With the exception of the infant in arms these are all working
children. They were called away from the
photographer to go on with their work!
]
The inferno of child torture which the records of nineteenth-century
England picture so vividly has more than historical interest for us. It
was the result of a policy of _laissez faire_ on the part of the
government, and that policy has its advocates in the United States
to-day. In our legislative assemblies, and through the press, able and
earnest men—some of them earnest only in their devotion to Mammon—are
advocating that policy and forever crying out, in the words of the old
physiocrats, “Let alone; the world revolves of itself.” When that cry of
_laissez faire_ is raised, despite the fact that children of four years
are found at work in the canning factories of New York State,[102] and
little girls of five and six years are found working by night in
Southern cotton mills,[103] it is not too much to assume that only a
vigilant and constantly protesting public conscience protects us from
conditions as revolting as any of those experienced in the black night
of England’s orgy of greed. Capital has neither morals nor ideals; its
interests are always and everywhere expressible in terms of cash
profits. Capital in the United States in the twentieth century calls for
children as loudly as it called in England a century ago.
Whatever advance has been made in the direction of the legislative
protection of children from the awful consequences of premature
exploitation, has been made in the face of bitter opposition from the
exploiters. In the New York Legislature, during the session of 1903, the
owners of the canning factories of the state used their utmost power to
have their industry exempted from the humane but inadequate provisions
of the Child Labor Law, notwithstanding that babies four years old were
known to be working in their factories. The Northern owners of Alabama
cotton mills secured the _repeal_ of the law passed in that state in
1887 prohibiting the employment of children under fourteen years of age
for more than eight hours in a day; and when, later, the Alabama Child
Labor Committee sought to secure legislative protection for children up
to twelve years of age, paid agents of the mill owners appeared before
the legislature and persistently opposed their efforts.[104] Similar
testimony might be given from practically every state where any attempt
has been made to legislate against the evil of child labor. Even such a
responsible organ of capitalist opinion as the _Manufacturers’ Record_
editorially denounces all child-labor legislation as wrong and
immoral![105] There are, of course, honorable exceptions, but as a class
the employers of labor are persistent in their opposition to all such
legislation.
According to the census of 1900 there were, in the United States in that
year, 1,752,187 children under sixteen years of age employed in gainful
occupations. Of itself that is a terrible sum, but all authorities are
agreed that it does not fully represent the magnitude of the child-labor
problem. It is well known that many thousands of children are working
under the protection of certificates in which they are falsely
represented as being of the legal age for employment. When a child of
twelve gets a certificate declaring its age to be fifteen, it needs only
to work a year, to be in reality thirteen years old, in order to be
classed as an adult over sixteen years of age. Such certificates have
been, and in many cases still are, ridiculously easy to obtain, it being
only necessary for one of the parents or guardians of a child to swear
before a notary that the child has reached the minimum age required by
law. The result has been the promotion of child slavery and illiteracy
through the wholesale perjury of parents and guardians.[106] I have
known scores of instances in which children ten or eleven years old were
employed through the possession of certificates stating that they were
thirteen or fourteen. I remember asking one little lad his age, in
Pittston, Pennsylvania, during the anthracite coal strike of 1902. He
certainly did not look more than ten years old, but he answered boldly,
“I’m thirteen, sir.” When I asked him how long he had been at work, he
replied, “More’n a year gone, sir.” Afterward I met his father at one of
the strikers’ meetings, and he told me that the lad was only a few days
over eleven years of age, and that he went to work as a “breaker boy”
before he was ten. “We’m a big fam’ly,” he said in excuse. “There’s six
kids an’ th’ missis an’ me. Wi’ me pay so small, I was glad to give a
quarter to have the papers (certificate) filled out so’s he could bring
in a trifle like other boys.” Afterward I came across several similar
cases.
That is only one of many reasons for supposing that the census figures
do not adequately represent the extent to which child labor prevails.
Another is the tremendous number of children of school age, and below
the age at which they may be legally employed, who do not attend school.
