Part 12

It is not my purpose to deal specifically with all the various forms of child labor. That would require a much larger volume than this to be devoted exclusively to the subject. Children are employed at a tender age in hundreds of occupations. In addition to those already enumerated, there were in 1900, according to the census, nearly 12,000 workers under sixteen years of age employed in the manufacture of tobacco and cigars, and it is certain that the number actually employed in that most unhealthful occupation was much greater. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I have seen hundreds of children, boys and girls, between the ages of ten and twelve years, at work in the factories belonging to the “Cigar Trust.” Some of these factories are known as “kindergartens” on account of the large number of small children employed in them.[125] It is by no means a rare occurrence for children in these factories to faint or to fall asleep over their work, and I have heard a foreman in one of them say that it was “enough for one man to do just to keep the kids awake.” In the domestic manufacture of cheap cigars, many very young children are employed. Often the “factories” are poorly lighted, ill-ventilated tenements in which work, whether for children or adults, ought to be absolutely prohibited. Children work often as many as fourteen or even sixteen hours in these little “home factories,” and in cities like Pittsburg, Pa., it is not unusual for them, after attending school all day, to work from 4 P.M. to 12.30 A.M., making “tobies” or “stogies,” for which they receive from eight to ten cents per hundred.

In the wood-working industries, more than 10,000 children were reported to be employed in the census year, almost half of them in saw-mills, where accidents are of almost daily occurrence, and where clouds of fine sawdust fill the lungs of the workers. Of the remaining 50 per cent, it is probable that more than half were working at or near dangerous machines, such as steam planers and lathes. Over 7000 children, mostly girls, were employed in laundries; 2000 in bakeries; 138,000 as servants and waiters in restaurants and hotels; 42,000 boys as messengers; and 20,000 boys and girls in stores. In all these instances there is every reason to suppose that the actual number employed was much larger than the official figures show.

In the canning and preservation of fish, fruit, and vegetables mere babies are employed during the busy season. In more than one canning factory in New York State, I have seen children of six and seven years of age working at two o’clock in the morning. In Oneida, Mr. William English Walling, formerly a factory inspector of Illinois, found one child four years old, who earned nineteen cents in an afternoon stringing beans, and other children from seven to ten years of age.[126] There are over 500 canning factories in New York State, but the census of 1900 gives the number of children employed under sixteen years of age as 219. This is merely another illustration of the deceptiveness of the statistics which are gathered at so much expense. The agent of the New York Child Labor Committee was told by the foreman of one factory that there were 300 children under fourteen years of age in that one factory! In Syracuse it was a matter of complaint, in the season of 1904, on the part of the children, that “The factories will not take you _unless you are eight years old_.”[127]

In Maryland there are absolutely no restrictions placed upon the employment of children in canneries. They may be employed at any age, by day or night, for as many hours as the employers choose, or the children can stand and keep awake. In Oxford, Md., I saw a tiny girl, seven years old, who had worked for twelve hours in an oyster-canning factory, and I was told that such cases were common. There were 290 canning establishments in the state of Maryland in 1900, all of them employing young children absolutely without legal restriction. And I fear that it must be added with little or no moral restriction either. Where regard for child life does not express itself in humane laws for its preservation, it may generally be presumed to be non-existent.

In Maine the age limit for employment is twelve years. Children of that age may be employed by day or night, provided that girls under eighteen and boys under sixteen are not permitted to work more than ten hours in the twenty-four or sixty hours in a week. In 1900 there were 117 establishments engaged in the preservation and canning of fish. Small herrings are canned and placed upon the market as “sardines.”[128] This industry is principally confined to the Atlantic coast towns,—Lubec and Eastport, in Washington County, being the main centres. I cannot speak of this industry from personal investigation, but information received from competent and trustworthy sources gives me the impression that child slavery nowhere assumes a worse form than in the “sardine” canneries of Maine. Says one of my correspondents in a private letter: “In the rush season, fathers, mothers, older children, and babies work from early morn till night—from dawn till dark, in fact. You will scarcely believe me, perhaps, when I say ‘and babies,’ but it is literally true. I’ve seen them in the present season, no more than four or five years old, working hard and beaten when they lagged. As you may suppose, being out here, far away from the centre of the state, we are not much troubled by factory inspection. I have read about the conditions in the Southern mills, but nothing I have read equals for sheer brutality what I see right here in Washington County.”

