PROTECTION OF CHILDREN FOR INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY
In the previous chapters it was stated that the United States, compared
to the most advanced European nations, is deficient in protective
legislation. This, as has been said, is the result of the emphasis
placed upon personal liberty at the date of the first constitutional
conventions and of the inherited belief in America that government is
of necessity oppressive, and its functions not to be lightly extended.
It is also possible that this protection of the humblest citizen has
been pushed forward in those countries of a homogeneous population
more rapidly than in America, because of that unconscious attitude of
contempt which the nationality at the moment representing economic
success always takes toward the weaker and less capable. There is no
doubt that we all despise our immigrants a little because of their
economic standing. The newly arrived immigrant goes very largely into
unskilled work; he builds the railroads, digs the sewers, he does
the sort of labor the English-speaking American soon gets rid of;
and then, because he is in this lowest economic class, he falls into
need, and we complain that in America the immigrant makes the largest
claim upon charitable funds. Yet in England, where immigration has
counted for very little; in Germany, where it has counted almost not
at all, we find the same claim made upon the public funds by people
who do the same unskilled work, who are paid the same irregular and
low wages. In Germany, where this matter is approached, not from the
charitable, but from the patriotic side, there is a tremendous code
of legislation for the protection of the men who hold to life by the
most uncertain economic tenure. In England there exists an elaborated
code of labor laws, protecting the laborer at all times from accidents,
in ways unknown in America. Here we have only the beginning of all
that legislation, partly because we have not yet broken through the
belief that the man who does this casual work is not yet quite one
of ourselves. We do not consider him entitled to the protective
legislation which is secured for him in other countries where he is
quite simply a fellow-citizen, humble it may be, but still bound to the
governing class by ties of blood and homogeneity.
Our moral attitude toward one group in the community is a determining
factor of our moral attitude toward other groups, and this relation of
kindly contempt, of charitable rather than democratic obligation, may
lend some explanation to the fact that the United States, as a nation,
is sadly in arrears in the legislation designed for the protection of
children. In the Southern States, where a contemptuous attitude towards
a weaker people has had the most marked effect upon public feeling,
we have not only the largest number of unprotected working children,
but the largest number of illiterate children as well. There are, in
the United States, according to the latest census[12] 580,000 children
between the ages of ten and fourteen years, who cannot read nor write.
They are not the immigrant children. They are our own native-born
children. Of these 570,000 are in the Southern States and ten thousand
of them are scattered over the rest of the Republic.
The same thing is true of our children at work. We have two millions
of them, according to the census of 1900--children under the age of
sixteen years who are earning their own livings.
Legislation of the States south of Maryland for the children is like
the legislation of England in 1844. We are sixty-two years behind
England in caring for the children of the textile industries.
May we not also trace some of this national indifference to the
disposition of the past century to love children without really knowing
them? We refuse to recognize them as the great national asset and
are content to surround them with a glamour of innocence and charm.
We put them prematurely to work, ignorant of the havoc it brings,
because no really careful study has been made of their capacities
and possibilities--that is, no study really fitted to the industrial
conditions in which they live.
Each age has, of course, its own temptations and above all its own
peculiar industrial temptations and needs to see them not only in the
light of the increased sensibility and higher ethical standards of
its contemporaries, but also in relation to its peculiar industrial
development. When we ask why it is that child-labor has been given
to us to discuss and to rectify, rather than to the people who
lived before us, we need only to remember that, for the first
time in industrial history, the labor of the little child has in
many industries become as valuable as that of a man or woman. The
old-fashioned weaver was obliged to possess skill and strength to pull
his beam back and forth. It is only through the elaborated inventions
of our own age that skill as well as strength has been so largely
eliminated that, for example, a little child may “tend the thread” in
a textile mill almost as well as an adult. This is true of so many
industries that the temptation to exploit premature labor has become
peculiar to this industrial epoch and we are tempted as never before to
use the labor of little children.
