THE LITTLE TOILERS
Poverty and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is
perpetual, indissoluble. The one begets the other. Need sets the child to
work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages,
thus increasing the need. Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it
has not been said better since: "The destruction of the poor is their
poverty."
It is the business of the State to see to it that its interest in the
child as a future citizen is not imperilled by the compact. Here in New
York we set about this within the memory of the youngest of us. To-day we
have compulsory education and a factory law prohibiting the employment of
young children. All between eight and fourteen years old must go to school
at least fourteen weeks in each year. None may labor in factories under
the age of fourteen; not under sixteen unless able to read and write
simple sentences in English. These are the barriers thrown up against the
inroads of ignorance, poverty's threat. They are barriers of paper. We
have the laws, but we do not enforce them.
By that I do not mean to say that we make no attempt to enforce them. We
do. We catch a few hundred truants each year and send them to
reformatories to herd with thieves and vagabonds worse than they, rather
illogically, since there is no pretence that there would have been room
for them in the schools had they wanted to go there. We set half a dozen
factory inspectors to canvass more than twice as many thousand workshops
and to catechise the children they find there. Some are turned out and go
back the next day to that or some other shop. The great mass that are
under age lie and stay. And their lies go on record as evidence that we
are advancing, and that child-labor is getting to be a thing of the past.
That the horrible cruelty of a former day is; that the children have
better treatment and a better time of it in the shops--often a good enough
time to make one feel that they are better off there learning habits of
industry than running about the streets, so long as there is no way of
_making_ them attend school--I believe from what I have seen. That the law
has had the effect of greatly diminishing the number of child-workers I do
not believe. It has had another and worse effect. It has bred wholesale
perjury among them and their parents. Already they have become so used to
it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them. The child
of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a
matter of course. Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose
of the law.
More than a year ago, in an effort to get at the truth of the matter of
children's labor, I submitted to the Board of Health, after consultation
with Dr. Felix Adler, who earned the lasting gratitude of the community by
his labors on the Tenement House Commission, certain questions to be asked
concerning the children by the sanitary police, then about to begin a
general census of the tenements. The result was a surprise, and not least
to the health officers. In the entire mass of nearly a million and a
quarter of tenants[8] only two hundred and forty-nine children under
fourteen years of age were found at work in living-rooms. To anyone
acquainted with the ordinary aspect of tenement-house life the statement
seemed preposterous, and there are valid reasons for believing that the
policemen missed rather more than they found even of those that were
confessedly or too evidently under age. They were seeking that which, when
found, would furnish proof of law-breaking against the parent or employer,
a fact of which these were fully aware. Hence their coming uniformed and
in search of children into a house could scarcely fail to give those a
holiday who were not big enough to be palmed off as fourteen at least.
Nevertheless, upon reflection, it seemed probable that the policemen were
nearer the truth than their critics. Their census took no account of the
factory in the back yard, but only of the living rooms, and it was made
during the day. Most of the little slaves, as of those older in years,
were found in the sweater's district on the East Side, where the home work
often only fairly begins after the factory has shut down for the day and
the stores released their army of child-laborers. Had the policemen gone
their rounds after dark they would have found a different state of things.
Between the sweat-shops and the school, which, as I have shown, is made to
reach farther down among the poorest in this Jewish quarter than anywhere
else in this city, the children were fairly accounted for in the daytime.
The record of school attendance in the district shows that forty-seven
attended day-school for every one who went to night-school.
To settle the matter to my own satisfaction I undertook a census of a
number of the most crowded houses, in company with a policeman not in
uniform. The outcome proved that, as regards those houses at least, it was
as I suspected, and I have no doubt they were a fair sample of the rest.
