movement and the various activities that have grown out of it to promote
the pleasures, advantages and opportunities of farm life together with
all the modern inventions, telephones, electric light, rural mail
delivery, the trolley, good roads and the automobile, I am sorry to say
have not served to check the onward march to the cities. The proportion
of our people living in rural districts declined from 63.9 per cent in
1890 to 53.7 per cent in 1910, and our experts in social economy assure
us that in all probability much more than half of our population will
be residents of urban communities before 1920. In many of the older
states beyond the eastern center of population more than 90 per cent
of all the people live in cities and towns with a population of more
than 2,500. During the past decade alone, according to the census of
1910, the increase in the urban population of the entire country has
been at the rate of 34.9 per cent as against only 11.1 per cent of
the rural population. In six states this increase of urban population
as against rural population has been over 100 per cent, and while not
one state has failed to show a large increase of urban population, the
increase of rural population has been negligible in many states and has
actually shown a considerable decrease in seven states. Unless some new
and unexpected change shall come it is reasonable to assume that the
next generation will find more than half the children of this country
in urban communities. There is a temptation to follow that diversity
afforded by a subject like that assigned me, which may lead us more
into the pleasantries that are supposed to be a part of the life of
all country boys. The field, the farm, the orchard, the meadows, the
babbling brooks; those recollections recalled in the rhymes of a Riley
from the jam and the pies over to old Aunt Mary’s, to the joys of the
old swimming hole or of these fall days when the frost is on the pumpkin
and the fodder’s in the shock. The pity of it is that most of these
legends of the country boy are too much legend and too little reality.
If it were not so we can scarcely account for the growing disposition of
country boys to flock to the city. I regret to say that I believe that
the call to the city that is reaching the country boys of the Nation
will prove to be more effective than any call to the country or “back to
the soil” movement that has so far been inaugurated. One of the chief
complaints we hear on every hand among the farmers of this country is
the difficulty of the problem of farm labor and the indisposition of
the boys and young men in any such numbers as there should be to become
interested in the farm. I remember listening to the almost pathetic story
of one farmer of the Northwest, who told me that every one of his five
sons had gone to the city, and he had been unable to induce one of them
to remain. He said they either complained of the hardships and the lack
of opportunity, or pined for the excitement, pleasure and possibilities
of the city. The very advantages that we had hoped would make farm life
more attractive to the youth of the Nation is also proving to be one
of the factors that would seem to emphasize its monotony. The daily
newspapers, the magazines, the trolley cars and automobiles and good
roads are bringing the youth in such complete touch with the city that
instead of promoting that satisfaction and contentment with the country
as we had expected these city advantages would do, it often has just the
reverse effect. I am not prepared to say that these modern conveniences
upon which we depended so much in the “back to the soil” movement will
not in the end increase rather than decrease the numbers of country boys.
I recently visited a city of about three thousand population in one of
the most rural of states. What did I find? It has its moving picture
shows along its Great White Way, limited to two or three blocks, with
a roller skating rink, dance hall, and other forms of excitement and
amusement—almost a perfect miniature of the larger city. The fact that
the youth of the farming community, through trolley cars and automobiles,
had convenient access to the city, where before it would have been more
difficult, I was assured only whetted the desire in the country boy for
the city life. It would seem then that we are booked for disappointment
in the hope that the extension of city conveniences to the farm is going
to increase the rural population and therefore the number of country
children.
COUNTRY AND CITY BOYS.
But except as it shall present difficulties in the growth and evolution
of modern civilization, I am not sure whether this condition, if it be
the condition, need be viewed with any great alarm. There is a gregarious
and sheep-like tendency in mankind to flock together. The phenomenon
presented by urban and rural growth must be a natural one or it would
not be so. It is simply presenting in the course of its natural growth
an occasional difficulty in the body politic as we have an occasional
disease in the growing body of the individual. It becomes our duty then,
in the one case just as much as in the other, to remedy the difficulty,
to direct the growth along natural and wholesome lines, and this calls
for work and coöperation among those factors that have to do with the
life of the city or country boy—home, school, neighborhood, church and
state.