What, then, are we going to do about it? How deeply are we concerned
that this labor shall not result to the detriment of the child, and
what excuses are we making to ourselves for thus prematurely using up
the strength which really belongs to the next generation? Of course,
it is always difficult to see the wrong in a familiar thing; it is
almost a test of moral insight to be able to see that an affair of
familiar intercourse and daily living may also be wrong. I have taken a
Chicago street-car on a night in December at ten o’clock, when dozens
of little girls who had worked in the department stores all day were
also boarding the cars. I know, as many others do, that these children
will not get into their beds before midnight, and that they will have
to be up again early in the morning to go to their daily work. And yet
because I have seen it many times I take my car almost placidly--I am
happy to say, not quite placidly. Almost every day at six o’clock I see
certain factories pouring out a stream of men and women and boys and
girls. The boys and girls have a peculiar hue--a color so distinctive
that one meeting them on the street, even on Sunday when they are in
their best clothes and mingled with other children who go to school and
play out of doors, can distinguish them in an instant, and there is on
their faces a premature anxiety and sense of responsibility, which we
should declare pathetic if we were not used to it.
How far are we responsible when we allow custom to blind our eyes
to the things that are wrong? In spite of the enormous growth in
charitable and correctional agencies designed for children, are we
really so lacking in moral insight and vigor that we fail even to
perceive the real temptation of our age and totally fail to grapple
with it? An enlightened State which regarded the industrial situation
seriously would wish to conserve the ability of its youth, to give them
valuable training in relation to industry, quite as the old-fashioned
State carefully calculated the years which were the most valuable for
military training. The latter, looking only toward the preservation of
the State, took infinite pains, while we are careless in regard to the
much greater task which has to do with its upbuilding and extension. We
conscientiously ignore industry in relation to government and because
we assume that its regulation is unnecessary, so we conclude that the
protection of the young from premature participation in its mighty
operations is not the concern of the Government.
The municipal lodging-house in Chicago in addition to housing vagrants,
makes an intelligent effort to put them into regular industry. A
physician in attendance makes a careful examination of each man who
comes to the lodging-house, and one winter we tried to see what
connection could be genuinely established between premature labor and
worn-out men. It is surprising to find how many of them are tired to
death of monotonous labor, and begin to tramp in order to get away
from it--as a business man goes to the woods because he is worn out
with the stress of business life. This inordinate desire to get away
from work seems to be connected with the fact that the men started to
work very early, before they had the physique to stand up to it, or
the mental vigor with which to overcome its difficulties, or the moral
stamina which makes a man stick to his work whether he likes it or
not. But we cannot demand any of these things from the growing boy.
They are all traits of the adult. A boy is naturally restless, his
determination easily breaks down, and he runs away. At least this seems
to be true of many of the men who come to the lodging-house. I recall
a man who had begun to work in a textile mill quite below the present
legal age in New England, and who had worked hard for sixteen years.
He told his tale with all simplicity; and, as he made a motion with
his hand, he said, “I done that for sixteen years.” I give the words
as he gave them. “At last I was sick in bed for two or three weeks
with a fever, and when I crawled out, I made up my mind that I would
rather go to hell than to go back to that mill.” Whether he considered
Chicago as equivalent to that, I do not know; but he certainly tramped
to Chicago, and has been tramping for four years. He does not steal.
He works in a lumber camp occasionally, and wanders about the rest of
the time getting odd jobs when he can; but the suggestion of a factory
throws him into a panic, and causes him quickly to disappear from the
lodging-house. The physician has made a diagnosis of general debility.
The man is not fit for steady work. He has been whipped in the battle
of life, and is spent prematurely because he began prematurely.
Yet the state makes no careful study as to the effect upon children
of the subdivided labor which many of them perform in factories.
A child who remains year after year in a spinning room gets no
instruction--merely a dull distaste for work. Often he cannot stand up
to the grind of factory life, and he breaks down under it.
What does this mean? That we have no right to increase the list
of paupers--of those who must be cared for by municipal and State
agencies because when they were still immature and undeveloped, they
were subjected to a tremendous pressure. I recall one family of five
children which, upon the death of the energetic mother who had provided
for it by means of a little dress-making establishment, was left to the
care of a feeble old grandmother. The father was a drunkard who had
never supported his family, and at this time he definitely disappeared.