In nine tenements that were filled with home-workers we found five
children at work who owned that they were under fourteen. Two were girls
nine years of age. Two boys said they were thirteen. We found thirteen who
swore that they were of age, proof which the policeman as an uninterested
census-taker would have respected as a matter of course, even though he
believed with me that the children lied. On the other hand, in seven
back-yard factories we found a total of 63 children, of whom 5 admitted
being under age, while of the rest 45 seemed surely so. To the other 13 we
gave the benefit of the doubt, but I do not think they deserved it. All
the 63 were to my mind certainly under fourteen, judging not only from
their size, but from the whole appearance of the children. My subsequent
experience confirmed me fully in this belief. Most of them were able to
write their names after a fashion. Few spoke English, but that might have
been a subterfuge. One of the home-workers, a marvellously small lad whose
arms were black to the shoulder from the dye in the cloth he was sewing,
and who said in his broken German, without evincing special interest in
the matter, that he had gone to school "e' bische'," referred us to his
"mother" for a statement as to his age. The "mother," who proved to be the
boss's wife, held a brief consultation with her husband and then came
forward with a verdict of sixteen. When we laughed rather incredulously
the man offered to prove by his marriage certificate that the boy must be
sixteen. The effect of this demonstration was rather marred, however, by
the inopportune appearance of another tailor, who, ignorant of the crisis,
claimed the boy as his. The situation was dramatic. The tailor with the
certificate simply shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work,
leaving the boy to his fate.
One girl, who could not have been twelve years old, was hard at work at a
sewing-machine in a Division Street shirt factory when we came in. She got
up and ran the moment she saw us, but we caught her in the next room
hiding behind a pile of shirts. She said at once that she was fourteen
years old but didn't work there. She "just came in." The boss of the shop
was lost in astonishment at seeing her when we brought her back. He could
not account at all for her presence. There were three boys at work in the
room who said "sixteen" without waiting to be asked. Not one of them was
fourteen. The habit of saying fourteen or sixteen--the fashion varies with
the shops and with the degree of the child's educational
acquirements--soon becomes an unconscious one with the boy. He plumps it
out without knowing it. While occupied with these investigations I once
had my boots blacked by a little shaver, hardly knee-high, on a North
River ferry-boat. While he was shining away, I suddenly asked him how old
he was. "Fourteen, sir!" he replied promptly, without looking up.
In a Hester Street house we found two little girls pulling basting-thread.
They were both Italians and said that they were nine. In the room in which
one of them worked thirteen men and two women were sewing. The child could
speak English. She said that she was earning a dollar a week and worked
every day from seven in the morning till eight in the evening. This
sweat-shop was one of the kind that comes under the ban of the new law,
passed last winter--that is, if the factory inspector ever finds it. Where
the crowds are greatest and the pay poorest, the Italian laborer's wife
and child have found their way in since the strikes among the sweater's
Jewish slaves, outbidding even these in the fierce strife for bread.
Even the crowding, the feverish haste of the half-naked men and women, and
the litter and filth in which they worked, were preferable to the silence
and desolation we encountered in one shop up under the roof of a Broome
Street tenement. The work there had given out--there had been none these
two months, said the gaunt, hard-faced woman who sat eating a crust of dry
bread and drinking water from a tin pail at the empty bench. The man sat
silent and moody in a corner; he was sick. The room was bare. The only
machine left was not worth taking to the pawnshop. Two dirty children,
naked but for a torn undershirt apiece, were fishing over the stair-rail
with a bent pin on an idle thread. An old rag was their bait.
From among a hundred and forty hands on two big lofts in a Suffolk Street
factory we picked seventeen boys and ten girls who were patently under
fourteen years of age, but who all had certificates, sworn to by their
parents, to the effect that they were sixteen. One of them whom we judged
to be between nine and ten, and whose teeth confirmed our diagnosis--the
second bicuspids in the lower jaw were just coming out--said that he had
worked there "by the year." The boss, deeming his case hopeless, explained
that he only "made sleeves and went for beer." Two of the smallest girls
represented themselves as sisters, respectively sixteen and seventeen, but
when we came to inquire which was the oldest, it turned out that she was
the sixteen-year one. Several boys scooted as we came up the stairs. When
stopped they claimed to be visitors. I was told that this sweater had been
arrested once by the Factory Inspector, but had successfully barricaded
himself behind his pile of certificates. I caught the children laughing
and making faces at us behind our backs as often as these were brought out
anywhere. In an Attorney Street "pants" factory we counted thirteen boys
and girls who could not have been of age, and on a top floor in Ludlow
Street, among others, two brothers, sewing coats, who said that they were
thirteen and fourteen, but, when told to stand up, looked so ridiculously
small as to make even their employer laugh. Neither could read, but the
oldest could sign his name and did it thus, from right to left:
[Illustration: (signature)]
It was the full extent of his learning, and all he would probably ever
receive.
