CHAPTER VIII_The Century of the Child

CHILD LABOUR AND THE CRIMES OF CHILDREN

Leaving aside questions of heredity and kindred topics, and considering

only the conditions under which the child is born, developed, and

reared, it is terrible to contemplate the misfortunes which happen to

children through lack of insight on the part of their mothers. Doctors

are never tired of telling what malformations tight-lacing causes. How

many children in the first year of their life become blind through

neglect. We only mention here some of the troubles which crude ignorance

or lack of conscience on the part of the mothers inflict on themselves

or on their children. There must be noticed too the uncertainty and the

want of system in the care of children that come from such ignorance. A

thorough improvement in all these things is not to be expected until

women have secured universal suffrage, and until they, at the same age

in which men serve their years of military service, are legally obliged

to pass through a period of training lasting just as long, devoting

themselves to the care of children, hygiene, and sick nursing. No other

exceptions must be made, except those which exempt a man from military

service. Such duties done for one's country would come for many women

just at the time in which their interest in the subject is awakened by

marrying or the thought of marrying. This training would give a

profounder meaning to their thoughts on this subject. But even women who

never become mothers themselves would in this way learn certain general

principles of psychology, hygiene, and care of the sick, that they might

make use of afterwards in every station of life. Further, I look for

increasing limitations of the right of parents over children. Such

limitations I mean as those which have forbidden the exposure of

children, have imposed penalties for child murder, for cruelty towards

children, and the laws which have enforced obligatory attendance at

school. In England there are organisations which investigate the

treatment of children at home and which prevent cruelties against them.

Mothers who forget their duties can be reported and punished with

imprisonment; neglectful fathers can be made to support their children,

etc.; and where parents show themselves hopelessly incompetent children

can be taken from them by law. In the different states of Germany there

are also laws which allow children to be taken from parents who, through

misuse of that relationship, injure the child's spiritual or bodily

welfare. Children receive this so-called compulsory training in cases,

too, where it is necessary to preserve them from moral destruction. The

compulsory training may be carried out either in a suitable family or in

institutions; it continues up to the eighteenth year. A notable

provision is that which places the supervision over such children, in

the hands of women.

An increased extension of the right of society in this direction is one

of its most important provisions for self-protection, and is just as

legitimate a limitation of individual freedom, as the laws to prevent

the extension of contagious diseases. Unfortunately such regulations are

often made ineffective by red tape. The parents or guardians of the

neglected child must be admonished; the unruly child must be warned, and

if this is not sufficient, the law provides that it must be disciplined.

All of these provisos are absolutely senseless in such cases. By such

warnings bad parents are not instructed in the art of training their

children, nor is an incorrigible child to be led by admonitions to

change its character, if he is left in the surroundings which have

caused his degeneration. By corporal punishment administered in the

presence of witnesses, a child already accustomed to cuffs and blows is

made more hardened and shameless. A person with only a superficial

knowledge of the subject, enough to understand the causes which produce

such parents and such children, soon realises that he is concerned in

each detail with the infinite horizon of the social question. It is

clear for example that low wages, combined with the work of women and

children, are the main factors in poor dwellings, insufficient food, and

bad clothing. The fact that the wife works out of the house causes the

neglect of the children and the home. The lodging-house system is the

result of the lack of dwellings; want of comfort at home causes the

husband to frequent saloons and public houses. All these factors, taken

together, cause immorality and intemperance; these last again produce

those physical and mental diseases to which children are often heirs at

their birth.

Leaving out of discussion the notion that by God's help the

battlefields are covered with torn, maimed beings, with whose destroyed

brains innumerable thoughts and feelings are extinguished which could

have enriched humanity, I know no more abnormal idea than the custom of

people speaking of a guardian angel when a chance has kept two children

from an accident. Where is this guardian angel in the innumerable other

cases of misfortune: when children remain alone because their mother

must go to work and they fall out of the window or into the fire? When

they lose their eyesight in dark cellars? When they are pressed to death

because in miserable lodgings they have to share a bed with their

parents? When the parents are drunk and the children lose their lives?

Where is this guardian angel when parents murder their children, from

religious fanaticism or disgust of life: when the children themselves,

tired of life or through fear of parental cruelty, take their own lives?