The oldest boy was almost twelve years old--a fine, manly little
fellow, who felt keenly his obligation to care for the family.
We found him a place as cash-boy in a department store for two dollars
a week. He held it for three years, although his enthusiasm failed
somewhat as the months went by, and he gradually discovered how little
help his wages were to the family exchequer after his carfare, decent
clothes and unending pairs of shoes were paid for. Before the end of
the third year he had become listless and indifferent to his work, in
spite of the increase of fifty cents a week. In the hope that a change
would be good for him, a place as elevator-boy was secured. This
he was unable to keep, and then one situation after another slipped
through his grasp, until a typhoid fever which he developed at the age
of fifteen, seemed to explain his apathy.
After a long illness and a poor recovery, he worked less well.
Finally, at the age of sixteen, when he should have been able really
to help the little family and perhaps be its main support, he had
become a professional tramp, and eventually dropped completely from
our knowledge. It was through such bitter lessons as these we learned
that good intentions and the charitable impulse do not always work
for righteousness; that to force the moral nature of a child and to
put tasks upon him beyond his normal growth, is quite as cruel and
disastrous as to expect his undeveloped muscle to lift huge weights.
Adolescence is filled with strange pauses of listlessness and
dreaminess. At that period the human will is perhaps further away from
the desire of definite achievement than it ever is again. To work ten
hours a day for six days in a week in order to buy himself a pair of
stout boots, that he may be properly shod to go to work some more,
is the very last thing which really appeals to a boy of thirteen or
fourteen. If he is forced to such a course too often, his cheated
nature later re-asserts itself in all sorts of decadent and abnormal
ways.
An enlightened state would also concern itself with the effect of
child labor upon the parents. We have in Chicago a great many European
immigrants, people who have come from country life in Bohemia or the
south of Italy, hoping that their children will have a better chance
here than at home. In the old country these immigrants worked on farms
which provided a very normal activity for a young boy or girl. When
they come to Chicago, they see no reason why their children should not
go to work, because they see no difference between the normal activity
of their own youth and the grinding life, to which they subject their
children. It is difficult for a man who has grown up in outdoor life
to adapt himself to the factory. The same experience is found in the
South with the men who come to the textile towns from the little farms.
They resent monotonous petty work, and get away from it; they will
in preference take more poorly paid work, care of horses or janitor
service--work which has some similarity to that to which they have
been accustomed. So the parents drop out, and the children, making the
adaptation, remain, and the curious result ensues of the head of the
household becoming dependent upon the earnings of the child. You will
hear a child say, “My mother can’t say nothing to me. I pay the rent;”
or, “I can do what I please, because I bring home the biggest wages.”
All this tends to break down the normal relation between parents and
children. The Italian men who work on the railroads in the summer find
it a great temptation to settle down in the winter upon the wages
of their children. A young man from the south of Italy was mourning
the death of his little girl of twelve; in his grief he said, quite
simply, “She was my oldest kid. In two years she could have supported
me, and now I shall have to work five or six years longer until the
next one can do it.” He expected to retire permanently at thirty-four.
That breaking down of the normal relation of parent and child, and the
tendency to demoralize the parent, is something we have no right to
subject him to. We ought to hold the parent up to the obligation which
he would have fulfilled had he remained in his early environment.
A modern state might rightly concern itself with the effect of child
labor upon industry itself. There has been for many years an increasing
criticism of the modern factory system, not only from the point of view
of the worker, but from the point of view of the product itself. It
has been said many times that we can not secure good workmanship nor
turn out a satisfactory product unless men and women have some sort
of interest in their work, and some way of expressing that interest
in relation to it. The system which makes no demand upon originality,
upon invention, upon self-direction, works automatically, as it were,
towards an unintelligent producer and towards an uninteresting product.
