Part 10

Worse still, the cupidity of British Bumbledom was aroused, and it became the custom for overseers of the poor to insist that one imbecile child at least should be taken by the mill owner, or the trafficker, with every batch of twenty children. In this manner the parish got rid of the expense of maintaining its idiot children. What became of these unhappy idiots will probably never be known, but from the cruel fate of the children who were sane, we may judge how awful that of the poor imbeciles must have been.

Even in the one factory of the time which was heralded as a model for the manufacturers to copy, the mill at New Lanark, Scotland, owned by Mr. David Dale and afterward made famous by the great and good Robert Owen, his son-in-law, conditions were, from a twentieth-century point of view, simply shocking, despite the fact that it was the subject of glowing praise in the _Annual Register_ for 1792, and that, like some of our modern factories, it had become generally regarded as a semi-philanthropic establishment. Robert Owen tells us in his autobiography that “children were received as early as six years old, the pauper authorities declining to send them at any later age.” These little children worked from six in the morning till seven in the evening, _and after that they were supposed to be educated_! “The poor children hated their slavery; many absconded; ... at thirteen or fifteen years old, when their apprenticeship expired, they commonly went off to Edinburgh or Glasgow, ... altogether admirably trained for swelling the mass of vice and misery in the towns.[94] And all this while British philanthropists were agitating the question of negro emancipation, and raising funds for that object!”

Thanks, mainly, to the agitation of Owen, a movement was begun to endeavor to improve the lot of these little child slaves. This movement received a tremendous impetus from the fearful epidemic which, in 1799–1800, spread through the factory districts of Manchester and the surrounding country. An inquiry into the causes of this epidemic ascribed it to overwork, scant and poor food, wretched clothing, bad ventilation, and overcrowding, especially among the children.[95] As a result the first act for the protection of child workers was passed through the parliamentary exertions of Sir Robert Peel, himself a master manufacturer. It was a very small measure of relief which this act afforded, but it is nevertheless a most important statute to students of industrial legislation as the “first definitely in restraint of modern factory labor and in general opposition to the _laissez-faire_ policy in industry.”[96] It was the first factory act ever passed by the British Parliament. It placed no limit upon the age at which children might be employed; it applied only to apprentices, and not to children “under the supervision of their parents;” it reduced the hours of labor to twelve per day, and provided for the clothing, instruction, and religious training of the children. These provisions were clearly a survival of an industrial system based upon paternal interest and authority.

One immediate effect of the act of 1802 was the practical break-up of the pauper apprentice system. But it must be remembered that this system was already outworn, and it is extremely improbable that it would have continued to any great extent, even if the act of 1802 had not been passed. It had served its purpose, but was no longer essential to the manufacturers.[97] Notwithstanding that it introduced a revolutionary principle, as we have seen, the act excited no opposition from the manufacturers. The reason for this is not difficult to determine. Wages had been forced down to the starvation level through the competition of the pauper apprentices with free, adult labor, with the result that poverty abounded. Parents were ready now to send their children into the mills. Hunger had conquered their prejudices—the iron man had triumphed over human flesh and blood.

It is not my purpose to trace the growth of English legislation against child labor. This brief historical sketch is introduced for quite another purpose, to wit, to show the origin of our modern problem of child slavery and degradation. Suffice it to say, then, that the “free” children who went into the mills by their parents’ “consent” were almost as badly off as the pauper apprentices had been. They were treated just as brutally. Even in 1830, before a meeting of philanthropists and clergy in Bradford, Richard Oastler, the “King of the Factory Children,” could hold up an overseer’s whip, saying, “_This_ was hard at work in this town last week.”[98] And on the 16th of March, 1832, Michael Sadler, M.P., in moving the second reading of his Ten Hours Bill in the House of Commons, could say: “Sir, children are beaten with thongs prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this country, no matter whether children or grown up, I hardly know which is the more disgusting outrage, are beaten upon the arms, face, and bosom—beaten in your ‘free market’ of labour, as you term it, like slaves.... These are the instruments!” (Here, says the report in _Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates_, the honorable member exhibited some black, heavy leathern thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when struck upon the table, resounded through the House.) “They are quite equal to breaking an arm, but the bones of the young ... are pliant. The marks, however, are long visible, and the poor wretch is flogged, I say, like a dog, by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cart-whip of the West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling against the factory thong of England.”[99] In some memorable verses this noble parliamentary leader of the movement for factory legislation has described such a whipping scene. The poem is too long to quote in its entirety:—

“‘Father, I’m up, but weary, I scarce can reach the door, And long the way and dreary— Oh, carry me once more!’

