MORAL EDUCATION AND LEGAL PROTECTION OF CHILDREN
No great wrong has ever arisen more clearly to the social consciousness
of a generation than has that of commercialized vice in the
consciousness of ours, and that we are so slow to act is simply another
evidence that human nature has a curious power of callous indifference
towards evils which have been so entrenched that they seem part of that
which has always been. Educators of course share this attitude; at
moments they seem to intensify it, although at last an educational
movement in the direction of sex hygiene is beginning in the schools and
colleges. Primary schools strive to satisfy the child's first
questionings regarding the beginnings of human life and approach the
subject through simple biological instruction which at least places this
knowledge on a par with other natural facts. Such teaching is an
enormous advance for the children whose curiosity would otherwise have
been satisfied from poisonous sources and who would have learned of
simple physiological matters from such secret undercurrents of corrupt
knowledge as to have forever perverted their minds. Yet this first
direct step towards an adequate educational approach to this subject has
been surprisingly difficult owing to the self-consciousness of grown-up
people; for while the children receive the teaching quite simply, their
parents often take alarm. Doubtless co-operation with parents will be
necessary before the subject can fall into its proper place in the
schools. In Chicago, the largest women's club in the city has
established normal courses in sex hygiene attended both by teachers and
mothers, the National and State Federations of Women's Clubs are
gradually preparing thousands of women throughout America for fuller
co-operation with the schools in this difficult matter. In this, as in
so many other educational movements, Germany has led the way. Two
publications are issued monthly in Berlin, which promote not only more
effective legislation but more adequate instruction in the schools on
this basic subject. These journals are supported by men and women
anxious for light for the sake of their children. Some of them were
first stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama "The Awakening of
Spring," which, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the
lesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of gifted
school-children, because of the cowardly reticence of their parents.
A year ago the Bishop of London gathered together a number of
influential people and laid before them his convictions that the root of
the social evil lay in so-called "parental modesty," and that in the
quickening of the parental conscience lay the hope for the "lifting up
of England's moral tone which has for so long been the despair of
England's foremost men."
In America the eighth year-book of the National Society for the
Scientific Study of Education treats of this important subject with
great ability, massing the agencies and methods in impressive array.
Many other educational journals and organized societies could be cited
as expressing a new conscience in regard to this world-old evil. The
expert educational opinion which they represent is practically agreed
that for older children the instruction should not be confined to
biology and hygiene, but may come quite naturally in history and
literature, which record and portray the havoc wrought by the sexual
instinct when uncontrolled, and also show that, when directed and
spiritualized, it has become an inspiration to the loftiest devotions
and sacrifices. The youth thus taught sees this primal instinct not only
as an essential to the continuance of the race, but also, when it is
transmuted to the highest ends, as a fundamental factor in social
progress. The entire subject is broadened out in his mind as he learns
that his own struggle is a common experience. He is able to make his own
interpretations and to combat the crude inferences of his patronizing
companions. After all, no young person will be able to control his
impulses and to save himself from the grosser temptations, unless he has
been put under the sway of nobler influences. Perhaps we have yet to
learn that the inhibitions of character as well as its reinforcements
come most readily through idealistic motives.
Certainly all the great religions of the world have recognized youth's
need of spiritual help during the trying years of adolescence. The
ceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this instinct almost to
the exclusion of others, and all later religions attempt to provide the
youth with shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies ahead of him, for
the wise men in every age have known that only the power of the spirit
can overcome the lusts of the flesh. In spite of this educational
advance, courses of study in many public and private schools are still
prepared exactly as if educators had never known that at fifteen or
sixteen years of age, the will power being still weak, the bodily
desires are keen and insistent. The head master of Eton, Mr. Lyttleton,
who has given much thought to this gap in the education of youth says,
"The certain result of leaving an enormous majority of boys unguided and
uninstructed in a matter where their strongest passions are concerned,
is that they grow up to judge of all questions connected with it, from a
purely selfish point of view." He contends that this selfishness is due
to the fact that any single suggestion or hint which boys receive on the
subject comes from other boys or young men who are under the same potent
influences of ignorance, curiosity and the claims of self. No wholesome
counter-balance of knowledge is given, no attempt is made to invest the
subject with dignity or to place it in relation to the welfare of others
and to universal law. Mr. Lyttleton contends that this alone can explain
the peculiarly brutal attitude towards "outcast" women which is a
sustained cruelty to be discerned in no other relation of English life.