In New York State, for instance, there were more than 76,000 children
between the ages of ten and fourteen years who were out of school during
the whole of the twelve months covered by the census of 1900, and nearly
16,000 more in the same age period who attended school less than five
months in the year.[107] Careful investigation in Philadelphia showed
that in one year, “after deducting those physically unable to attend
school, 16,100 children, between the ages of eight and thirteen,” were
out of school, and a similar condition is reported to exist throughout
the whole of Pennsylvania.[108] The Child Labor Committee of
Pennsylvania gives a list of nearly one hundred different kinds of work
at which children between the ages of eight and thirteen were found to
be employed in Philadelphia alone. In practically every industrial
centre this margin of children of school age and below the legal age for
employment, who do not attend school, exists. It is impossible for any
one who is at all conversant with the facts to resist the conclusion
that, after making all possible allowances for other causes, by far the
larger part of these absentees are at work. Thousands find employment in
factories and stores; others find employment in some of the many street
trades, selling newspapers, peddling, running errands for small
storekeepers, and the like. Many others are not “employed” in the strict
sense of the word at all, because they work in their homes, assisting
their parents. Their condition is generally much worse than that of the
children regularly employed in factories and workshops. In excluding
them the census figures omit a very large class of child workers who are
the victims of the worst conditions of all. I am convinced that the
number of children under _fifteen_ years of age who work is much larger
than the official figures give, notwithstanding that these are supposed
to give the number of all workers under _sixteen_ years of age. It
would, I think, be quite within the mark to say that the number of child
workers under fifteen is at least 2,250,000.
From the point of view of the sociologist an accurate statistical
measure of the child-labor problem would be a most valuable gain, but to
most people such figures mean very little. If they could only see the
human units represented by the figures, it would be different. If they
could only see in one vast, suffering throng as many children as there
are men, women, and children in the state of New Jersey, they would be
able to appreciate some of the meaning of the census figures. Even so,
they would have only a vivid sense of the magnitude of such a number as
1,752,000; they would still have no idea of the awful physical, mental,
and moral wreckage hidden in the lifeless and dumb figures. If it were
only possible to take the consumptive cough of one child textile worker
with lint-clogged lungs, and to multiply its volume by tens of
thousands; to gather into one single compass the fevers that burn in
thousands of child toilers’ bodies, so that we might visualize the Great
White Plague’s relation to child labor, the nation would surely rise as
one man and put an end to the destruction of children for profit. If all
the people of this great republic could see little Anetta Fachini, four
years old, working with her mother making artificial flowers, as I saw
her in her squalid tenement home at eleven o’clock at night, I think the
impression upon their hearts and minds would be far deeper and more
lasting than any that whole pages of figures could make. The frail
little thing was winding green paper around wires to make stems for
artificial flowers to decorate ladies’ hats. Every few minutes her head
would droop and her weary eyelids close, but her little fingers still
kept moving—uselessly, helplessly, mechanically moving. Then the mother
would shake her gently, saying: “_Non dormire, Anetta! Solamente pochi
altri—solamente pochi altri._” (“Sleep not, Anetta! Only a few more—only
a few more.”)
[Illustration:
JUVENILE TEXTILE WORKERS ON STRIKE IN PHILADELPHIA
]
And the little eyes would open slowly and the tired fingers once more
move with intelligent direction and purpose.
Some years ago, in one of the mean streets of Paris, I saw, in a dingy
window, a picture that stamped itself indelibly upon my memory. It was
not, judged by artistic canons, a great picture; on the contrary, it was
crude and ill drawn and might almost have been the work of a child.
Torn, I think, from the pages of the Anarchist paper _La Revolté_, it
was, perchance, a protest drawn from the very soul of some indignant
worker. A woman, haggard and fierce of visage, representing France, was
seated upon a heap of child skulls and bones. In her gnarled and knotted
hands she held the writhing form of a helpless babe whose flesh she was
gnawing with her teeth. Underneath, in red ink, was written in rude
characters, “The wretch! She devours her own children!” My mind goes
back to that picture: it is literally true to-day, that this great
nation in its commercial madness devours its babes.