This was said at first only by such artists and social reformers as
Morris and Ruskin; but it is being gradually admitted by men of affairs
and may at last incorporate itself into actual factory management, in
which case the factory itself will favor child labor legislation or
any other measure which increases the free and full development of the
individual, because he thereby becomes a more valuable producer. We may
gradually discover that in the interests of this industrial society
of ours it becomes a distinct loss to put large numbers of producers
prematurely at work, not only because the community inevitably loses
their mature working power, but also because their “free labor
quality,” which is so valuable, is permanently destroyed.
Exercise of the instinct of workmanship not only affords great
satisfaction to the producer, but also to the consumer, if he be
possessed of any critical faculty, or have developed genuine powers of
appreciation. Added to the conscience which protests against the social
waste of child labor, we have the taste that revolts against a product
totally without the charm which pleasure in work creates. We may at
last discover that we are imperiling our civilization at the moment of
its marked materialism, by wantonly sacrificing to that materialism the
eternal spirit of youth, the power of variation, which alone is able to
prevent it from degenerating into a mere mechanism.
It would be easy to produce many illustrations to demonstrate that in
the leading industrial countries a belief is slowly developing that the
workman himself is the chief asset, and that the intelligent interest
of skilled men, the power of self-direction and co-operation which is
only possible among the free-born and educated, is exactly the only
thing which will hold out in the markets of the world. As the foremen
of factories testify again and again, factory discipline is valuable
only up to a certain point, after which something else must be depended
on if the best results are to be achieved.
Monopoly of both the raw material and the newly-opened markets is
certainly a valuable factor in a nation’s industrial prosperity; but
while we spend blood and treasure to protect one and secure the other,
we wantonly destroy the most valuable factor of all, intelligent labor.
Nothing can help us here save the rising tide of humanitarianism, which
is not only emotional enough to regret the pitiless and stupid waste
of this power but also intelligent enough to perceive what might be
accomplished by its utilization.
We are told that the German products hold a foremost place in the
markets of the world because of Germany’s fine educational system,
which includes training in trade-schools for so many young men. We
know, too, that there is at the present moment a strong party in
Germany opposing militarism, not from the “peace society” point of
view, but because it withdraws all the young men from the industrial
life for the best part of three years during which their activity is
merely disciplinary, with no relation to the industrial life of the
nation. This anti-military party insists that the loss of the three
years is a serious matter, and that one nation cannot successfully hold
its advance position if it must compete with other nations which are
also establishing trade-schools but which do not thus withdraw their
youth from continuous training at the period of their greatest docility
and aptitude.
England is discovering that the cheap markets afforded by semi-savage
peoples, which she has thrown open to her manufacturers, are now
reacting in the debasement of her products and her factory workers.
The manufacturer produces the cheap and inferior articles which he
imagines the new commerce will demand. The result upon the workers in
the factories producing these unworthy goods, is that they are robbed
of the skill which would be demanded if they were ministering to an
increasing demand of taste and if they were supplying the market of a
civilized people. It would be a curious result of misapplied energy
if those very markets which the Briton has so eagerly sought, would
finally so debase the English producers that all the increased wealth
the markets have brought to the nation would be consumed in efforts to
redeem the debased working population.
We have made public education our great concern in America, and perhaps
the public-school system is our most distinctive achievement; but
there is a certain lack of consistency in the relation of the State
to the child after he leaves the public school. At great expense the
State has provided school buildings and equipment, and other buildings
in which to prepare professional teachers. It has spared no pains to
make the system complete, and yet as rapidly as the children leave the
schoolroom, the State seems to lose all interest and responsibility in
their welfare and has, until quite recently, turned them over to the
employer with no restrictions.
At no point does the community say to the employer, We are allowing
you to profit by the labor of these children whom we have educated at
great cost, and we demand that they do not work so many hours that they
shall be exhausted. Nor shall they be allowed to undertake the sort of
labor which is beyond their strength, nor shall they spend their time
at work that is absolutely devoid of educational value. The preliminary
education which they have received in school is but one step in the
process of making them valuable and normal citizens, and we cannot
afford to have that intention thwarted, even though the community as
well as yourself may profit by the business activity which your factory
affords.