To quote him again: "But when the victims of man's cruelty are not birds
or beasts but our own countrywomen, doomed by the hundred thousand to a
life of unutterable shame and hopeless misery, then and then only the
general average tone of young men becomes hard and brutally callous or
frivolous with a kind of coarse frivolity not exhibited in relation to
any other form of human suffering." At the present moment thousands of
young people in our great cities possess no other knowledge of this
grave social evil which may at any moment become a dangerous personal
menace, save what is imparted to them in this brutal flippant spirit. It
has been said that the child growing up in the midst of civilization
receives from its parents and teachers something of the accumulated
experience of the world on all other subjects save upon that of sex. On
this one subject alone each generation learns little from its
predecessors.
An educator has lately pointed out that it is an old lure of vice to
pretend that it alone deals with manliness and reality, and he complains
that it is always difficult to convince youth that the higher planes of
life contain anything but chilly sentiments. He contends that young
people are therefore prone to receive moralizing and admonitions with
polite attention, but when it comes to action, they carefully observe
the life about them in order to conduct themselves in such wise as to be
part of the really desirable world inhabited by men of affairs. Owing to
this attitude, many young people living in our cities at the present
moment have failed to apprehend the admonitions of religion and have
never responded to its inner control. It is as if the impact of the
world had stunned their spiritual natures, and as if this had occurred
at the very time that a most dangerous experiment is being tried. The
public gaieties formerly allowed in Catholic countries where young
people were restrained by the confessional, are now permitted in cities
where this restraint is altogether unknown to thousands of young people,
and only faintly and traditionally operative upon thousands of others.
The puritanical history of American cities assumes that these gaieties
are forbidden, and that the streets are sober and decorous for
conscientious young men and women who need no external protection. This
ungrounded assumption, united to the fact that no adult has the
confidence of these young people, who are constantly subjected to a
multitude of imaginative impressions, is almost certain to result
disastrously.
The social relationships in a modern city are so hastily made and often
so superficial, that the old human restraints of public opinion, long
sustained in smaller communities, have also broken down. Thousands of
young men and women in every great city have received none of the
lessons in self-control which even savage tribes imparted to their
children when they taught them to master their appetites as well as
their emotions. These young people are perhaps further from all
community restraint and genuine social control than the youth of the
community have ever been in the long history of civilization. Certainly
only the modern city has offered at one and the same time every possible
stimulation for the lower nature and every opportunity for secret vice.
Educators apparently forget that this unrestrained stimulation of young
people, so characteristic of our cities, although developing very
rapidly, is of recent origin, and that we have not yet seen the outcome.
The present education of the average young man has given him only the
most unreal protection against the temptations of the city. Schoolboys
are subjected to many lures from without just at the moment when they
are filled with an inner tumult which utterly bewilders them and
concerning which no one has instructed them save in terms of empty
precept and unintelligible warning.
We are authoritatively told that the physical difficulties are
enormously increased by uncontrolled or perverted imaginations, and all
sound advice to young men in regard to this subject emphasizes a clean
mind, exhorts an imagination kept free from sensuality and insists upon
days filled with wholesome athletic interests. We allow this régime to
be exactly reversed for thousands of young people living in the most
crowded and most unwholesome parts of the city. Not only does the stage
in its advertisements exhibit all the allurements of sex to such an
extent that a play without a "love interest" is considered foredoomed to
failure, but the novels which form the sole reading of thousands of
young men and girls deal only with the course of true or simulated love,
resulting in a rose-colored marriage, or in variegated misfortunes.