He was one of many Jewish children we came across who could neither read
nor write. Most of them answered that they had never gone to school. They
were mostly those of larger growth, bordering on fourteen, whom the
charity school managers find it next to impossible to reach, the children
of the poorest and most ignorant immigrants, whose work is imperatively
needed to make both ends meet at home, the "thousand" the school census
failed to account for. To banish them from the shop serves no useful
purpose. They are back the next day, if not sooner. One of the Factory
Inspectors told me of how recently he found a little boy in a sweat-shop
and sent him home. He went up through the house after that and stayed up
there quite an hour. On his return it occurred to him to look in to see
if the boy was gone. He was back and hard at work, and with him were two
other boys of his age who, though they claimed to have come in with dinner
for some of the hands, were evidently workers there.
So much for the sweat-shops. Jewish, Italian, and Bohemian, the story is
the same always. In the children that are growing up, to "vote as would
their master's dogs if allowed the right of suffrage," the community reaps
its reward in due season for allowing such things to exist. It is a kind
of interest in the payment of which there is never default. The physician
gets another view of it. "Not long ago," says Dr. Annie S. Daniel, in the
last report of the out-practice of the Infirmary for Women and Children,
"we found in such an apartment five persons making cigars, including the
mother. Two children were ill with diphtheria. Both parents attended to
the children; they would syringe the nose of each child and, without
washing their hands, return to their cigars. We have repeatedly observed
the same thing when the work was manufacturing clothing and
under-garments, to be bought as well by the rich as the poor. Hand-sewed
shoes, made for a fashionable Broadway shoe store, were sewed at home by a
man in whose family were three children with scarlet fever. And such
instances are common. Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house
manufactories. When reported to the Board of Health, the inspector at once
prohibits further manufacture during the continuance of the disease, but
his back is scarcely turned before the people return to their work. When
we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their
heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be
expected to impress the people."
[Illustration: SHINE, SIR?]
And she adds: "Wages have steadily decreased. Among the women who earned
the whole or part of the income the finishing of pantaloons was the most
common occupation. For this work in 1881 they received ten to fifteen
cents per pair; for the same work in 1891 three to five, at the most ten
cents per pair. When the women have paid the express charges to and from
the factory there is little margin left for profit. The women doing this
work claim that wages are reduced because of the influx of Italian women."
The rent has not fallen, however, and the need of every member of the
family contributing by his or her work to its keep is greater than ever.
The average total wages of 160 families whom the doctor personally treated
and interrogated during the year was $5.99 per week, while the average
rent was $8.62-3/4. The list included twenty-three different occupations
and trades. The maximum wages was $19, earned by three persons in one
family; the minimum $1.50, by a woman finishing pantaloons and living in
one room for which she paid $4 a month rent! In nearly every instance
observed by Dr. Daniel, the children's wages, when there were working
children, was the greater share of the family income. A specimen instance
is that of a woman with a consumptive husband, who is under her treatment.
The wife washes and goes out by the day, when she can get such work to do.
The three children, aged eleven, seven, and five years, not counting the
baby for a wonder, work at home covering wooden buttons with silk at four
cents a gross. The oldest goes to school, but works with the rest evenings
and on Saturday and Sunday, when the mother does the finishing. Their
combined earnings are from $3 to $6 a week, the children earning
two-thirds. The rent is $8 a month.