It follows then that our difficulties, as they must develop from time
to time, will be with the city rather than the country boy. This is
not because the country boy is inherently any different from the city
boy—don’t forget that—any better or any worse, nor in my judgment
because he is capable of greater possibilities. It is rather because of
the environment and condition under which a great number of our boys
must in the future development of this country necessarily be reared. I
once attended a powwow of some Indian chiefs in North Dakota. There was
present old John Grass, the successor of Sitting Bull, and Red Tomahawk,
the slayer of the same old chief. I asked these Indian chiefs about
Indian children in their primitive days, in the days of the real country
and the wilderness. Did they lie? Did they steal? These chiefs assured
me that such things were practically unknown among Indian boys in the
days of their own childhood which was before the white man came. “But,”
said one of the chiefs, “when white man come Indian boy he steal, lie
just like white boy.”
I asked one of these Indian chiefs why it was that in their primitive
state stealing was unknown among Indian boys—and surely they were the
original country boys. The old chief grunted and a smile actually lit
up that otherwise stolid Indian face as he replied: “It is very simple,
there wasn’t anything to steal. The child’s wants were few and he had
what he wanted.” Neither was there any poverty, any crime. This virtue
of the original country boy in America was acclaimed without a taint of
pharisaism. For it was admitted that the honest little savage was no
better than his dishonest little progeny. It was rather a problem of
condition, of occasion, of environment, than one of inherent viciousness.
The wants of the little savage were few and generously supplied by
nature. There was no temptation, no occasion to steal.
This fact no more favors savagery than it disproves the advantages of
civilization. It is the law of nature that men should multiply and
populate the earth, and the instinct among the greater numbers to flock
together in cities is precisely the same as it was in the days of
savagery when smaller numbers flocked together in smaller groups more
widely distributed. We must meet the change by doing two things:
HOW TO MEET THE CHANGES.
First. Perfect our system of education. We need to improve our methods of
moral training. We must more and more develop heart and conscience that
our children may be equipped for moral as well as industrial efficiency.
Boys need strength, but most of all the strength that comes from within;
self-control, self-restraint; a yielding of more obedience to authority
and respect for law and the rights of others.
Second. The application of a system of real justice among men which means
an industrial, social and economic world in which every man shall really
have an opportunity to develop the best that is in him, and be assured
that he shall reap the joys, rewards and profits to be derived from his
own honest toil.
This means that the boy to keep pace with our modern civilization must be
better supplied with certain opportunities that are now largely denied
him.
New conditions necessarily create new problems. It is the law of growth
and development. Since these new conditions are to be found principally
in the cities, and since most of the boys who need our attention and
interest are in the cities, it follows that the problem of the child is
largely the problem of the city. But as the country becomes more closely
in touch with the city and many of its difficulties reach into the life
of the country boy, we will also in time find the difficulties of the one
are the difficulties of the other.
Whatever the city does for the child is done for the community as a
whole, for the child cannot profit without equal profit directly or
indirectly inuring to the entire community. It is difficult to put any
limit on the duty of the community to the child. It is coextensive with
that of the parent, if there be no parent, or if the parent be helpless,
or the child suffers from the parent’s neglect. This duty of the
community, once recognized and accepted, is bound to be extended until
indeed the community shall become one great family possessing some of the
attributes, duties and responsibilities for the child that in original
country life were limited to the particular family or family group of
the child. The first general and accepted duty of the community towards
the child was its education. Then came the demand for playgrounds,
natatoriums, baths, trade schools, recreation centers, medical
inspection, visiting nurses, dental clinics, and finally the school free
restaurant. That is as sure to come within the next ten years as the
playground and the recreation center has come in the past ten years. In a
word, there is absolutely nothing that the child needs which the parent
for any fair reason cannot furnish, which it is not the duty of the
community to supply. This is so because it is simply the struggle of the
state for itself. The child is the state; when the child is neglected the
state is neglected; when the child suffers the state suffers; when the
child is lost the state is lost. To say that the child is the chief asset
of the state is undoubtedly true, but it is short of the real truth. The
child is the state. It is, therefore, futile to oppose the movement going
on in this country for the conservation of childhood on the ground that
it is paternal. If there is anything in the scriptural injunction that “A
little child shall lead them,” it is surely making itself felt at this
period of our civilization. If we would conserve the real interests of
the children of the Nation, we have simply got to be paternal. The state
has got to be the over-parent. It cannot escape if it would; it would not
escape if it could.
PALLIATIVES AND CURES.