Often the only recreation possible for young men and young women
together is dancing, in which it is always easy to transgress the
proprieties. In many public dance halls, however, improprieties are
deliberately fostered. The waltzes and two-steps are purposely slow, the
couples leaning heavily on each other barely move across the floor, all
the jollity and bracing exercise of the peasant dance is eliminated, as
is all the careful decorum of the formal dance. The efforts to obtain
pleasure or to feed the imagination are thus converged upon the senses
which it is already difficult for young people to understand and to
control. It is therefore not remarkable that in certain parts of the
city groups of idle young men are found whose evil imaginations have
actually inhibited their power for normal living. On the streets or in
the pool-rooms where they congregate their conversation, their tales of
adventure, their remarks upon women who pass by, all reveal that they
have been caught in the toils of an instinct so powerful and primal that
when left without direction it can easily overwhelm its possessor and
swamp his faculties. These young men, who do no regular work, who expect
to be supported by their mothers and sisters and to get money for the
shows and theatres by any sort of disreputable undertaking, are in
excellent training for the life of the procurer, and it is from such
groups that they are recruited. There is almost a system of
apprenticeship, for boys when very small act as "look-outs" and are
later utilized to make acquaintances with girls in order to introduce
them to professionals. From this they gradually learn the method of
procuring girls and at last do an independent business. If one boy is
successful in such a life, throughout his acquaintance runs the rumor
that a girl is an asset that will bring a larger return than can
possibly be earned in hard-working ways. Could the imaginations of these
young men have been controlled and cultivated, could the desire for
adventure have been directed into wholesome channels, could these idle
boys have been taught that, so far from being manly they were losing all
virility, could higher interests have been aroused and standards given
them in relation to this one aspect of life, the entire situation of
commercialized vice would be a different thing.
The girls with a desire for adventure seem confined to this one dubious
outlet even more than the boys, although there are only one-eighth as
many delinquent girls as boys brought into the juvenile court in
Chicago, the charge against the girls in almost every instance involves
a loss of chastity. One of them who was vainly endeavoring to formulate
the causes of her downfall, concentrated them all in the single
statement that she wanted the other girls to know that she too was a
"good Indian." Such a girl, while she is not an actual member of a gang
of boys, is often attached to one by so many loyalties and friendships
that she will seldom testify against a member, even when she has been
injured by him. She also depends upon the gang when she requires bail in
the police court or the protection that comes from political influence,
and she is often very proud of her quasi-membership. The little girls
brought into the juvenile court are usually daughters of those poorest
immigrant families living in the worst type of city tenements, who are
frequently forced to take boarders in order to pay the rent. A
surprising number of little girls have first become involved in
wrong-doing through the men of their own households. A recent inquiry
among 130 girls living in a sordid red light district disclosed the fact
that a majority of them had thus been victimized and the wrong had come
to them so early that they had been despoiled at an average age of eight
years. Looking upon the forlorn little creatures, who are often brought
into the Chicago juvenile court to testify against their own relatives,
one is seized with that curious compunction Goethe expressed in the now
hackneyed line from "Mignon:"
"Was hat Man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?"
One is also inclined to reproach educators for neglecting to give
children instruction in play when one sees the unregulated amusement
parks which are apparently so dangerous to little girls twelve or
fourteen years old. Because they are childishly eager for amusement and
totally unable to pay for a ride on the scenic railway or for a ticket
to an entertainment, these disappointed children easily accept many
favors from the young men who are standing near the entrances for the
express purpose of ruining them. The hideous reward which is demanded
from them later in the evening, after they have enjoyed the many
"treats" which the amusement park offers, apparently seems of little
moment. Their childish minds are filled with the memory of the lurid
pleasures to the oblivion of the later experience, and they eagerly tell
their companions of this possibility "of getting in to all the shows."
These poor little girls pass unnoticed amidst a crowd of honest people
seeking recreation after a long day's work, groups of older girls
walking and talking gaily with young men of their acquaintance, and
happy children holding their parents' hands. This cruel exploitation of
the childish eagerness for pleasure is, of course, possible only among a
certain type of forlorn city children who are totally without standards
and into whose colorless lives a visit to the amusement park brings the
acme of delirious excitement. It is possible that these children are the
inevitable product of city life; in Paris, little girls at local fêtes
wishing to ride on the hobby horse frequently buy the privilege at a
fearful price from the man directing the machinery, and a physician
connected with the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children writes: "It is horribly pathetic to learn how far a nickel or a
quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children."
The home environment of such children has been similar to that of many
others who come to grief through the five-cent theatres. These eager
little people, to whom life has offered few pleasures, crowd around the
door hoping to be taken in by some kind soul and, when they have been
disappointed over and over again and the last performance is about to
begin, a little girl may be induced unthinkingly to barter her chastity
for an entrance fee.