The doctor's observations throw a bright side-light upon the economic home
conditions that lie at the root of this problem of child labor in the
factories. With that I have not done. Taking the Factory Inspector's
report for 1890, the last at that time available, I found that in that
year his deputies got around to 2,147 of the 11,000 workshops (the number
given in the report) in the Second district, which is that portion of New
York south of Twenty-third Street. In other words, they visited less than
one-fifth of them all. They found 1,102 boys and 1,954 girls under sixteen
at work; 3,485 boys under eighteen, and 12,701 girls under twenty-one, as
nearly as I could make the footings. The figures alone are instructive, as
showing the preponderance of girls in the shops. The report, speaking of
the State as a whole, congratulates the community upon the alleged fact
"that the policy of employing very young children in manufactories has
been practically abolished." It states that "since the enactment of the
law the sentiment among employers has become nearly unanimous in favor of
its stringent enforcement," and that it "has had the further important
effect of preventing newly arrived non-English speaking foreigners from
forcing their children into factories before they learned the language of
the country," these being "now compelled to send their children to school,
for a time at least, until they can qualify under the law." Further, "the
system of requiring sworn certificates, giving the name, date, and place
of birth of all children under sixteen years of age ... has resulted in
causing parents to be very cautious about making untrue statements of the
ages of their children." The deputies "are aware of the various
subterfuges which have been tried in order to evade the law and put
children at labor before the legal time," and the Factory Inspector is
"happy to say that they are not often imposed upon by such tactics."
Without wading through nearly seventy pages of small print it was not
possible to glean from the report how many of the "under sixteen" workers
were really under fourteen, or so adjudged. A summary of what has been
accomplished since 1886 showed that 1,614 children under fourteen were
discharged by the Inspector in the Second District in that time, and that
415 were discharged because they could not read or write simple sentences
in the English language. The "number of working children who could not
read and write English" was in 1890 alone 252, according to the report, or
more than one-half of the whole number discharged in the four years, which
does not look as if the law had had much effect in that way, at least in
New York city. I determined to see for myself what were the facts.
I visited a number of factories, in a few instances accompanied by the
deputy factory inspector, more frequently alone. Where it was difficult to
gain admission I watched at the door when the employees were going to or
coming from work, finding that on the whole the better plan, as affording
a fairer view of the children and a better opportunity to judge of their
age than when they sat at their work-benches. I found many shops in which
there were scarcely any children, some from which they had been driven, so
I was informed by the inspectors. But where manufacturers were willing to
employ their labor--and this I believe to be quite generally the case
where children's labor can be made to pay--I found the age certificate
serving as an excellent protection for the employer, never for the child.
I found the law considered as a good joke by some conscienceless men, who
hardly took the trouble to see that the certificates were filled out
properly; loudly commended by others whom it enabled, at the expense of a
little perjury in which they had no hand, to fill up their shops with
cheap labor, with perfect security to themselves. The bookkeeper in an
establishment of the conscienceless kind told me with glee how a boy who
had been bounced there three times in one year, upon his return each time
had presented a sworn certificate giving a different age. He was fifteen,
sixteen, and seventeen years old upon the records of the shop, until the
inspectors caught him one day and proved him only thirteen. I found boys
at work, posing as seventeen, who had been so recorded in the same shop
three full years, and were thirteen at most. As seventeen-year freaks they
could have made more money in a dime museum than at the work-bench, only
the museum would have required something more convincing than the
certificate that satisfied the shop. Some of these boys were working at
power-presses and doing other work beyond their years. An examination of
their teeth often disproved their stories as to their age. It was not
always possible to make this test, for the children seemed to see
something funny in it, and laughed and giggled so, especially the girls,
as to make it difficult to get a good look. Some of the girls, generally
those with decayed teeth,[9] would pout and refuse to show them. These
were usually American girls, that is to say, they were born here. The
greater number of the child-workers I questioned were foreigners, and our
birth returns could have given no clue to them. The few natives were alert
and on the defensive from the moment they divined my purpose. They easily
defeated it by giving a false address.
I finally picked out a factory close to my office where Italian girls were
employed in large numbers, and made it my business to ascertain the real
ages of the children. They seemed to me, going and coming, to average
twelve or thirteen years. The year before the factory inspector had
reported that nearly a hundred girls "under sixteen" were employed there.