The last decade of agitation in behalf of the boys of the city was for
what is becoming more and more to be regarded as the palliatives. We
first asked for playgrounds only in certain bad neighborhoods, on the
theory that the children in that neighborhood were bad. We know now that
the children were no different from other children, and if they need
playgrounds, then all children need playgrounds, whether they be country
children or city children. The play instinct needs to be wisely directed
as much in one child as in another—in the country as truly as in the city.
We first asked for child labor law forbidding children to work in certain
industries, and we are realizing more and more that it is not a good
thing for the Nation to draw on the manhood of tomorrow by sacrificing
the childhood of today. (Applause) The recent report of the National
Bureau of Labor on juvenile delinquency and its relation to employment
makes perfectly clear the extra hazards and dangers to which children are
subjected from being too early forced into economic competition with men.
It demonstrates the necessity for not only more stringent child labor
laws, but the better enforcement of those we have. It explodes the idea
that the working boy and girl under 16 years of age is freer from dangers
of delinquency than the non-working child. It would seem indeed that the
playing child in the street is much less likely to go wrong there than
while engaged in those occupations in which they are mostly employed.
From what is undoubtedly a very thorough investigation and study of 4,839
cases of delinquents (of whom 561 were girls and 4,278 were boys), we
have carefully worked out for us interesting tables showing 2,416 working
as against 1,862 non-working delinquent boys, and 251 working as against
210 non-working delinquent girls, or a total number of 2,767 working
delinquent children as against 2,072 non-working delinquent children.
Added to these interesting figures is the further fact that the ratio of
working delinquents is very much larger than the non-working in all these
cities, varying in different cities from three to ten times as great as
the non-working, with the disproportion even more striking among the
girls, making it perfectly clear, as one chapter of the report concludes,
“that putting children to work prematurely is not an effective method of
training them for good citizenship.”
THE VALUE OF THE REPORT.
Another interesting fact brought out by the report is that the repeaters
or recidivists (those apprehended for the second to the tenth offense
as carefully tabulated in the report) are to be found mostly among the
working children with the proportions much larger among the younger
working children between 9 and 14 years of age. Up to this point the
scale in this respect constantly ascends, beginning to descend as the
working age approaches maturity.
The report is unusually fair in making every possible concession to a
variety of details and difficulties that might discredit its conclusions;
but even with all such concessions there isn’t any room to dispute its
final demonstration that working children not only contribute more
in actual numbers but in an alarmingly larger proportion than do the
non-workers to the criminal classes, and among repeaters or recidivists
the same condition is even more marked. No such interesting or reliable
set of tables has ever yet been added to the literature on this subject.
It forces upon us the idea that the virtues necessary to good citizenship
are not so much inherited as they are to be acquired. It follows that we
are doing hideous injustice to our children in unnecessarily subjecting
them to temptations which their untrained, immature souls are not yet
able to withstand. These temptations naturally enough are greatest among
the six groups of working boys who furnish the most delinquents. They are
well known to juvenile court officers. These six groups represent the
six classes of occupations yielding the greatest number of delinquents
out of the total number investigated. Proportionately they are, delivery
and errand boys 491, or 20.3 per cent; news-boys and bootblacks 449, or
18.6 per cent; office boys 46, or 1.9 per cent; street vendors 66, or 2.7
per cent; telegraph messengers 73, or 3 per cent; employed in amusement
resorts 51, or 2.1 per cent; or a total of 2,416, more than one-half of
the total number of 4,278 cases of delinquent boys investigated. The
greatest proportion of offenses among the boys are of course larceny.
This one offense constitutes more than half of all the offenses reported.
Putting these immature souls to work simply violates the supplication of
the Christian’s prayer “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
evil.” The temptation of dishonesty constantly besets the working child,
much more than the non-working child. The results shown are rather to be
expected. The next in order of popular offenses are incorrigibility and
disorderly conduct, terms so indefinite as to frequently include larceny.
Truancy appears only in the cases of 185, and begging in the cases of
only seven. Every juvenile officer will appreciate the more than probable
accuracy of these tables, for, with one or two exceptions of minor
importance, they are confirmed by their common experience, for which
heretofore reliable tables are rather scarce.
A FALLACY EXPLODED.