Many children are also found who have been decoyed into their first
wrong-doing through the temptation of the saloon, in spite of the fact
that one of the earliest regulations in American cities for the
protection of children was the prohibition of the sale of liquor to
minors. That children may be easily demoralized by the influence of a
disorderly saloon was demonstrated recently in Chicago; one of these
saloons was so situated that the pupils of a public school were obliged
to pass it and from the windows of the schoolhouse itself could see much
of what was passing within the place. An effort was made by the Juvenile
Protective Association to have it closed by the chief of police, but
although he did so, it was opened again the following day. The
Association then took up the matter with the mayor, who refused to
interfere, insisting that the objectionable features had been
eliminated. Through months of effort, during which time the practices of
the place remained quite unchanged, one group after another of
public-spirited citizens endeavored to suppress what had become a public
scandal, only to find that the place was protected by brewery interests
which were more powerful, both financially and politically, than
themselves. At last, after a peculiarly flagrant case involving a little
girl, the mothers of the neighborhood arranged a mass meeting in the
schoolhouse itself, inviting local officials to be present. The mothers
then produced a mass of testimony which demonstrated that dozens and
hundreds of children had been directly or indirectly affected by the
place whose removal they demanded. A meeting so full of genuine anxiety
and righteous indignation could not well be disregarded, and the
compulsory education department was at last able to obtain a revocation
of the license. The many people who had so long tried to do away with
this avowedly disreputable saloon received a fresh impression of the
menace to children who became sophisticated by daily familiarity with
vice. Yet many mothers, hard pressed by poverty, are obliged to rent
houses next to vicious neighborhoods and their children very early
become familiar with all the outer aspects of vice. Among them are the
children of widows who make friends with their dubious neighbors during
the long days while their mothers are at work. I recall two sisters in
one family whose mother had moved her household to the borders of a
Chicago segregated district, apparently without knowing the character of
the neighborhood. The little sisters, twelve and eight years old,
accepted many invitations from a kind neighbor to come into her house to
see her pretty things. The older girl was delighted to be "made up" with
powder and paint and to try on long dresses, while the little one who
sang very prettily was taught some new songs, happily without
understanding their import. The tired mother knew nothing of what the
children did during her absence, until an honest neighbor who had seen
the little girls going in and out of the district, interfered on their
behalf. The frightened mother moved back to her old neighborhood which
she had left in search of cheaper rent, her pious soul stirred to its
depths that the children for whom she patiently worked day by day had so
narrowly escaped destruction.
Who cannot recall at least one of these desperate mothers, overworked
and harried through a long day, prolonged by the family washing and
cooking into the evening, followed by a night of foreboding and
misgiving because the very children for whom her life is sacrificed are
slowly slipping away from her control and affection? Such a spectacle
forces one into an agreement with Wells, that it is a "monstrous
absurdity" that women who are "discharging their supreme social
function, that of rearing children, should do it in their spare time, as
it were, while they 'earn their living' by contributing some
half-mechanical element to some trivial industrial product."
Nevertheless, such a woman whose wages are fixed on the basis of
individual subsistence, who is quite unable to earn a family wage, is
still held by a legal obligation to support her children with the
desperate penalty of forfeiture if she fail.
I can recall a very intelligent woman who long brought her children to
the Hull House day nursery with this result at the end of ten years of
devotion: the little girl is almost totally deaf owing to neglect
following a case of measles, because her mother could not stop work in
order to care for her; the youngest boy has lost a leg flipping cars;
the oldest boy has twice been arrested for petty larceny; the twin boys,
in spite of prolonged sojourns in the parental school, have been such
habitual truants that their natural intelligence has secured little aid
from education. Of the five children three are now in semi-penal
institutions, supported by the state. It would not therefore have been
so un-economical to have boarded them with their own mother, requiring a
standard of nutrition and school attendance at least up to that national
standard of nurture which the more advanced European governments are
establishing.
The recent Illinois law, providing that the children of widows may be
supported by public funds paid to the mother upon order of the juvenile
court, will eventually restore a mother's care to these poor children;
but in the meantime, even the poor mother who is receiving such aid, in
her forced search for cheap rent may be continually led nearer to the
notoriously evil districts. Many appeals made to landlords of
disreputable houses in Chicago on behalf of the children living adjacent
to such property have never secured a favorable response. It is
apparently difficult for the average property owner to resist the high
rents which houses in certain districts of the city can command if
rented for purposes of vice. I recall two small frame houses identical
in type and value standing side by side. One which belonged to a citizen
without scruples was rented for $30.00 a month, the other belonging to a
conscientious man was rented for $9.00 a month. The supposedly
respectable landlords defend themselves behind the old sophistry: "If I
did not rent my house for such a purpose, someone else would," and the
more hardened ones say that "It is all in the line of business." Both of
them are enormously helped by the secrecy surrounding the ownership of
such houses, although it is hoped that the laws requiring the name of
the owner and the agent of every multiple house to be posted in the
public hallway will at length break through this protection, and the
discovered landlords will then be obliged to pay the fine to which the
law specifically states they have made themselves liable. In the
meantime, women forced to find cheap rents are subjected to one more
handicap in addition to the many others poverty places upon them. Such
experiences may explain the fact that English figures show a very large
proportion of widows and deserted women among the prostitutes in those
large towns which maintain segregated districts.