“Her wasted form seemed nothing— The load was at his heart, The sufferer he kept soothing Till at the mill they part. The overlooker met her, As to her frame she crept, And with his thong he beat her And cursed her as she wept.

“All night with tortured feeling, He watched his speechless child, While, close beside her kneeling, She knew him not, nor smiled. Again the factory’s ringing Her last perceptions tried; When, from her straw bed springing, ‘Tis time!’ she shrieked, and died!”[100]

A Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investigate the grounds of Sadler’s demand for the Ten Hours Bill. From the mass of evidence of almost unspeakable cruelty, I quote only one brief passage from the testimony of one Jonathan Downe, himself a mill hand: “Provided a child should be drowsy (there were plenty working at six years of age), the overlooker walks around the room with a stick in his hand, and he touches the child on the shoulder, and says, ‘Come here!’ In the corner of the room is an iron cistern; it is filled with water; he takes this boy, and holding him up by his legs, dips him overhead in the cistern, and sends him to his task for the remainder of the day; and that boy is to stand dripping as he is at his work—he has no chance of drying himself.”[101]

Such, then, was child labor at its worst; such the immediate effects of the introduction of great mechanical inventions which the wisest of the ancients believed would liberate men from all forms of bondage and destroy every vestige of slavery,—a hope which for many of us has not been shattered, even by a century and a quarter of disappointment. Happily, we in the United States have been practically free from some of the worst evils of England’s experience, yet it is only too true that we have to-day a child-labor problem of terrible magnitude, challenging the heart and brain of the nation to find a solution. We, too, are permitting the giant “iron men” to enslave our babies. The machine is our modern Moloch, and we feed it with precious child lives.

III

I am not unmindful of the fact that the presentation of the darkest side of England’s experience may have the effect of inducing in some minds a certain spirit of content,—a pharisaical thanksgiving that we are “not as other men” have been in a past that is not very remote. I accept, gladly, the issue implied in that attitude. It is no part of my purpose to discount the social and ethical gains which have resulted from the struggle against child labor, or to paint in unduly dark colors the problem as it presents itself to us in the United States to-day. No good purpose is served by exaggeration; progress is not quickened by denying the progress that has been made.

The inferno of child torture which the records of nineteenth-century England picture so vividly has more than historical interest for us. It was the result of a policy of _laissez faire_ on the part of the government, and that policy has its advocates in the United States to-day. In our legislative assemblies, and through the press, able and earnest men—some of them earnest only in their devotion to Mammon—are advocating that policy and forever crying out, in the words of the old physiocrats, “Let alone; the world revolves of itself.” When that cry of _laissez faire_ is raised, despite the fact that children of four years are found at work in the canning factories of New York State,[102] and little girls of five and six years are found working by night in Southern cotton mills,[103] it is not too much to assume that only a vigilant and constantly protesting public conscience protects us from conditions as revolting as any of those experienced in the black night of England’s orgy of greed. Capital has neither morals nor ideals; its interests are always and everywhere expressible in terms of cash profits. Capital in the United States in the twentieth century calls for children as loudly as it called in England a century ago.

Whatever advance has been made in the direction of the legislative protection of children from the awful consequences of premature exploitation, has been made in the face of bitter opposition from the exploiters. In the New York Legislature, during the session of 1903, the owners of the canning factories of the state used their utmost power to have their industry exempted from the humane but inadequate provisions of the Child Labor Law, notwithstanding that babies four years old were known to be working in their factories. The Northern owners of Alabama cotton mills secured the _repeal_ of the law passed in that state in 1887 prohibiting the employment of children under fourteen years of age for more than eight hours in a day; and when, later, the Alabama Child Labor Committee sought to secure legislative protection for children up to twelve years of age, paid agents of the mill owners appeared before the legislature and persistently opposed their efforts.[104] Similar testimony might be given from practically every state where any attempt has been made to legislate against the evil of child labor. Even such a responsible organ of capitalist opinion as the _Manufacturers’ Record_ editorially denounces all child-labor legislation as wrong and immoral![105] There are, of course, honorable exceptions, but as a class the employers of labor are persistent in their opposition to all such legislation.