She had discharged sixty of them as unable to read or write English. I
went to see the manufacturers. They were not disposed to help me and fell
back on their certificates--no child was employed by them without
one--until I told them that my purpose was not to interfere with their
business but to prove that a birth-certificate was the only proper warrant
for employment of child-labor.
"Why," said the manufacturer, in his astonishment forgetting that he had
just told me his children were all of age, "my dear sir! would you throw
them all out of work?"
It was what I expected. I found out eventually that a number of the
children attended the evening classes in the Leonard Street Italian
School, and there one rainy night I corralled twenty-three of them, all
but one officially certified under oath to be fourteen or sixteen. But for
the rain I might have found twice the number. The twenty-three I polled,
comparing their sworn age with the entry in the school register, which the
teachers knew to be correct. This was the result: one was eleven years old
and had worked in the factory a year; one, also eleven, had just been
engaged and was going for her certificate that night; three were twelve
years old, and had worked in the factory from one month to a year; seven
were thirteen, and of them three had worked in the shop two years, the
others one; nine were fourteen; one of them had been there three years,
four others two years, the rest shorter terms; one was fifteen and had
worked in the factory three years; the last and tallest was sixteen and
had been employed in the one shop four years. She said with a laugh that
she had a "certificate of sixteen" when she first went there. Not one of
them all was of legal age when she went to work in the shop, under the
warrant of her parents' oath. The majority were not even then legally
employed, since of those who had passed fourteen there were several who
could not read simple sentences in English intelligibly; yet they had been
at work in the factory for months and years. One of the eleven-year
workers, who felt insulted somehow, said spitefully that "I needn't
bother, there was lots of other girls in the shop younger than she." I
have no doubt she was right. I should add that the firm was a highly
respectable one, and its members of excellent social standing.
I learned incidentally where the convenient certificates came from, at
least those that were current in that school. They were issued, the
children said, free of charge, by a benevolent undertaker in the ward. I
thought at first that it was a bid for business, or real helpfulness. The
neighborhood undertaker is often found figuring suggestively as the
nearest friend of the poor in his street, when they are in trouble. But I
found out afterward that it was politics combined with business. The
undertaker was an Irishman and an active organizer of his district.
Unpolitical notaries charged twenty-five cents for each certificate. This
one made them out for nothing. All they had to do was to call for them.
The girls laughed scornfully at the idea of there being anything wrong in
the transaction. Their parents swore in a good cause. They needed the
money. The end conveniently justified the means in their case. Besides
"they merely had to touch the pen." Evidently, any argument in favor of
education could scarcely be expected to have effect upon parents who thus
found in their own ignorance a valid defence against an accusing
conscience as well as a source of added revenue.
My experience satisfied me that the factory law has had little effect in
prohibiting child labor in the factories of New York City, although it may
have had some in stimulating attendance at the night schools. The census
figures, when they appear, will be able to throw no valuable light on the
subject. The certificate lie naturally obstructs the census as it does the
factory law. The one thing that is made perfectly clear by even such
limited inquiry as I have been able to make, is that a birth certificate
should be substituted for the present sworn warrant, if it is intended to
make a serious business of the prohibition. In the piles upon piles of
these which I saw, I never came across one copy of the birth registry.
There are two obstacles to such a change. One is that our birth returns
are at present incomplete; the other, that most of the children are not
born here. Concerning the first, the Registrar of Vital Statistics
estimates that he is registering nearly or quite a thousand births a month
less than actually occur in New York; but even that is a great improvement
upon the record of a few years ago. The registered birthrate is increasing
year by year, and experience has shown that a determination on the part of
the Board of Health to prosecute doctors and midwives who neglect their
duty brings it up with a rush many hundreds in a few weeks. A wholesome
strictness at the Health Office on this point would in a short time make
it a reliable guide for the Factory Inspector in the enforcement of the
law. The other objection is less serious than it appears at first sight.