The deprivation of a mother's care is most frequently experienced by the
children of the poorest colored families who are often forced to live in
disreputable neighborhoods because they literally cannot rent houses
anywhere else. Both because rents are always high for colored people and
because the colored mothers are obliged to support their children, seven
times as many of them, in proportion to their entire number, as of the
white mothers, the actual number of colored children neglected in the
midst of temptation is abnormally large. So closely is child life
founded upon the imitation of what it sees that the child who knows all
evil is almost sure in the end to share it. Colored children seldom roam
far from their own neighborhoods: in the public playgrounds, which are
theoretically open to them, they are made so uncomfortable by the
slights of other children that they learn to stay away, and, shut out
from legitimate recreation, are all the more tempted by the careless,
luxurious life of a vicious neighborhood. In addition to the colored
girls who have thus from childhood grown familiar with the outer aspects
of vice, are others who are sent into the district in the capacity of
domestic servants by unscrupulous employment agencies who would not
venture to thus treat a white girl. The community forces the very people
who have confessedly the shortest history of social restraint, into a
dangerous proximity with the vice districts of the city. This results,
as might easily be predicted, in a very large number of colored girls
entering a disreputable life. The negroes themselves believe that the
basic cause for the high percentage of colored prostitutes is the recent
enslavement of their race with its attendant unstable marriage and
parental status, and point to thousands of slave sales that but two
generations ago disrupted the negroes' attempts at family life. Knowing
this as we do, it seems all the more unjustifiable that the nation which
is responsible for the broken foundations of this family life should
carelessly permit the negroes, making their first struggle towards a
higher standard of domesticity, to be subjected to the most flagrant
temptations which our civilization tolerates.
The imaginations of even very young children may easily be forced into
sensual channels. A little girl, twelve years old, was one day brought
to the psychopathic clinic connected with the Chicago juvenile court.
She had been detained under police surveillance for more than a week,
while baffled detectives had in vain tried to verify the statements she
had made to her Sunday-school teacher in great detail of certain
horrible experiences which had befallen her. For at least a week no one
concerned had the remotest idea that the child was fabricating. The
police thought that she had merely grown confused as to the places to
which she had been "carried unconscious." The mother gave the first clue
when she insisted that the child had never been away from her long
enough to have had these experiences, but came directly home from school
every afternoon for her tea, of which she habitually drank ten or twelve
cups. The skilful questionings at the clinic, while clearly establishing
the fact of a disordered mind, disclosed an astonishing knowledge of the
habits of the underworld.
Even children who live in respectable neighborhoods and are guarded by
careful parents so that their imaginations are not perverted, but only
starved, constantly conduct a search for the magical and impossible
which leads them into moral dangers. An astonishing number of them
consult palmists, soothsayers, and fortune tellers. These dealers in
futurity, who sell only love and riches, the latter often dependent upon
the first, are sometimes in collusion with disreputable houses, and at
the best make the path of normal living more difficult for their eager
young patrons. There is something very pathetic in the sheepish, yet
radiant, faces of the boy and girl, often together, who come out on the
street from a dingy doorway which bears the palmist's sign of the
spread-out hand. This remnant of primitive magic is all they can find
with which to feed their eager imaginations, although the city offers
libraries and galleries, crowned with man's later imaginative
achievements. One hard-working girl of my acquaintance, told by a
palmist that "diamonds were coming to her soon," afterwards accepted
without a moment's hesitation a so-called diamond ring from a man whose
improper attentions she had hitherto withstood.
In addition to these heedless young people, pulled into a sordid and
vicious life through their very search for romance, are many little
children ensnared by means of the most innocent playthings and pleasures
of childhood. Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the social evil as
it exists to-day in the modern city, is the procuring of little girls
who are too young to have received adequate instruction of any sort and
whose natural safeguard of modesty and reserve has been broken down by
the overcrowding of tenement house life. Any educator who has made a
careful study of the children from the crowded districts is impressed
with the numbers of them whose moral natures are apparently unawakened.