Where are these protective angels on the occasions when they are most

wanted?--in the narrow streets of great cities, in the great industrial

centres where lack of sunlight, of pure air, and of all the other

primary conditions for the development of soul and body, undermines the

bodily strength and efficiency of children before their birth?

To see the hand of Providence in an accidental case of preservation,

while the same Providence is released from all share in natural

occurrences, from all part in the terrible phenomena of society, that

fill every second of the earth's existence with terror, is a relic of

superstition to be overcome if man is to be filled with a sense of

obligation to conditions he must master and mould. Modern man is ever

becoming more and more his own Providence; he has already protected

himself against fire by fire engines and fire insurance; against the sea

by life-saving stations; against smallpox and cholera, diphtheria and

tuberculosis, he has found other means of defence. The blind belief that

death is dependent on God's will man is losing by the witness of

statistics which declare that duration of life increases with improved

sanitary condition; which show that when disease or summer heat mows

down the children of the poor in dark tenements the rich man can

preserve his own children in his healthy, light dwelling.

Every man who has his heart in the right spot does not wait for an

angel, but rushes to save a child from danger. But the superstitious

belief of the majority of people in God's Providence perhaps will cause

the same man to regard with complete apathy conditions by which millions

and millions of children are yearly sacrificed. Doctors know that the

destruction caused by bacteria is insignificant, as compared with

pauperism as a cause of disease. Mothers who have over-exerted

themselves, drunken fathers, bad dwellings, like those where the poor

dry out newly built houses for the rich, induced by the low rate of

rents, insufficient nourishment, inherited diseases, especially

syphilis, too early work,--all this shows its result in the emaciated,

shrivelled, ulcerated bodies of children who occasionally are cured of

their momentary disease in hospitals, but cannot be freed from the

results of the conditions of life under which they were born and brought

up. The efforts of doctors will be in vain while they, like the other

factors in society, do not devote their whole energy to avoiding

diseases, instead of healing them. What they can now do in the way of

prevention is but a palliative in comparison with the incurable evil

which flourishes in abundance. The situation will remain as it is so

long as hygiene does not receive the same attention in society as the

soul. This solicitude may take the form of religious edification, or

intellectual enlightenment, but it remains nothing but a cut flower,

stuck in a dust heap.

It is possible, with sufficient certainty, to show from criminal

statistics that degenerate children are the creation of society itself.

By allowing them to be forced into "the path of virtue," by punishment,

society behaves like a tyrant, who has put out a man's eyes and then

beats him because he cannot by himself find his road.

The categorical imperative for the social consciousness at the present

moment, is an effective legislation for the protection of children and

women.

Wherever industry is developed, the woman is taken away from the home,

the child from play and school. In the period of guilds, women and

children worked in the house, and in the workshop of the husband. But

since the factory system has constantly restricted the household work of

woman, industrial occupations on the scale of modern capitalism can

satisfy its needs for cheaper work by woman's work. This like children's

work has forced down in many places the pay of adult workmen. The pay

with which a married man can care for his family by his work is now

divided among several members of the family. As long as special work

required great personal bodily strength or developed manual dexterity,

it fell as a rule to the men, not to women or children. But the natural

protection of women and children disappeared with the introduction of

machinery. In many cases working a machine required neither strength nor

dexterity. In other cases, like cotton spinning or mining, delicate

fingers were more valued because they were more adaptable, tender bodies

more desirable because they were smaller.

In England the work of women and children first reached its highest

point. The poorhouses sent crowds of children to the wool weaving

industry in Lancashire, children who worked in shifts at the same

machine and slept in the same dirty beds. The population in the

industrial districts pined away, as the result; diseases unknown before

came into existence; ignorance and roughness increased. Women and

children from four to five years old worked fourteen to eighteen hours.

