It is less easy to understand the problem of child labor in its relation
to parental responsibility. It is continually asked: “Why do parents
send their little ones to work at such an early age? Is it possible that
there are so many parents who are so indifferent to the welfare of their
children that they send them to work, and surround them with perils and
evil influences, or are there other, deeper reasons? Are the parents
helpless to save their little ones?” These are questions which have
never yet been satisfactorily answered; they deal with a phase of the
problem which has never been fully investigated, notwithstanding that it
is of vital importance.
As already noted, when the manufacturers of England sought first to get
child workers for the cotton and woollen mills, they found the parents
arrayed against them, defending their children. For a long time no
self-respecting father or mother would allow a child to go to the
factories to work, and it remained for many years a brand of social
disgrace to have one’s children so employed. Not until their pride was
conquered by poverty, not until they were subjugated by hunger and
compelled to surrender and accept the inevitable, did the parents send
their children into the factories. It was poverty, bitter poverty, which
led the first “free” child into the mills to economic servitude, and I
am disposed to think that poverty is still the main reason why parents
send their children to body-and-soul-destroying toil.
Many of those whose work for the enactment of legislation to protect the
children from the ills of premature labor entitles them to lasting honor
and gratitude, have shown an inclination to minimize the extent to which
poverty is responsible for child labor. The opponents of child-labor
legislation have so strongly insisted upon the hardships which would
follow if parents were deprived of their children’s earnings, and have
so eloquently pleaded the cause of the “poor widowed mothers,” as almost
to make the employment of children appear as a philanthropic enterprise.
Very often, it seems to me, the advocates of child-labor legislation, in
their eagerness to refute their critics, have resorted to arguments
which rest upon exceedingly slight foundations of fact, and, in this
case especially, laid insufficient stress upon the logical answer. The
more closely the problem is scrutinized and investigated, the larger the
influence of poverty will appear, I think. At the same time, it is well
to remember that poverty is not the only cause by any means. There are
many other causes, some closely associated with poverty, others only
remotely or not at all. Ignorance, cupidity, indifference, feverish
ambition to “get on,”—these are a few of the many other causes which
might be named.
It is declared, then, that actual inquiry has shown that the claim that
the earnings of the children are necessary to the support of the family,
and that widows and others would suffer serious poverty if their
children under fifteen were not permitted to work, is “rarely if ever
justified.” Mrs. Frederick Nathan, of the Consumers’ League of the City
of New York, whose splendid devotion to the cause of social
righteousness lends weight to her words, expresses this view with
admirable clearness. She says: “Whenever preventive measures for child
labor are enacted or enforced, there is always a wail heard to the
effect that the child’s labor is absolutely requisite for the living
expenses of the family. Yet, upon investigation, this statement is
rarely corroborated. In Illinois, there was recently enacted a law
prohibiting children under sixteen from working more than eight hours a
day, or after 7 P.M. Thousands of diminutive toilers were discharged.
Then a cry of hardship went up in behalf of hundreds of families.
Philanthropic women undertook an investigation, supposing they would
find a number of cases in which the wages of the working child were
absolutely necessary to the family income. To their amazement they found
only three families in Chicago, and five in the remainder of the state,
where this was true. In every other case it was discovered that either
the parent or older children could support the family, or some relative
was willing to assist until the child reached the legal age.”[149]
Where there are so many coöperating causes, it would be easy to
overestimate the importance of any one, and correspondingly easy to
underestimate it. How the investigations in Illinois were conducted,
what standards were adopted by the investigators, I do not know, and
cannot, therefore, in the absence of specified data, express an opinion
upon the validity of the conclusions drawn. Frankly, however, I distrust
them. Not long since I heard of a case in which a “philanthropic lady
investigator” decided that the wages of a child of thirteen were not
necessary to the maintenance of the family, because she “had a father in
regular employment.” It did not, apparently, occur to her that $9 a week
was too little to support decently a family of six persons.
Whatever the nature of the Illinois investigation, I am certain that in
my own experience the proportion of cases in which there is actual
dependence upon what the children earn is very much larger. It must not
be forgotten in discussing this question that although a child may earn
only $1.50 a week, that sum may mean a great deal to the family. It may
mean the difference between living in a comparatively good house on a
decent street and going to a foul tenement in a bad neighborhood. It may
mean the difference between coal and no coal in winter, or ice and no
ice in summer. As a poor woman said to me quite recently, “Joe only
earns thirty cents a day, but that thirty cents means supper for all
five in the family.” The investigations of Mr. Nichols in the
coal-mining and textile-manufacturing towns,[150] of Mr. Kellogg
Durland,[151] and, particularly, the inquiries made in New Jersey
concerning the immediate effects of the Child Labor Law of 1904,[152]
all tend to show that the dependence of families upon children’s
earnings is much greater than the Illinois figures would indicate. I
venture the opinion that there is not a Settlement worker in America who
has studied this problem whose experience would confirm the optimism of
the Illinois investigators. I am certain that within a radius of three
blocks from the little Settlement in which this is written, and with
which I am at present most familiar, there are more families known to be
absolutely dependent upon the earnings of young children than were found
in the whole State of Illinois, according to the report quoted. I know
of at least twice as many such families as were found in Illinois living
in this little city with its population of about sixty thousand as
against the nearly 5,000,000 in Illinois. Settlement workers in various
parts of the country have, without exception, declared the Illinois
report to be absolutely at variance with their experience.
In the hope that I might be able to gather sufficient accurate data to
warrant some fairly definite conclusions upon this point, I spent
several weeks making careful personal investigations into the matter in
four states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. I
made inquiries into 213 cases, first getting the children’s stories and
then carefully investigating them. The results are clearly set forth in
the accompanying schedule, but explanation of a few points may be
helpful to the reader.
In choosing a wage standard to represent the primary poverty line, I
somewhat arbitrarily fixed upon $10 per week. In either of the four
states named, such a wage must mean poverty and lead to the employment
of children at the earliest possible moment. Intemperance appears in
four cases, but that does not mean that it did not enter into other
cases at all. In the four cases noted the fathers were earning from $12
to $18 per week, and while it is possible that with such wages they
might be honestly and honorably poor, since even $18 is not a very
princely wage, it is a fact that their expenditures upon drink
constituted the real cause of the poverty which forced their children to
work. On the other hand, I do not suppose that all the cases of child
labor due to the primary poverty of their families are noted. In the
last column several cases are given of children who were “sick when
attending school,” or who “could not get on at school.” For reasons
given in an earlier chapter, I am inclined to believe that these cases
would have to be transferred to the other column if it were only
possible to investigate them more fully.