While there are comparatively few of these non-moral children in any one
neighborhood, in the entire city their number is far from negligible.
Such children are used by disreputable people to invite their more
normal playmates to house parties, which they attend again and again,
lured by candy and fruit, until they gradually learn to trust the
vicious hostess. The head of one such house, recently sent to the
penitentiary upon charges brought against her by the Juvenile Protective
Association, founded her large and successful business upon the
activities of three or four little girls who, although they had
gradually come to understand her purpose, were apparently so chained to
her by the goodies and favors which they received, that they were quite
indifferent to the fate of their little friends. Such children, when
brought to the psychopathic clinic attached to the Chicago juvenile
court, are sometimes found to have incipient epilepsy or other physical
disabilities from which their conduct may be at least partially
accounted for. Sometimes they come from respectable families, but more
often from families where they have been mistreated and where dissolute
parents have given them neither affection nor protection. Many of these
children whose relatives have obviously contributed to their delinquency
are helped by the enforcement of the adult delinquency law.
One looks upon these hardened little people with a sense of apology that
educational forces have not been able to break into their first
ignorance of life before it becomes toughened into insensibility, and
one knows that, whatever may be done for them later, because of this
early neglect, they will probably always remain impervious to the
gentler aspects of life, as if vice seared their tender minds with
red-hot irons. Our public-school education is so nearly universal, that
if the entire body of the teachers seriously undertook to instruct all
American youth in regard to this most important aspect of life, why
should they not in time train their pupils to continence and
self-direction, as they already discipline their minds with knowledge in
regard to many other matters? Certainly the extreme youth of the victims
of the white slave traffic, both boys and girls, places a great
responsibility upon the educational forces of the community.
The state which supports the public school is also coming to the rescue
of children through protective legislation. This is another illustration
that the beginnings of social advance have often resulted from the
efforts to defend the weakest and least-sheltered members of the
community. The widespread movement which would protect children from
premature labor, also prohibits them from engaging in occupations in
which they are subjected to moral dangers. Several American cities have
of late become much concerned over the temptations to which messenger
boys, delivery boys, and newsboys are constantly subjected when their
business takes them into vicious districts. The Chicago vice commission
makes a plea for these "children of the night" that they shall be
protected by law from those temptations which they are too young and too
untrained to withstand. New York and Wisconsin are the only states which
have raised the legal age of messenger boys employed late at night to
twenty-one years. Under the inadequate sixteen-year limit, which
regulates night work for children in Illinois, boys constantly come to
grief through their familiarity with the social evil. One of these, a
delicate boy of seventeen, had been put into the messenger service by
his parents when their family doctor had recommended out-of-door work.
Because he was well-bred and good-looking, he became especially popular
with the inmates of disreputable houses. They gave him tips of a dollar
and more when he returned from the errands which he had executed for
them, such as buying candy, cocaine or morphine. He was inevitably
flattered by their attentions and pleased with his own popularity.
Although his mother knew that his duties as a messenger boy occasionally
took him to disreputable houses, she fervently hoped his early training
might keep him straight, but in the end realized the foolhardiness of
subjecting an immature youth to these temptations. The vice commission
report gives various detailed instances of similar experiences on the
part of other lads, one of them being a high-school boy who was merely
earning extra money as a messenger boy during the rush of Christmas
week.
The regulations in Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St. Louis
for the safeguarding of these children may be but a forecast of the care
which the city will at last learn to devise for youth under special
temptations. Because the various efforts made in Chicago to obtain
adequate legislation for the protection of street-trading children have
not succeeded, incidents like the following have not only occurred once,
but are constantly repeated: a pretty little girl, the only child of a
widowed mother, sold newspapers after school hours from the time she was
seven years old. Because her home was near a vicious neighborhood and
because the people in the disreputable hotels seldom asked for change
when they bought a paper and good-naturedly gave her many little
presents, her mother permitted her to gain a clientele within the
district on the ground that she was too young to understand what she
might see. This continued familiarity, in spite of her mother's
admonitions, not to talk to her customers, inevitably resulted in so
vitiating the standard of the growing girl, that at the age of fourteen
she became an inmate of one of the houses. A similar instance concerns
three little girls who habitually sold gum in one of the segregated
districts. Because they had repeatedly been turned away by kind-hearted
policemen who felt that they ought not to be in such a neighborhood,
each one of these children had obtained a special permit from the mayor
of the city in order to protect herself from "police interference."
