There has been no extensive, systematic investigation in this country of
the physical condition of working children. In 1893–1894 volunteer
physicians examined and made measurements of some 200 children, taken
from the factories and workshops of Chicago.[131] These records show a
startling proportion of undersized, rachitic, and consumptive children,
but they are too limited to be of more than suggestive value. So far as
they go, however, they bear out the results obtained in more extensive
investigations in European countries. It is the consensus of opinion
among those having the best opportunities for careful observation that
physical deterioration quickly follows a child’s employment in a factory
or workshop.
It is a sorry but indisputable fact that where children are employed,
the most unhealthful work is generally given them.[132] In the spinning
and carding rooms of cotton and woollen mills, where large numbers of
children are employed, clouds of lint-dust fill the lungs and menace the
health. The children have often a distressing cough, caused by the
irritation of the throat, and many are hoarse from the same cause. In
bottle factories and other branches of glass manufacture, the atmosphere
is constantly charged with microscopic particles of glass. In the
wood-working industries, such as the manufacture of cheap furniture and
wooden boxes, and packing cases, the air is laden with fine sawdust.
Children employed in soap and soap-powder factories work, many of them,
in clouds of alkaline dust which inflames the eyelids and nostrils. Boys
employed in filling boxes of soap-powder work all day long with
handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. In the coal-mines the breaker boys
breathe air that is heavy and thick with particles of coal, and their
lungs become black in consequence. In the manufacture of felt hats,
little girls are often employed at the machines which tear the fur from
the skins of rabbits and other animals. Recently, I stood and watched a
young girl working at such a machine; she wore a newspaper pinned over
her head and a handkerchief tied over her mouth. She was white with dust
from head to feet, and when she stooped to pick anything from the floor
the dust would fall from her paper head-covering in little heaps. About
seven feet from the mouth of the machine was a window through which
poured thick volumes of dust as it was belched out from the machine. I
placed a sheet of paper on the inner sill of the window and in twenty
minutes it was covered with a layer of fine dust, half an inch deep. Yet
that girl works midway between the window and the machine, in the very
centre of the volume of dust, sixty hours a week. These are a few of the
occupations in which the dangers arise from the forced inhalation of
dust.
In some occupations, such as silk-winding, flax-spinning, and various
processes in the manufacture of felt hats, it is necessary, or believed
to be necessary, to keep the atmosphere quite moist. The result of
working in a close, heated factory, where the air is artificially
moistened, in summer time, can be better imagined than described. So
long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint,
the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent
that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed. The children
who work in the dye rooms and print-shops of textile factories, and the
color rooms of factories where the materials for making artificial
flowers are manufactured, are subject to contact with poisonous dyes,
and the results are often terrible. Very frequently they are dyed in
parts of their bodies as literally as the fabrics are dyed. One little
fellow, who was employed in a Pennsylvania carpet factory, opened his
shirt one day and showed me his chest and stomach dyed a deep, rich
crimson. I mentioned the incident to a local physician, and was told
that such cases were common. “They are simply saturated with the dye,”
he said. “The results are extremely severe, though very often slow and,
for a long time, almost imperceptible. If they should cut or scratch
themselves where they are so thoroughly dyed, it might mean death.” In
Yonkers, N.Y., are some of the largest carpet factories in the United
States, and many children are employed in them. Some of the smallest
children are employed in the “drum room,” or print-shop, where the yarns
are “printed” or dyed. Small boys, mostly Slavs and Hungarians, push the
trucks containing boxes of liquid dye from place to place, and get it
all over their clothing. They can be seen coming out of the mills at
night literally soaked to the skin with dye of various colors. In the
winter time, after a fall of snow, it is possible to track them to their
homes, not only by their colored footprints, but by the drippings from
their clothing. The snow becomes dotted with red, blue, and green, as
though some one had sprinkled the colors for the sake of the variegated
effect.
Children employed as varnishers in cheap furniture factories inhale
poisonous fumes all day long and suffer from a variety of intestinal
troubles in consequence. The gilding of picture frames produces a
stiffening of the fingers. The children who are employed in the
manufacture of wall papers and poisonous paints suffer from slow
poisoning. The naphtha fumes in the manufacture of rubber goods produce
paralysis and premature decay. Children employed in morocco leather
works are often nauseated and fall easy victims to consumption. The
little boys who make matches, and the little girls who pack them in
boxes, suffer from phosphorous necrosis, or “phossy-jaw,” a gangrene of
the lower jaw due to phosphor poisoning. Boys employed in type foundries
and stereotyping establishments are employed on the most dangerous part
of the work, namely, rubbing the type and the plates, and lead poisoning
is excessively prevalent among them as a result. Little girls who work
in the hosiery mills and carry heavy baskets from one floor to another,
and their sisters who run machines by foot-power, suffer all through
their after life as a result of their employment. Girls who work in
factories where caramels and other kinds of candies are made are
constantly passing from the refrigerating department, where the
temperature is perhaps 20 degrees Fahr., to other departments with
temperatures as high as 80 or 90 degrees. As a result, they suffer from
bronchial troubles.
These are only a few of the many occupations of children that are
inherently unhealthful and should be prohibited entirely for children
and all young persons under eighteen years of age. In a few instances it
might be sufficient to fix the minimum age for employment at sixteen, if
certain improvements in the conditions of employment were insisted upon.
Other dangers to health, such as the quick transition from the heat of
the factory to the cold outside air, have already been noted. They are
highly important causes of disease, though not inherent in the
occupation itself in most cases. A careful study of the child-labor
problem from this largely neglected point of view would be most
valuable. When to the many dangers to health are added the dangers to
life and limb from accidents, far more numerous among child workers than
adults,[133] the price we pay for the altogether unnecessary and
uneconomic service of children would, in the Boer patriot’s phrase,
“stagger humanity,” if it could be comprehended.
No combination of figures can give any idea of that price. Statistics
cannot express the withering of child lips in the poisoned air of
factories; the tired, strained look of child eyes that never dance to
the glad music of souls tuned to Nature’s symphonies; the binding to
wheels of industry the little bodies and souls that should be free, as
the stars are free to shine and the flowers are free to drink the
evening dews. Statistics may be perfected to the extent of giving the
number of child workers with accuracy, the number maimed by dangerous
machines, and the number who die year by year, but they can never give
the spiritual loss, if I may use that word in its secular, scientific
sense. Who shall tally the deaths of childhood’s hopes, ambitions, and
dreams? How shall figures show the silent atrophy of potential genius,
the brutalizing of potential love, the corruption of potential purity?
In what arithmetical terms shall we state the loss of shame, and the
development of that less than brute view of life, which enables us to
watch with unconcern the toil of infants side by side with the idleness
of men?