority of an employer or his agent,

looking, not to the child’s well-being and skill as an artificer, but to

the supplying of a great, ever widening market for cash gain.

It is not without its significance that the ribbon-loom which in the

latter part of the seventeenth century caused the workmen of England to

riot, the same machine which, later, was publicly burnt in Hamburg by

order of the Senate, should have been described as “enabling a totally

inexperienced boy” to set the whole loom with all its shuttles in

motion, “by simply moving a rod backwards and forwards.”[89] It was as

though the new mechanical invention had been designed with the express

purpose of laying the burden of the world’s work upon child shoulders;

as though some evil genius had deliberately contrived that the nation of

progress should

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