According to the census of 1900 there were, in the United States in that year, 1,752,187 children under sixteen years of age employed in gainful occupations. Of itself that is a terrible sum, but all authorities are agreed that it does not fully represent the magnitude of the child-labor problem. It is well known that many thousands of children are working under the protection of certificates in which they are falsely represented as being of the legal age for employment. When a child of twelve gets a certificate declaring its age to be fifteen, it needs only to work a year, to be in reality thirteen years old, in order to be classed as an adult over sixteen years of age. Such certificates have been, and in many cases still are, ridiculously easy to obtain, it being only necessary for one of the parents or guardians of a child to swear before a notary that the child has reached the minimum age required by law. The result has been the promotion of child slavery and illiteracy through the wholesale perjury of parents and guardians.[106] I have known scores of instances in which children ten or eleven years old were employed through the possession of certificates stating that they were thirteen or fourteen. I remember asking one little lad his age, in Pittston, Pennsylvania, during the anthracite coal strike of 1902. He certainly did not look more than ten years old, but he answered boldly, “I’m thirteen, sir.” When I asked him how long he had been at work, he replied, “More’n a year gone, sir.” Afterward I met his father at one of the strikers’ meetings, and he told me that the lad was only a few days over eleven years of age, and that he went to work as a “breaker boy” before he was ten. “We’m a big fam’ly,” he said in excuse. “There’s six kids an’ th’ missis an’ me. Wi’ me pay so small, I was glad to give a quarter to have the papers (certificate) filled out so’s he could bring in a trifle like other boys.” Afterward I came across several similar cases.

That is only one of many reasons for supposing that the census figures do not adequately represent the extent to which child labor prevails. Another is the tremendous number of children of school age, and below the age at which they may be legally employed, who do not attend school. In New York State, for instance, there were more than 76,000 children between the ages of ten and fourteen years who were out of school during the whole of the twelve months covered by the census of 1900, and nearly 16,000 more in the same age period who attended school less than five months in the year.[107] Careful investigation in Philadelphia showed that in one year, “after deducting those physically unable to attend school, 16,100 children, between the ages of eight and thirteen,” were out of school, and a similar condition is reported to exist throughout the whole of Pennsylvania.[108] The Child Labor Committee of Pennsylvania gives a list of nearly one hundred different kinds of work at which children between the ages of eight and thirteen were found to be employed in Philadelphia alone. In practically every industrial centre this margin of children of school age and below the legal age for employment, who do not attend school, exists. It is impossible for any one who is at all conversant with the facts to resist the conclusion that, after making all possible allowances for other causes, by far the larger part of these absentees are at work. Thousands find employment in factories and stores; others find employment in some of the many street trades, selling newspapers, peddling, running errands for small storekeepers, and the like. Many others are not “employed” in the strict sense of the word at all, because they work in their homes, assisting their parents. Their condition is generally much worse than that of the children regularly employed in factories and workshops. In excluding them the census figures omit a very large class of child workers who are the victims of the worst conditions of all. I am convinced that the number of children under _fifteen_ years of age who work is much larger than the official figures give, notwithstanding that these are supposed to give the number of all workers under _sixteen_ years of age. It would, I think, be quite within the mark to say that the number of child workers under fifteen is at least 2,250,000.

From the point of view of the sociologist an accurate statistical measure of the child-labor problem would be a most valuable gain, but to most people such figures mean very little. If they could only see the human units represented by the figures, it would be different. If they could only see in one vast, suffering throng as many children as there are men, women, and children in the state of New Jersey, they would be able to appreciate some of the meaning of the census figures. Even so, they would have only a vivid sense of the magnitude of such a number as 1,752,000; they would still have no idea of the awful physical, mental, and moral wreckage hidden in the lifeless and dumb figures. If it were only possible to take the consumptive cough of one child textile worker with lint-clogged lungs, and to multiply its volume by tens of thousands; to gather into one single compass the fevers that burn in thousands of child toilers’ bodies, so that we might visualize the Great White Plague’s relation to child labor, the nation would surely rise as one man and put an end to the destruction of children for profit. If all the people of this great republic could see little Anetta Fachini, four years old, working with her mother making artificial flowers, as I saw her in her squalid tenement home at eleven o’clock at night, I think the impression upon their hearts and minds would be far deeper and more lasting than any that whole pages of figures could make. The frail little thing was winding green paper around wires to make stems for artificial flowers to decorate ladies’ hats. Every few minutes her head would droop and her weary eyelids close, but her little fingers still kept moving—uselessly, helplessly, mechanically moving. Then the mother would shake her gently, saying: “_Non dormire, Anetta! Solamente pochi altri—solamente pochi altri._” (“Sleep not, Anetta! Only a few more—only a few more.”)