The tabulations concerning the parental condition of the delinquents
show equally creditable work. They are interesting as exploding another
popular fallacy (which indeed was long since exploded by Miss Jane
Addams and other champions of child labor laws) that most of the working
children were sons and daughters of widows. Only 419 boys or 17.3 per
cent of the entire number investigated were sons of widows, and only 185,
or 8.7 per cent, were orphans; while 1,318, or more than one-half of the
entire number, had both parents living. And again, curiously enough, the
tables show that proportionately the great majority of these delinquent
boys, employed or unemployed, came from average good homes. Seventy-six
and two-tenths per cent of the delinquent working boys are recorded as
coming from “fair or good homes,” and 71.6 per cent of the working and
non-working boys (that is, of the total number of delinquents) enjoy
the same favorable conditions in so far as their homes are concerned.
The results seem to prove what has often been emphasized by juvenile
officers, that a good home is not as complete a guarantee of a good
boy or girl as it would seem we ought to be entitled to expect. The
influences of the home—while of course the most important influence and
the one that counts most—is by no means the only influence under which a
child is placed, especially in that kind of city life that has come to
this country only in the past fifty years and which in every particular
is to become more terrific in the next fifty years, unless there be some
unexpected changes. It is furnishing in many respects a new kind of
environment under which most of our children are expected to be reared.
It means we have got to make war against the street, the conditions, the
environment, the causes, if we are to perform our full measure of duty to
our children.
Forty-four and seven-tenths per cent of the delinquent boys are children
of native born parents as against fifty-five and three-tenths per cent of
foreign born parents. Considering the far greater ratio of native born
parents, this clearly indicates that there is less control over their
children by foreign than by native parents.
But I do not wish to be misunderstood. I firmly believe in work even in
childhood. By this, I mean the right kind of work. It is not so much
a question of work as the amount of work, the kind of work and the
conditions under which that work is performed. This need not lessen our
belief in happiness in childhood. I want to say very candidly, that there
are a great number of children in this country from fourteen years of age
upward about whom I feel more alarmed at their failure to do or to know
how to do any kind of useful work than of any possibility of their being
overworked.
THE DANGER OF IDLENESS.
In our zeal for the protection of our boys subjected to extreme or
unnatural conditions, we must not lose sight of the dangers and
difficulties of idleness. There are thousands of boys in the cities of
this country who, if not employed at some useful thing, are generally
on the streets or in the alleys in the downtown public pool rooms and
bowling alleys, engaged not always in wholesome play, but too often in
idling, cigarette smoking and dirty story telling, with absolutely no
thought of work or the serious side of life. They are too constantly
occupied with thoughts of “having a good time,” and some rather perverted
notions of what a good time is. Too many of our boys especially reach the
age of moral and legal responsibility without the slightest conception of
work. They are too often more concerned as to how much they earn than how
well they do their work. In dealing with a certain class of youth in the
juvenile court, I say without hesitation that the most hopeless fellow
in the world is the boy who will not work—the boy who has not learned
how to work, or the value and importance of work. There is always hope
for the boy who works, especially the boy who likes to work. I believe
in the “strenuous life,” and I think its importance should be taught our
boys and girls at an early age. There are too many young people in this
country looking for “the life of ignoble ease.” I can say all of this
to persons sincerely interested in the protection of the children from
degradation or unnatural labor, and yet not be understood as depreciating
the importance of wise child labor laws and their rigid enforcement for
the protection of the children of the Union. But we must be careful,
in doing this, never to underestimate the importance of work—the right
kind of work, a certain amount of work—in the life of every child, and
especially that teaching which inculcates good impressions in the life
of every child as to the necessity and importance of labor. On the other
hand, my experience is that most boys will work if given any kind of
an encouraging opportunity. The lack of a chance is often responsible
for idleness. At least 90 per cent of our boys and girls are forced out
of the grammar school to fight the battles of life. They must have a
chance to earn a living under such reasonably favorable conditions as
not to destroy all chance of happiness or else they must become idlers
and loafers. My own experience is that our common school education too
often fails to equip them for earning more than the most scanty wages.
An opportunity between the sixth and eighth grades in our city schools
for children of the toiling masses to learn some kind of useful trade
or valuable work with the hands—to learn to do what their fathers do—is
a reform in our educational system which the champions of child labor
must, in my opinion, espouse if they would round out a systematic and
consistent plan of battle in this fight for the salvation of the children.