Such a position seems perfectly reasonable, yet the same citizens who
willingly pay taxes to support an elaborate public-school system,
strenuously oppose the most moderate attempts to guard the children
from needless and useless exploitation after they have left school and
have entered industry.
We are forced to believe that child labor is a national problem, even
as public education is a national duty. The children of Alabama, Rhode
Island, and Pennsylvania belong to the nation quite as much as they
belong to each State, and the nation has an interest in the children
at least in relation to their industrial efficiency, quite as it has
an interest in enacting protective tariffs for the preservation of
American industries.
Uniform compulsory education laws in connection with uniform child
labor legislation are the important factors in securing educated
producers for the nation. Fortunately, a new education is arising which
endeavors to widen and organize the child’s experience with reference
to the world in which he lives.[13] The new pedagogy holds that it is
a child’s instinct and pleasure to exercise all his faculties and to
make discoveries in the world around him. It is the chief business of
the teacher merely to direct his activity and to feed his insatiable
curiosity. In order to accomplish this, he is forced to relate the
child to the surroundings in which he lives; and the most advanced
schools are, perforce, using modern industry for this purpose. The
educators have ceased to mourn industrial conditions of the past
generation, when children were taught agricultural and industrial
arts by the natural co-operation with their parents, and they are
endeavoring to supply this inadequacy by manual arts in the school,
by courses in industrial history, and by miniature reproductions of
industrial processes, thus constantly coming into better relations with
the present factory system. These educators recognize the significance
and power of contemporary industrialism, and hold it an obligation to
protect children from premature participation in our industrial life,
only that the children may secure the training and fibre which will
later make this participation effective, and that their minds may
finally take possession of the machines which they will guide and feed.
But there is another side to the benefits of child-labor legislation
represented by the time element, the leisure which is secured to
the child for the pursuit of his own affairs, quite aside from the
opportunity afforded him to attend school. Helplessness in childhood,
the scientists tell us, is the guarantee of adult intellect, but they
also assert that play in youth is the guarantee of adult culture. It
is the most valuable instrument the race possesses to keep life from
becoming mechanical.
The child who cannot live life is prone to dramatize it, and the very
process is a constant compromise between imitation and imagination, as
the over-mastering impulse itself which drives him to incessant play is
both reminiscent and anticipatory. In proportion as the child in later
life is to be subjected to a mechanical and one-sided activity, and as
a highly subdivided labor is to be demanded from him, it is therefore
most important that he should have his full period of childhood and
youth for this play expression in order that he may cultivate within
himself the root of a culture which alone can give his later activity a
meaning.[14] This is true whether or not we accept the theory that the
aesthetic feelings originate in the play impulse, with its corollary
that the constant experimentation found in the commonest forms of
play are to be looked upon as “the principal source of all kinds of
art.” At this moment, when industrial forces are concentrated and
unified as never before, unusual care must be taken to secure to the
children their normal play period, that the art instinct may have some
chance, and that the producer himself may have enough individuality of
character to avoid becoming a mere cog in the vast industrial machine.
Quite aside also from the problem of individual development and
from the fact that play, in which the power of choice is constantly
presented and constructive imagination required, is the best corrective
of the future disciplinary life of the factory, there is another reason
why the children who are to become producers under the present system
should be given their full child-life period.
The entire population of the factory town and of those enormous
districts in every large city in which the children live who most need
the protection of child-labor legislation, consists of people who have
come together in response to the demands of modern industry. They are
held together by the purely impersonal tie of working in one large
factory, in which they not only do not know each other, but in which
no one person nor even group of persons knows everybody. They are
utterly without the natural and minute acquaintance and inter-family
relationships that rural and village life afford, and are therefore
much more dependent upon the social sympathy and power of effective
association which is becoming its urban substitute.