Immigrants might be required to provide birth certificates from their old
homes, where their children are sure to be registered under the stringent
laws of European governments. But as a matter of fact that would not often
be necessary. They all have passports in which the name and ages of their
children are set down. The claim that they had purposely registered them
as younger to cheapen transportation, which they would be sure to make,
need not be considered seriously. One lie is as good and as easy as
another.
Another lesson we may learn with advantage from some old-country
governments, which we are apt to look down upon as "slow," is to punish
the parents for the truancy of their children, whether they are found
running in the street or working in a shop when they should have been at
school. Greed, the natural child of poverty, often has as much to do with
it as real need. In the case of the Italians and the Jewish girls it is
the inevitable marriage-portion, without which they would stand little
chance of getting a husband, that dictates the sacrifice. One little one
of twelve in a class in the Leonard Street School, who had been working on
coats in a sweat-shop nine months, and had become expert enough to earn
three dollars a week, told me that she had $200 in bank, and that her
sister, also a worker, was as forehanded. Their teacher supported her
story. But often a meaner motive than the desire to put money in bank
forges the child's fetters. I came across a little girl in an East Side
factory who pleaded so pitifully that she had to work, and looked so poor
and wan, that I went to her home to see what it was like. It was on the
top floor of a towering tenement. The mother, a decent German woman, was
sewing at the window, doing her share, while at the table her husband, a
big, lazy lout who weighed two hundred pounds if he weighed one, lolled
over a game of checkers with another vagabond like himself. A half-empty
beer-growler stood between them. The contrast between that pitiful child
hard at work in the shop, and the big loafer taking his ease, was enough
to make anybody lose patience, and I gave him the piece of my mind he so
richly deserved. But it rolled off him as water rolls off a duck. He
merely ducked his head, shifted his bare feet under the table, and told
his crony to go on with the play.
It is only when the child rebels in desperation against such atrocious
cruelty and takes to the street as his only refuge, that his tyrant hands
him over to the justice so long denied him. Then the school comes as an
avenger, not as a friend, to the friendless lad, and it is scarcely to be
wondered at if behind his prison-bars he fails to make sense of the
justice of a world that locks him up and lets his persecutor go
free--likely enough applauds him for his public spirit in doing what he
did. When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not
work, and has to be supported, at the odd intervals at least when he comes
back from the street, the father surrenders him as a truant and
incorrigible. A large number of the children that are every year sent to
the Juvenile Asylum are admitted in that way. The real animus of it crops
out when it is proposed to put the little prisoner in a way of growing up
a useful citizen by sending him to a home out of the reach of his grasping
relatives. Then follows a struggle for the possession of the child that
would make the uninitiated onlooker think a gross outrage was about to be
perpetrated on a fond parent. The experienced Superintendent of the
Asylum, who has fought many such fights to a successful end, knows better.
"In a majority of these cases," he remarks in his report for last year,
"the opposition is due, not to any special interest in the child's
welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation
for the boy in order to get his weekly wages."
Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin
covers for pocket-flasks--one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible
of classification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor--with hands
so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but
lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work
begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags
down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes,
much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running
errands and earning a few pennies that way, takes her place at the bench
and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has
earned sixty cents--"more than mother," she says with a smile. "Mother"
has been finishing "knee-pants" for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a
pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing buttons on; but she
cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look
after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who "does not
love work well," in the patient language of the housekeeper, had been out
of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of
his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not
press for the rent long due. That was Susie's doings, too, though he
didn't know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that
dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.
[Illustration: LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.]
Of Susie's hundred little companions in the alley--playmates they could
scarcely be called--some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while
the boys earned money at "shinin'" or selling newspapers. The smaller
girls "minded the baby," so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them
did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The
rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children's labor in
and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm
in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them
always. In an evening school class of nineteen boys and nine girls which I
polled once I found twelve boys who "shined," five who sold papers, one of
thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of
twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and
worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one
twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age
minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old,
and of them one worked for a sweater and "finished twenty-five coats
yesterday," she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman's
work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to
help her mother sew coats when baby slept.