While the mayor had no actual authority to issue such permits, naturally
the piece of paper bearing his name, when displayed by a child, checked
the activity of the police officer. The incident was but one more
example of the old conflict between mistaken kindness to the individual
child in need of money, and the enforcement of those regulations which
may seem to work a temporary hardship upon one child, but save a hundred
others from entering occupations which can only lead into blind alleys.
Because such occupations inevitably result in increasing the number of
unemployables, the educational system itself must be challenged.
A royal commission has recently recommended to the English Parliament
that "the legally permissible hours for the employment of boys be
shortened, that they be required to spend the hours so set free, in
physical and technological training, that the manufacturing of the
unemployable may cease." Certainly we are justified in demanding from
our educational system, that the interest and capacity of each child
leaving school to enter industry, shall have been studied with reference
to the type of work he is about to undertake. When vocational bureaus
are properly connected with all the public schools, a girl will have an
intelligent point of departure into her working life, and a place to
which she may turn in time of need, for help and advice through those
long and dangerous periods of unemployment which are now so inimical to
her character.
This same British commission divided all of the unemployed, the
under-employed, and the unemployable as the results of three types of
trades: first, the subsidized labor trades, wherein women and children
are paid wages insufficient to maintain them at the required standard of
health and industrial efficiency, so that their wages must be
supplemented by relatives or charity; second, labor deteriorating
trades, which have sapped the energy, the capacity, the character, of
workers; third, bare subsistence trades, where the worker is forced to
such a low level in his standard of life that he continually falls below
self-support. We have many trades of these three types in America, all
of them demanding the work of young and untrained girls. Yet, in spite
of the obvious dangers surrounding every girl who enters one of them,
little is done to guide the multitude of children who leave school
prematurely each year into reasonable occupations.
Unquestionably the average American child has received a more expensive
education than has yet been accorded to the child of any other nation.
The girls working in department stores have been in the public schools
on an average of eight years, while even the factory girls, who so often
leave school from the lower grades, have yet averaged six and two-tenths
years of education at the public expense, before they enter industrial
life. Certainly the community that has accomplished so much could afford
them help and oversight for six and a half years longer, which is the
average length of time that a working girl is employed. The state might
well undertake this, if only to secure its former investment and to save
that investment from utter loss.
Our generation, said to have developed a new enthusiasm for the
possibilities of child life, and to have put fresh meaning into the
phrase "children's rights," may at last have the courage to insist upon
a child's right to be well born and to start in life with its tiny body
free from disease. Certainly allied to this new understanding of child
life and a part of the same movement is the new science of eugenics with
its recently appointed university professors. Its organized societies
publish an ever-increasing mass of information as to that which
constitutes the inheritance of well-born children. When this new science
makes clear to the public that those diseases which are a direct outcome
of the social evil are clearly responsible for race deterioration,
effective indignation may at last be aroused, both against the
preventable infant mortality for which these diseases are responsible,
and against the ghastly fact that the survivors among these afflicted
children infect their contemporaries and hand on the evil heritage to
another generation. Public societies for the prevention of blindness are
continually distributing information on the care of new-born children
and may at length answer that old, confusing question "Did this man sin
or his parents, that he was born blind?" Such knowledge is becoming more
widespread every day and the rising interest in infant welfare must in
time react upon the very existence of the social-evil itself.