This substitute can be most easily elaborated among groups of
children. Somewhere they must learn to carry on an orderly daily
life--that life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help which is the
only real life of civilized man. Play is the great social stimulus,
and it is the prime motive which unites children and draws them into
comradeship. A true democratic relation and ease of acquaintance is
found among the children in a typical factory community because they
more readily overcome differences of language, tradition, and religion
than do the adults. “It is in play that nature reveals her anxious
care to discover men to each other,” and this happy and important
task, children unconsciously carry forward day by day with all the
excitement and joy of co-ordinate activity. They accomplish that which
their elders could not possibly do, and they render a most important
service to the community. We have not as yet utilized this joy of
association in relation to the system of factory production which is
so preëminently one of large bodies of men working together for hours
at a time. But there is no doubt that it would bring a new power into
modern industry if the factory could avail itself of that _esprit de
corps_, that triumphant buoyancy which the child experiences when he
feels his complete identification with a social group; that sense of
security which comes upon him sitting in a theatre or “at a party,”
when he issues forth from himself and is lost in a fairyland which
has been evoked not only by his own imagination, but by that of his
companions as well. This power of association, of assimilation, which
children possess in such a high degree, is easily carried over into
the affairs of youth if it but be given opportunity and freedom for
action, as it is in the college life of more favored young people.
The _esprit de corps_ of an athletic team, that astonishing force
of co-operation, is, however, never consciously carried over into
industry, but is persistently disregarded. It is, indeed, lost before
it is discovered--if I may be permitted an Irish bull--in the case of
children who are put to work before they have had time to develop the
power beyond its most childish and haphazard manifestations.
Factory life depends upon groups of people working together, and yet
it is content with the morphology of the group, as it were, paying
no attention to its psychology, to the interaction of its members.
By regarding each producer as a solitary unit, a tremendous power is
totally unutilized. In the case of children who are prematurely put to
work under such conditions, an unwarranted nervous strain is added as
they make their effort to stand up to the individual duties of life
while still in the stage of group and family dependence.
We naturally associate a factory with orderly productive action; but
similarity of action, without identical thought and co-operative
intelligence, is coercion, and not order. The present factory
discipline needs to be redeemed as the old school discipline has been
redeemed. In the latter the system of prizes and punishments has been
largely given up, not only because they were difficult to administer,
but because they utterly failed to free the powers of the child.
“The fear of starvation,” of which the old economists made so much, is,
after all, but a poor incentive to work; and the appeal to cupidity
by which a man is induced to “speed up” in all the various devices of
piece-work is very little better. Yet the factory still depends upon
these as incentives to the ordinary workers. Certainly one would wish
to protect children from them as long as possible. In a soap factory
in Chicago little girls wrap bars of soap in two covers at the minimum
rate of 3,000 bars a week; their only ambition is to wrap as fast as
possible and well enough to pass the foreman’s inspection. The girl
whose earnings are the largest at the end of the week is filled with
pride--praiseworthy, certainly, but totally without educational value.
Let us realize before it is too late that in this age of iron, of
machine-tending, and of subdivided labor, we need as never before
the untrammeled and inspired activity of youth. To cut it off from
thousands of working children is a most perilous undertaking, and
endangers the very industry to which they have been sacrificed.
Only of late years has an effort been made by the city authorities,
by the municipality itself, to conserve the play instinct and to
utilize it, if not for the correction of industry, at least for the
nurture of citizenship. It has been discovered that the city which is
too careless to provide playgrounds, gymnasiums, and athletic fields
where the boys legitimately belong and which the policeman is bound to
respect, simply puts a premium on lawlessness. Without these places
of their own, groups of boys come to look upon the policeman as an
enemy, and he regards them as the most lawless of all the citizens.
