THE CITIZEN’S LIBRARY
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ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND
SOCIOLOGY
EDITED BY
RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY,
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
SOME ETHICAL GAINS
THROUGH LEGISLATION
THE CITIZEN’S LIBRARY OF ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND SOCIOLOGY
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=SOME ETHICAL GAINS THROUGH LEGISLATION.= By FLORENCE KELLEY.
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_THE CITIZEN’S LIBRARY_
Some Ethical Gains
Through Legislation
BY
FLORENCE KELLEY
GENERAL SECRETARY
OF THE NATIONAL CONSUMERS LEAGUE
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1910
_All Rights Reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and Electrotyped.
Published October, 1905
Reprinted July, 1910
THE MASON-HENRY PRESS
Syracuse, New York.
To
C. B. K.
PREFACE
The substance of this volume has grown out of the writer’s experience
as special agent for the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Illinois for
an investigation of the needle-trades in the tenements of Chicago, in
1892; as Chief Inspector of Factories of that state from 1893 to 1897;
as agent in charge of the Chicago division of the investigation of the
“Slums of Great Cities” for the Department of Labor at Washington; and
as Secretary of the National Consumers’ League from 1899 to the date
of publication; but chiefly as a resident for thirteen years beginning
in 1892, first at Hull-House in Chicago and afterward at the Nurses’
Settlement in New York. Lest it seem strange that one of the laity
should discuss statutes and the decisions of courts of last resort, it
may be well to state that the writer has for many years been a member
of the bar of Illinois.
The subject matter has been presented in part to the students of
several universities and colleges; and published, also in part, in the
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the
American Journal of Sociology, the Chautauquan and Charities, to which
acknowledgment is due for courteous permission to reprint. Thanks are
due also to the West Publishing Company for the text of decisions;
and to patient friends whose searching criticism has led to many
modifications both of substance and form.
While the present volume was in press, Mayor Dunne of Chicago appointed
to the Board of Education of that city, Miss Jane Addams of Hull-House,
Mrs. Emmons Blaine and Dr. Cornelia De Bey. It remains to be seen how
far these able and public spirited citizens may disprove the argument
advanced in chapter V.
That portion of this book which is of permanent value is to be found
in the appendices. These are commended to the careful attention of the
reader because, without a full understanding of the judicial decisions
thus brought together, it is impossible to comprehend the difficulties
which have been overcome in the sadly incomplete process of freeing
the conscience of the purchasing public from participation in gross
industrial evils; and to estimate justly the obstacles which still
beset the path of the growing body of citizens of the Republic who
elect to pursue this discouraging yet indispensable line of civic duty,
the permanent establishment of ethical gains through legislation.
FLORENCE KELLEY.
NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER, 1905.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE RIGHT TO CHILDHOOD 3
Young Children Working in Tenement Houses 6
Young Children in Domestic Work 8
Children in Street Occupations 11
Telegraph and Messenger Boys 15
Children in Retail Trade 26
Children in Manufacture 33
The Glass Bottle Industry 43
CHAPTER II
THE CHILD, THE STATE, AND THE NATION 58
Consequences of Recognition of the Child’s Right
to Exemption from Work 66
Inter-State Aspect of the Right to Childhood 81
Legislation Needed in the Near Future 91
A United States Commission for Children 99
CHAPTER III
THE RIGHT TO LEISURE 105
The Unsought Leisure of Prosperous Women 112
Enforced Idleness is not Leisure 116
Increased Speed Calls for Leisure 120
Methods of Establishing the Right to Leisure 125
CHAPTER IV
JUDICIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE RIGHT TO LEISURE 127
The Right to Leisure Accorded to Public Servants 128
The Right to Leisure of Wage-Earning Women
and Children 132
The Illinois Decision of 1895 (Ritchie _vs._ The
People) 139
The Right to Leisure of Workingmen 145
Trade Agreements and Statutes 165
CHAPTER V
THE RIGHT OF WOMEN TO THE BALLOT 172
Women’s Opportunities on Public Boards and
Commissions 173
Need of Women in Educational Work 178
Protection of Children in Colorado 190
Advantages of the Recognition of the Right of
Women to the Ballot 195
Right of Women to a Share in the Enactment of
Marriage and Divorce Laws 206
CHAPTER VI
THE RIGHTS OF PURCHASERS 209
Ignorance of Conditions of Production 212
Some Typical Purchasers 216
Efforts to Enlighten Purchasers 220
CHAPTER VII
THE RIGHTS OF PURCHASERS, AND THE COURTS 229
The New York Decision of 1884 (In re Jacobs) 230
The Development and Attempted Regulation of
the Sweating System 235
Trade Unions and the Union Label 240
Ethical Loss Through Lack of Legislation 245
APPENDIX I
CANTON COTTON MILLS _vs._ EDWARDS, SUPREME COURT
OF GEORGIA, JUNE 10, 1904 256
APPENDIX II
RITCHIE _vs._ THE PEOPLE, SUPREME COURT OF ILLINOIS,
MARCH 14, 1895 259
APPENDIX III
HOLDEN _vs._ HARDY, SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED
STATES, FEBRUARY 28, 1898 280
APPENDIX IV
IN RE JACOBS, COURT OF APPEALS OF NEW YORK, JANUARY
20, 1885 306
APPENDIX V
PURE FOOD BILL 325
SOME ETHICAL GAINS
THROUGH LEGISLATION
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] One of the curiosities of legislation is that provision of the
penal code of New York which reads as follows: Penal Code--Sec. 292a
(Laws 1893, Ch. 692): “A corporation or person employing messenger
boys who knowingly sends or permits any person to send any messenger
boy to any disorderly house, unlicensed saloon, inn, tavern or other
unlicensed place, where malt or spiritous liquors or wines are sold, on
any errand or business whatsoever, _except to deliver telegrams at the
door of such house_, is guilty of a misdemeanor, and incurs a penalty
of fifty dollars, to be recovered by the district attorney.”
[2] See Appendix I.