This new public concern for the welfare of little children in certain
American cities has resulted in a municipal milk supply; in many German
cities, in free hospitals and nurseries. New York, Chicago, Boston and
other large towns, employ hundreds of nurses each summer to instruct
tenement-house mothers upon the care of little children. Doubtless all
of this enthusiasm for the nurture of children will at last arouse
public opinion in regard to the transmission of that one type of disease
which thousands of them annually inherit, and which is directly
traceable to the vicious living of their parents or grandparents. This
slaughter of the innocents, this infliction of suffering upon the
new-born, is so gratuitous and so unfair, that it is only a question of
time until an outraged sense of justice shall be aroused on behalf of
these children. But even before help comes through chivalric sentiments,
governmental and municipal agencies will decline to spend the
tax-payers' money for the relief of suffering infants, when by the
exertion of the same authority they could easily provide against the
possibility of the birth of a child so afflicted. It is obvious that the
average tax-payer would be moved to demand the extermination of that
form of vice which has been declared illegal, although it still
flourishes by official connivance, did he once clearly apprehend that it
is responsible for the existence of these diseases which cost him so
dear. It is only his ignorance which makes him remain inert until each
victim of the white slave traffic shall be avenged unto the third and
fourth generation of them that bought her. It is quite possible that the
tax-payer will himself contend that, as the state does not legalize a
marriage without a license officially recorded, that the status of
children may be clearly defined, so the state would need to go but one
step further in the same direction, to insist upon health certificates
from the applicant for a marriage license, that the health of future
children might in a certain measure, be guaranteed. Whether or not this
step may be predicted, the mere discussion of this matter in itself, is
an indication of the changing public opinion, as is the fact that such
legislation has already been enacted in two states, which are only now
putting into action the recommendation made centuries ago by such social
philosophers as Plato and Sir Thomas More. A sense of justice outraged
by the wanton destruction of new-born children, may in time unite with
that ardent tide of rising enthusiasm for the nurture of the young,
until the old barriers of silence and inaction, behind which the social
evil has so long intrenched itself, shall at last give way.
Certainly it will soon be found that the sentiment of pity, so recently
aroused throughout the country on behalf of the victims of the white
slave traffic, will be totally unable to afford them protection unless
it becomes incorporated in government. It is possible that we are on the
eve of a series of legislative enactments similar to those which
resulted from the attempts to regulate child labor. Through the entire
course of the last century, in that anticipation of coming changes which
does so much to bring changes about, the friends of the children were
steadily engaged in making a new state, from the first child labor law
passed in the English parliament in 1803 to the final passage of the
so-called children's charter in 1909. During the long century of
transforming pity into political action there was created that social
sympathy which has become one of the greatest forces in modern
legislation, and to which we may confidently appeal in this new crusade
against the social evil.
Another point of similarity to the child labor movement is obvious, for
the friends of the children early found that they needed much
statistical information and that the great problem of the would-be
reformer is not so much overcoming actual opposition--the passing of
time gradually does that for him--as obtaining and formulating accurate
knowledge and fitting that knowledge into the trend of his time. From
this point of view and upon the basis of what has already been
accomplished for "the protection of minors," the many recent
investigations which have revealed the extreme youth of the victims of
the white slave traffic, should make legislation on their behalf all the
more feasible. Certainly no reformer could ever more legitimately make
an emotional appeal to the higher sensibility of the public.
In the rescue homes recently opened in Chicago by the White Slave
Traffic Committee of the League of Cook County Clubs, the tender ages of
the little girls who were brought there horrified the good clubwomen
more than any other aspect of the situation. A number of the little
inmates in the home wanted to play with dolls and several of them
brought dolls of their own, which they had kept with them through all
their vicissitudes. There is something literally heart-breaking in the
thought of these little children who are ensnared and debauched when
they are still young enough to have every right to protection and care.
Quite recently I visited a home for semi-delinquent girls against each
one of whom stood a grave charge involving the loss of her chastity.
Upon each of the little white beds or on one of the stiff chairs
standing by its side was a doll belonging to a delinquent owner still
young enough to love and cherish this supreme toy of childhood. I had
come to the home prepared to "lecture to the inmates." I remained to
dress dolls with a handful of little girls who eagerly asked questions
about the dolls I had once possessed in a childhood which seemed to them
so remote. Looking at the little victims who supply the white slave
trade, one is reminded of the burning words of Dr. Howard Kelly uttered
in response to the demand that the social evil be legalized and its
victims licensed. He says: "Where shall we look to recruit the
ever-failing ranks of these poor creatures as they die yearly by the
tens of thousands? Which of the little girls of our land shall we
designate for this traffic? Mark their sweet innocence to-day as they
run about in our streets and parks prattling and playing, ever busy
about nothing; which of them shall we snatch as they approach maturity,
to supply this foul mart?"
It is incomprehensible that a nation whose chief boast is its free
public education, that a people always ready to respond to any moral or
financial appeal made in the name of children, should permit this infamy
against childhood to continue! Only the protection of all children from
the menacing temptations which their youth is unable to withstand, will
prevent some of them from falling victims to the white slave traffic;
only when moral education is made effective and universal will there be
hope for the actual abolition of commercialized vice. These are
illustrations perhaps of that curious solidarity of which society is so
rapidly becoming conscious.