This is partly due to the fact that because of our military survivals
the officer is not brought in contact with the educational forces of
the city, but only with its vices and crime. He might have quite as
great an opportunity for influencing the morals of youth as the school
teacher has. At least one American city spends twenty per cent. more in
provision for the conviction of youths than for their education, for
the city which fails to utilize this promising material of youthful
adventure does not truly get rid of it, and finds it more expensive to
care for as waste material than as educative material. At a certain
age a boy is possessed by a restless determination to do something
dangerous and exciting--a “difficult stunt,” as it were--by which he
may prove that he is master of his fate and thus express his growing
self-assertion. He prefers to demonstrate in feats requiring both
courage and adroitness, and it may be said that tradition is with him
in his choice. That this impulse is mixed with an absurd desire on the
part of the boy to “show off,” to impress his companions with the fact
that he is great and brave and generally to be admired, does not in
the least affect its genuineness. The city which fails to provide an
opportunity for this inevitable and normal desire on the part of the
young citizens makes a grave mistake and invites irregular expression
of it. The thwarted spirit of adventure finds an outlet in infinite
varieties of gambling; craps, cards, the tossing of discarded union
buttons, the betting on odd or even automobile numbers, on the number
of newspapers under a boy’s arm. Another end which can be accomplished,
if the city recognizes play as legitimate and provides playgrounds
and athletic fields, is the development of that self-government and
self-discipline among groups of boys, which forms the most natural
basis for democratic political life later.
The boy in a tenement-house region who does not belong to the gang is
not only an exception, but a very rare exception. This earliest form
of social life is almost tribal in its organization, and the leader
too often holds his place because he is a successful bully. The gang
meets first upon the street, but later it may possess a club room in
a stable, in a billiard room, in an empty house, under the viaduct,
in a candy store, in a saloon or even in an empty lot. The spirit of
association, the fellowship and loyalty which the group inspires,
carry them into many dangers; but there is no doubt that it is through
these experiences that the city boy learns his political lessons.
The training for political life is given in these gangs, and also an
opportunity to develop that wonderful power of adaptation which is the
city’s contribution, even to the poorest of her children. A clever
man once told me that he doubted whether an alderman could be elected
in a tenement-house district unless he had had gang experience, and
had become an adept in the interminable discussion which every detail
of the gang’s activity receives. This alone affords a training in
democratic government, for it is the prerogative of democracy to invest
political discussion with the dignity of deeds, and to provide adequate
motives for discussion. In these social folk-motes, so to speak, the
young citizen learns to act upon his own determination. The great pity
is that it so often results in a group morality untouched by a concern
for the larger morality of the community. Normal groups reacting upon
each other would tend to an equilibrium of a certain liberty to all,
but this cannot be accomplished in the life of the street where the
weaker boy or the weaker gang is continually getting the worst of
it. And it is only on the protected playground that the gangs can be
merged into baseball nines and similar organizations, governed by
well-recognized rules.
We have already democratized education in the interests of the entire
community; but recreation and constructive play, which afford the best
soil for establishing genuine and democratic social relations, we have
left untouched, although they are so valuable in emotional and dynamic
power. Further than that, the city that refrains from educating the
play motive is obliged to suppress it. In Chicago gangs of boys between
fourteen and sixteen years of age, who, possessing work-certificates
are outside of the jurisdiction of the truant officer, are continually
being arrested by the police, since they have no orderly opportunity
for recreation. An enlightened city government would regard these
groups of boys as the natural soil in which to sow the seeds of
self-government. As every European city has its parade-ground, where
the mimics of war are faithfully rehearsed, in order that the country
may be saved in times of danger, so, if modern government were as
really concerned in developing its citizens as it is in defending them,
we would look upon every playing-field as the training-place and
parade-ground of mature citizenship.
Frederick the Great discovered and applied the use of the rhythmic
step for the marching of soldiers. For generations men had gone
forth to war, using martial music as they had used the battle-cry,
merely to incite their courage and war spirit; but the music had had
nothing to do with their actual marching. The use of it as a practical
measure enormously increased the endurance of the soldiers and raised
the records of forced marches. Industry at the present moment, as
represented by masses of men in the large factories, is quite as
chaotic as the early armies were. We have failed to apply our education
to the real life of the average factory producer. He works without any
inner coherence or sense of comradeship. Our public education has done
little as yet to release his powers or to cheer him with the knowledge
of his significance to the State.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] For further analysis of the census figures relating to children,
consult “Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation.” Mrs. Florence Kelley.
[13] School and Society, by John Dewey.
[14] The Play of Man, Groos, page 394.