PLACES FOR THE BOYS.
I want to see the time come in this country when a boy of fourteen years
of age up may be a valuable help to the plumber, the carpenter or the
printer at a decent wage, instead of going to the messenger service and
the street. I do not believe that juvenile labor should trespass upon the
legitimate occupations of men and women, but we must equip these children
for some kind of industrial efficiency and usefulness, or enlarge our
reformatories and prisons for their care and maintenance. One of the
saddest things in my experience as judge of the juvenile court has been
the little fellows who have requested me to send them to the reform
school in order that they might learn a trade. The principal of a school
once said to me: “Judge, why don’t you send that boy to the reform school
so that he can learn a trade?” On behalf of the boy, I replied: “In
God’s name, why don’t you people on the Board of Education give him an
opportunity to learn a trade at home?”
I ask you, is it fair, just or decent that in most of the cities of
this country an American boy has no opportunity to learn a trade, to
capacitate himself for joyous, useful work with his hands, unless he
commits a crime? And yet, I am compelled to say to you, that such is the
condition in a very large section of this country.
But there are wonderful changes just ahead of us in our educational
system. These changes are bound to come if we are to make progress, and
we are making progress.
If the Nation is to do its real duty to its boys—whether they be city
boys or country boys, its children, city children or country children—it
should pass the bill that has for the last six years been repeatedly
offered in Congress providing for the establishment of a children’s
bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor.
CHILDREN VERSUS ANIMALS.
It is a kind of protection that is sadly needed in this country, and
especially from the government we need a systematic scheme of national
investigation of all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and
child life. It would in no manner interfere with the activities and
agencies provided by the states but, on the contrary, through the help
and assistance that would come from the national government, do much to
strengthen all such agencies. Such a bureau would be of equal if not
superior importance to those now existing in several of the departments.
For instance, the Department of Agriculture, where we have a bureau of
animal industry, plant industry, of soils, of chemistry, and the like.
The Government spends annually millions of dollars investigating the
diseases of animals, the inspection of cattle, hogs, sheep, etc., and
the results obtained by the able experts are published and circulated
generously to the farmers and stock raisers of the country. The work
of these bureaus has more than justified the expenditure of money by
the Government. If we have a somewhat analogous bureau dealing with
the welfare of the child life of the Nation, it would be doing no more
for them than we are now doing for cattle and hogs. We have no right
to neglect the child crop of this country. It is scarcely necessary to
repeat that it is our most valuable crop, for there are born every year
in this country over two million children. What the state is, what the
Nation is ten, twenty, or thirty years from now depends not so much on
our business, our ranches, our great industries, as upon the kind of
men we have directing the great industries, the business, the farms,
the ranches of this country, and what these men are then depends upon
how well we care for our children now. If there are diseases among the
cattle of the Nation, or decrease in some of the staple cereal crops
of the Nation, the Government immediately becomes interested and its
investigators and experts are busy everywhere to ascertain the causes,
to furnish the remedies, to coöperate with the people for the protection
of the material wealth of the Nation. Now, the child crop of the Nation
is not to be measured in dollars and cents for as important as such a
standard may be it is insufficient to furnish a scale for measuring
the value of soul stuff. Yet if there is a large increase in infant
mortality, of the dependency or delinquency of the childhood of the
Nation, there is no bureau under the Federal Government that is even
required to become interested in the matter. And, indeed, there are
very few states that provide sufficient and adequate agencies to carry
on the work that must be done if we are true to our children. It is
freely admitted that of the 300,000 little children—out of the 2,000,000
born annually—that die annually, one-half of the deaths are preventable
by the knowledge and application of preventive measures. If through
the dissemination of proper information about children, such as is
disseminated concerning cattle, an appreciable per cent of these children
could be saved as they certainly would be saved, such a bureau would more
than justify its establishment.
SOME PRACTICAL EXPERIMENTS.
I remember recently, when the Children’s bill in England was being
considered, receiving a letter, I think, from one of the under
secretaries, to get certain facts, and it was simply impossible to
provide the information that was needed and expected that this Government
could furnish; and I, as a judge of one of the courts of this country
dealing with children, felt very much embarrassed that we could not say
that our Government was able to furnish such information.