The report of the investigations made on this subject caused Elizabeth

Barrett to write her poem, "The Cry of the Children" that made the

employers of children so indignant, but which helped to produce the Ten

Hour bill. This bill laid down that women, children, and young persons

should not work more than ten hours a day in textile factories. This law

was succeeded by others of the same type. Similar conditions in other

lands have produced similar legislation. In Saxony, Belgium, Alsace, and

the Rhine Provinces the results of the system seemed to be just as

frightful as in England. On the Rhine, as early as the year 1838, a

Prussian army officer noticed that the number of those able to bear arms

had diminished as a result of the degenerating influence of woman and

child labour. But notwithstanding the introduction of this legislation

generally, the labour of women and children continues. It takes the most

destructive forms in those occupations which lie outside of the sphere

of legislation. There are places in which child labour is as shocking as

it was in England in 1848. In Russia, in the Bastmat weaving industry,

children of three or four years have been found at work; and masses of

children under ten working as much as eighteen hours a day. In Germany

the toy industry can show as cruel figures in connection with children's

work, all the more cruel because in order to provide enjoyment for happy

children the living energy of others is forced out of existence.

Industrial work at home is done by children four to five years old,

while the age limit for child labour in factories, both in Germany and

in Switzerland, is fourteen years. The government of Denmark has

proposed the same limit of age. In Italy most of the crippled young

children were brought up in the sulphur districts of Sicily, crowded

together in low galleries, burdened with heavy sacks at an age at which

their tender limbs under such conditions must inevitably and incurably

be contorted. As early as twelve and thirteen years old many of them are

incapable of work. In the magnesium mines of Spain, quantities of

children six to eight years old are kept at work; through the poisonous

odours they fall victims to severe diseases. Other children carrying

heavy pitchers on their head are employed to water dry places. The child

is a cheaper means of transportation than the ass.

Despite protective legislation the average of height and weight in the

Lancashire children is and continues to be lower than anywhere else. Of

the two thousand children investigated in this district only one hundred

and fifty-one were really sound and strong; one hundred and ninety-eight

were seriously crippled; the rest more or less under the standard of

good health. All work in the cotton industry done from six o'clock in

the morning till five in the evening changes, so this doctor says, the

hopeful ten-year-old child into the thin pallid thirteen-year-old boy.

This degeneration of the population in industrial districts is becoming

a serious danger for England's future.

After people are convinced that all civilised nations are exposed to

this same danger, industrial and street work of children will be

everywhere forbidden. This will be a victory for the principle of child

protection, which, in this as in other like spheres, was opposed at

first on both economic and industrial grounds. Among these was the

uncontested right of fathers to decide on the work of their children.

It is not alone the question of child labour that reveals the low

standpoint taken by the civil authorities of Europe, but it is proved

also by the introduction of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is

as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is

ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other

effect than a hardening one, when the blow is delivered in cold blood

long after the act occasioning it has been done. Most of the victims

are so accustomed to blows already that the physical effect is little or

nothing, but they awaken feelings of detestation against a society which

so avenges its own faults. If the soul of the child is sensitive,

corporal punishment can produce deep spiritual torment, as was the case

with Lars Kruse, the hero of Skagen, who some years ago met his death by

drowning. Everybody knows his story from the fine account of him by the

Danish poet, Drachmann. Lars, in his childhood, had taken a plank, a

piece of driftwood, and sold it. For this he was condemned to be

punished. Till late in life, what he had suffered was ever present with

him. He was not ashamed of his action but of his punishment--a

punishment which embittered the whole life of a really great character.

The blows administered by society are inflicted on children whose

poverty and neglected education are in most cases responsible for their

faults. The victims, often emaciated by hunger, and trembling with shame

or terror, can experience no spiritual emotion fit to be the basis of

moral shame.

If the statistics of the life-history of those who are so disciplined

were revealed, we should find that the majority come from, and return

to, a home where the mother, as a result of working out of the home, is

hindered from caring for her children. They have suffered from the

custom of sleeping together, the result of overcrowded dwellings, with

its demoralising influence. It may be the child has commenced to make

his living on the street as messenger, cigar picker, or newspaper boy,

or has been engaged in such like occupations, and so in his immediate

neighbourhood has seen the luxurious living of the upper classes, which

he strives to imitate. Hardly a week passes that the street youngster

does not read about the embezzlements, fraudulent acts in the

capitalistic classes, frequently committed by grey-headed men, whose

childish impressions go back to the good old time, on whom the lax

education of the present could not have any influence. No day passes in

which he does not see how the representatives of the upper classes, old

and young alike, satisfy their desires for pleasure. But from the child

of the tenement and the street, people expect Spartan virtue or try to

thrash it into him. It is hard to say which is greater here, stupidity

or savagery.