I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the
children under age into the stores, where they find employment as "cash"
girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are
as rare as angels' visits. I do not believe this is true to any great
extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other
mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would
alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the
Working Women's Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates
that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all
the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger.
Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and
less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I
think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and
not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the
children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who
exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal
dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked
fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more
than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down
when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two
dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to
leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most
wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the
hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing
the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour
spent in going through such a store tires many grown persons more than a
whole day's work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their
whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their
strength.
An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law
to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it
is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave
things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in
defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get
their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road
is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be
wanting to smooth the way for them.
There is still another kind of employment that absorbs many of the boys
and ought to be prohibited with the utmost rigor of the law. I refer to
the messenger service of the District Telegraph Companies especially.
Anyone can see for himself how old some of these boys are who carry
messages about the streets every day; but everybody cannot see the kind of
houses they have to go to, the kind of people they meet, or the sort of
influences that beset them hourly at an age when they are most easily
impressed for good or bad. If that were possible, the line would be drawn
against their employment rather at eighteen than at sixteen or fourteen.
At present there is none except the fanciful line drawn against truancy,
which, to a boy who has learned the tricks of the telegraph messenger, is
very elastic indeed.
[Illustration: MINDING THE BABY.]
To send the boys to school and see that they stay there until they have
learned enough to at least vote intelligently when they grow up, is the
bounden duty of the State--celebrated in theory but neglected in practice.
If it did its duty much would have been gained, but even then the real
kernel of this question of child labor would remain untouched. The trouble
is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of
work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown
to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more, and
therefore less, than when they began, and with the years that should have
prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery.
How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the
senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor, in denying to
our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting
foreign workmen in in shoals to crowd our market under the plea of the
"solidarity of labor"--a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor
all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.
The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of
improving the condition of the poor, who said to me, "They are down on the
scrub level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you
can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to
find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out
mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the
whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the
responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to
another generation that is so much worse to start off with." She spoke of
the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity
of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass
of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the
children.
I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee
wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man
found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing. The
woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train.
But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her
hand," reported her first employer, indignantly. The children were sent to
good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing
and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved; they were
simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever
received--that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original
creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.
I confess I had always laid the blame for this discouraging feature of the
problem upon our general industrial development in a more or less vague
way--steam, machinery, and all that sort of thing--until the other day I
met a man who gave me another view of it altogether. He was a manufacturer
of cheap clothing, a very intelligent and successful one at that; a large
employer of cheap Hebrew labor and, heaven save the mark!--a Christian.
His sincerity was unquestionable. He had no secrets to keep from me. He
was in the business to make money, he said with perfect frankness, and one
condition of his making money was, as he had had occasion to learn when he
was himself a wage-worker and a union man, to keep his workmen where they
were at his mercy. He had some four hundred hands, all Jewish immigrants,
all working for the lowest wages for which he could hire them. Among them
all there was not one tailor capable of making a whole garment. His policy
was to keep them from learning. He saw to it that each one was kept at
just one thing--sleeves, pockets, buttonholes--some small part of one
garment, and never learned anything else.
"This I do," he explained, "to prevent them from going on strike with the
hope of getting a job anywhere else. They can't. They don't know enough.
Not only do we limit them so that a man who has worked three months in my
shop and never held a needle before is just as valuable to me as one I
have had five years, but we make the different parts of the suit in
different places and keep Christians over the hands as cutters so that
they shall have no chance to learn."
Where we stood in his shop, a little boy was stacking some coats for
removal. The manufacturer pointed him out. "Now," he said, "this boy is
not fourteen years old, as you can see as well as I. His father works here
and when the Inspector comes I just call him up. He swears that the boy is
old enough to work, and there the matter ends. What would you? Is it not
better that he should be here than on the street? Bah!" And this
successful Christian manufacturer turned upon his heel with a vexed air.
It was curious to hear him, before I left, deliver a homily on the
"immorality" of the sweat-shops, arraigning them severely as "a blot on
humanity."