And the little eyes would open slowly and the tired fingers once more move with intelligent direction and purpose.

Some years ago, in one of the mean streets of Paris, I saw, in a dingy window, a picture that stamped itself indelibly upon my memory. It was not, judged by artistic canons, a great picture; on the contrary, it was crude and ill drawn and might almost have been the work of a child. Torn, I think, from the pages of the Anarchist paper _La Revolté_, it was, perchance, a protest drawn from the very soul of some indignant worker. A woman, haggard and fierce of visage, representing France, was seated upon a heap of child skulls and bones. In her gnarled and knotted hands she held the writhing form of a helpless babe whose flesh she was gnawing with her teeth. Underneath, in red ink, was written in rude characters, “The wretch! She devours her own children!” My mind goes back to that picture: it is literally true to-day, that this great nation in its commercial madness devours its babes.

IV

The textile industries rank first in the enslavement of children. In the cotton trade, for example, 13.3 per cent of all persons employed throughout the United States are under sixteen years of age.[109] In the Southern states, where the evil appears at its worst, so far as the textile trades are concerned, the proportion of employees under sixteen years of age in 1900 was 25.1 per cent, in Alabama the proportion was nearly 30 per cent. A careful estimate made in 1902 placed the number of cotton-mill operatives under sixteen years of age in the Southern states at 50,000. At the beginning of 1903 a very conservative estimate placed the number of children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the South at 30,000, no less than 20,000 of them being under twelve.[110] If this latter estimate of 20,000 children under twelve is to be relied upon, it is evident that the total number under fourteen must have been much larger than 30,000. According to Mr. McKelway, one of the most competent authorities in the country, there are at the present time not less than 60,000 children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the Southern states.[111] Miss Jane Addams tells of finding a child of five years working by night in a South Carolina mill;[112] Mr. Edward Gardner Murphy has photographed little children of six and seven years who were at work for twelve and thirteen hours a day in Alabama mills.[113] In Columbia, S.C., and Montgomery, Ala., I have seen hundreds of children, who did not appear to be more than nine or ten years of age, at work in the mills, by night as well as by day.

The industrial revival in the South from the stagnation consequent upon the Civil War has been attended by the growth of a system of child slavery almost as bad as that which attended the industrial revolution in England a century ago. From 1880 to 1900 the value of the products of Southern manufactures increased from less than $458,000,000 to $1,463,000,000—an increase of 220 per cent. Many factors contributed to that immense industrial development of the South, but, according to a well-known expert,[114] it is due “chiefly to her supplies of tractable and cheap labor.” During the same period of twenty years in the cotton mills outside of the South, the proportion of workers under sixteen years of age decreased from 15.6 per cent to 7.7 per cent, but in the South it remained at approximately 25 per cent. It is true that the terrible pauper apprentice system which forms such a tragic chapter in the history of the English factory movement has not been introduced; yet the fate of the children of the poor families from the hill districts who have been drawn into the vortex of this industrial development is almost as bad as that of the English pauper children. These “poor whites,” as they are expressively called, even by their negro neighbors, have for many years eked out a scanty living upon their farms, all the members of the family uniting in the struggle against niggardly nature. Drawn into the current of the new industrial order, they do not realize that, even though the children worked harder upon the farms than they do in the mills, there is an immense difference between the dust-laden air of a factory and the pure air of a farm; between the varied tasks of farm life with the endless opportunities for change and individual initiative, and the strained attention and monotonous tasks of mill life. The lot of the pauper children driven into the mills by the ignorance and avarice of British Bumbledom was little worse than that of these poor children, who work while their fathers loaf. During the long, weary nights many children have to be kept awake by having cold water dashed on their faces, and when morning comes they throw themselves upon their beds—often still warm from the bodies of their brothers and sisters—without taking off their clothing. “When I works nights, I’se too tired to undress when I gits home, an’ so I goes to bed wif me clo’s on me,” lisped one little girl in Augusta, Ga.