While the upper classes show that they are crude, immoderate, lazy,

devoted to enjoying themselves; while the majority are aiming at

getting and spending money; while so many are able to eat without

working, and so few can find work who look for it; while careless luxury

lives side by side with careless necessity, the upper class has not the

shadow of right to expect an improved lower class. The society of the

present day creates and maintains a social system whose effects are

notorious in the economic crimes of the upper and lower class alike. It

is not surprising that great cities are full of tramps and street

urchins, like a spoilt cheese full of maggots.

A destroyed home life, an idiotic school system, premature work in the

factory, stupefying life in the streets, these are what the great city

gives to the children of the under classes. It is more astonishing that

the better instincts of human nature generally are victorious in the

lower class, than the fact that this result is occasionally reversed.

There is another argument against child labour, to be found in its

immediate effect on industry itself.

Working men trained in the schools are everywhere notoriously most

efficient; even in Russia, where popular education is still so

defective, this experience has been noted. The working man able to read

and to write receives without exception on that account a higher pay

than the illiterate ones who can be only used for the coarsest kind of

work. The present development of German industry, as compared with

English, is to be ascribed among other things to the superior

educational training of the German people. The intensive and intelligent

work of the American working man has apparently the same cause. But when

children made sleepy by work in the factory enter evening schools, or

when children are taken too early from school, they lose under

continuous hard work the desire and possibility of adapting themselves

to a higher education; they become organic machines which feed the

inorganic ones. This must cause the value of their work to decline.

These organic machines are passive, they do not try to improve their

condition of life, as do the higher workmen. Besides living machines

cannot increase the product of labour. Intelligent working men who watch

over their own rights and increase them are also those who learn easiest

new methods of work, discover new inventions which are of advantage to

their line of work, and so increase the value of their product. It is

only by the growth of this class of workmen, that any country to-day

can stand the pressure of foreign competition. But the chief condition

of this growth is that the bodily and mental powers of the child shall

be used for his own development in school games and play; at the same

time his capacity for work must be trained by occupation at home and in

the technical school, not by work in a factory.

Some years ago, a poem created a furore over the whole civilised world,

from Canada to the islands of Polynesia. The author of this poem, Edwin

Markham, was inspired by Millet's simple and wonderful picture, _The Man

with the Hoe_. An agricultural labourer with bowed back stands there,

one hand folded on the other, supported on the handle of the hoe. Millet

in him has eternalised the expression so often observed in old workmen,

especially in those who are worn out by day labour. The man's face is

empty, says nothing, every human aspect has disappeared; we only see in

his face the look of the patient beast of burden. For while moderate

work ennobles the animal in man, immoderate work kills humanity in the

beast.

Millet's picture was to the poet, who was once himself a slave to bodily

labor, a revelation, the eternal artistic type of the generation of man

bowed down from childhood under the yoke of labour. In one strophe after

another of that finely conceived poem he pictures this being that does

not sorrow, and never hopes, his destroyed soul for which Plato and the

Pleiades, the sunrise and the rose, all the treasures of mind and

nature, are nothing. The poet asks sovereigns, masters, and governors

how they will restore to this thing a soul, how they will give it music

and dreams. What, he asks, will become of the people who have made this

being what it is now; when after a thousand years' silence God's

terrible question is answered,--What has become of his soul.

Many such employers of labour go to church, they hear explanations of

texts like these, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto ... even the least of

these, ... ye did it unto me. All that ye wish others should do to you,

that do to them." It does not occur to them to think how Jesus, the most

inconsiderate of men, at the right place, would have characterised their

demands to have small children employed in glass works at ten years of

age. It never occurs to them to ask whether they would like to see their

own children in these factories or others like them.

This complete dualism between life and teaching in our present-day

society will continue to exist until people realise that the opinions

about life which are expressed by the lips, but are denied by deeds,

should no longer be proclaimed as an absolute explanation of life and

rule of life. The permanent element in Christianity can only be realised

through the conviction that mankind is master of Christianity just as it

is over all its other creations. The ardent idea of the Galilean

carpenter, fraternity among men, will give man no rest until man has

wiped out the last trace of injustice in his social relations. But the

thought will not be realised by those ideals regarded by Jesus as

absolute. This is the point of view which has crippled man's conscience

and it applies equally to the realisation of this and all other ideals.

An ideal impossible to carry out under the ordinary assumptions of human

life, yet to which men have given the authority of a divine revelation,

and which they conceive of as absolute, this is the main cause for the

demoralisation which has gone on for nineteen hundred years. The history

of humanity has really revealed to men how this absolute ideal of theirs

has been betrayed. The cause of this demoralisation must cease before

existence can be remodelled seriously by those who are convinced that

ideals can really be binding.

People will then not do as they do now, misuse the name of the Father,

whom Jesus has taught men to proclaim with their lips, will not murder

one another _en masse_ on the battlefield, to solve political and

economic questions of supremacy. A society which calls itself Christian

will no longer tolerate capital punishment, prostitution, stock exchange

gambling, and child slavery. Men will not then as they do now, learn on

their mother's breast to love their neighbours as themselves, and then

tread in the footsteps of their fathers, trampling one another down in

the struggle for bread.

Our reverence for God will then be found in our capacity to humanise

existence by humanising the human race.

The youth of our day have not always successfully passed out of the

Christian circles of ideals into another circle. The successful method

would be to face immediately new purposes and aims that are really

believed, and for which men wish to live. But many of our young

generation know of no new purposes and aims in which they can believe.

Hence comes that spiritual apathy which has mastered a great part of

the young generation. Without undervaluing the influences of

environment, I still believe that young people who have lost their

ideals without getting new ones in their place are to be pitied. The

young who are not making ideals out of their own souls will have no

other time than this to find ideals. A generation of young men of this

type laughed at Socrates. They would have nailed Jesus of Nazareth to

the Cross, with a shrug of the shoulders; they would have become,

undoubtedly, in 1789, _emigrés_ with the Bourbons.

When the youth of any period remains without ideals, we pass through a

_fin de siècle_ period no matter what the exact date may be. But when

the young generation is inspired with the feeling of having great acts

to do, a new century begins. It is always the fortunate right of young

people to stimulate individualism before everything else. This is done

every time a young person full of sound egoism develops his own

personality completely and powerfully, throws himself keenly into the

struggle for his own fortune. Any one who takes his individual

development seriously will find that it is hard to become an

independent, noble, and exalted personality by treading underfoot other

individuals. He will moreover see that it makes more demands on his

personal powers to try to create new values by new means, to devote his

youthful energy to new tasks, than to look back to ideas that are

already exhausted. There is another truth the young man will soon find

to be valid. If an individual throws himself into the struggle of life

without consideration for any one else, he is all the more likely to get

hurt in the struggle. The more developed, too, an individual is, the

more assailable points there are about him to be wounded. Great pain, as

well as great happiness, is for great men a part of the fulness of life.

Failures of a personality are often better proofs that it is above the

average than its victories. But failures, even if they frequently leave

our innermost personality shattered, can be borne, when we have learnt

that there is a bandage to heal our own wounds, the bandage, I mean,

that we lay on the wounds of others.

No real man needs to wait until life has taught him, to sympathise with

others. The inspiring age of youth may experience this, as well as the

strong individual feeling of power. In this sense, many remain ever

young, always able to pass through inspired moments, such moments when

a great action, a great truth, a great and beautiful thing, or great

good fortune, absorbs our whole existence; moments when our eyes fill

with tears, when our arms stretch out to embrace the world and the

thoughts which it contains. Such moments include the most intensive

emotion of our own personality; at the same time they bring the fullest

absorption in the common feeling of existence as a whole. A great life

means giving continuity of action to such inspired moments.

There are young people who can look back on no such moments, who

arrogantly look down on the problems of their times from the height of

their "superman" theories or from their superior learning; who measure

them by the iron law of historical development. At all times there have

been such people. There is no question in which it is more fatal for

young people to isolate themselves, than that which deals with social

conflicts. This age requires the young above all others to test this

question from all points of view, to investigate all other ideas in

connection with it. Every reform plan must be investigated in connection

with its influence on the problems of individualism and socialism. From

youth we have a right to expect something for the future. This hope

implies that youth, in approaching it, in thinking and acting for the

many whose lot it is the immediate task of the future to improve, adopt

as their own the words of Walt Whitman, "I do not ask whether my wounded

brother suffers; I will myself be this wounded brother."