In the sweatshops and, more particularly, the poorly paid home industries, the kindergartens are robbed to provide baby slaves. I am perfectly well aware that many persons will smile incredulously at the thought of infants from three to five years old working. “What can such little babies do?” they ask. Well, take the case of little Anetta Fachini, for example. The work she was doing when I saw her, wrapping paper around pieces of wire, was very similar to the play of better-favored children. As play, to be put aside whenever her childish fancy wandered to something else, it would have been a very good thing for little Anetta to do. She was compelled, however, to do it from early morning till late at night and even denied the right to sleep. For her, therefore, what might be play for some other child became the most awful bondage and cruelty. What can four-year-old babies do? Go into the nursery and watch the rich man’s four-year-old child, seated upon the rug, sorting many-colored beads and fascinated by the occupation for half an hour or so. That is play—good and wholesome for the child. In the public kindergarten, other four-year-old children are doing the same thing with zest and laughing delight. But go into the dim tenement yonder; another four-year-old child is sorting beads, but not in play. Her eyes do not sparkle with childish glee; she does not shout with delight at finding a prize among the beads. With tragic seriousness she picks out the beads and lays them before her mother, who is a slipper-beader—that is, she sews the beaded designs upon ladies’ fancy slippers. She works from morn till night, and all the while the child is seated by her side, straining her little eyes in the dim light, sorting the beads or stringing them on pieces of thread.

In the “Help Wanted” columns of the morning papers, advertisements frequently appear such as the following, taken from one of the leading New York dailies:—

WANTED.—Beaders on slippers; good pay; steady home work. M. B——, West —— Street.

In the tenement districts women may be seen staggering along with sack loads of slippers to be trimmed with beadwork, and children of four years of age and upward are pressed into service to provide cheap, dainty slippers for dainty ladies. What can four-year-old babies do? A hundred things, when they are driven to it. “They are pulling basting threads so that you and I may wear cheap garments; they are arranging the petals of artificial flowers; they are sorting beads; they are pasting boxes. They do more than that. I know of a room where a dozen or more little children are seated on the floor, surrounded by barrels, and in those barrels is found human hair, matted, tangled, and blood-stained—you can imagine the condition, for it is not my hair or yours that is cut off in the hour of death.”[129]

There are more than 23,000 licensed “home factories” in New York City alone, 23,000 groups of workers in the tenements licensed to manufacture goods. How difficult it is to protect children employed in these tenement factories can best be judged by the following incident: Two small Italian children, a boy of five and his sister aged four, left a West-side kindergarten and were promptly followed up by their kindergartner, who found that the children were working and could not, in the opinion of their mother, be spared to attend the kindergarten. They were both helping to make artificial flowers. The truant officer was first applied to and asked whether the compulsory education law could not be used to free them, part of the time at least, from their unnatural toil. But attendance at school is not compulsory before the eighth year, so that was a useless appeal. Then the factory inspector was applied to, and he showed that the work of the children was entirely legal; they received no wages and were, therefore, not “employed” in the technical sense of that term. They were working in their own family. The room was not dirty or excessively overcrowded. No law was broken, and there was no legal means whereby the enslavement of those little children might be prevented.[130]

This kind of child labor, be it remembered, is very different from that wholesome employment of children in the domestic industry which preceded the advent of the system of machine production. Then there was hope in the work and joy in the leisure which followed the work. Then competition was based on human qualities; man against man, hand against hand, eye against eye, brain against brain. To-day the competition is between man and the machine, the child and the man,—and even the child and the machine. Children are employed in the textile mills because their labor is cheaper than that of adults; boys are employed in the glass factories at night because their labor is cheaper to buy than machinery; children in the tenements paste the fancy boxes in which we get our candies and chocolate bonbons for the same reason. Such child labor has no other objective than the increase of employers’ profits; it has nothing to do with training the child for the work of life. On the contrary, it saps the constitution of the child, robs it of hope, and unfits it for life’s struggle. Such child labor is not educative or wholesome, but blighting to body, mind, and spirit.

VIII

There has been no extensive, systematic investigation in this country of the physical condition of working children. In 1893–1894 volunteer physicians examined and made measurements of some 200 children, taken from the factories and workshops of Chicago.[131] These records show a startling proportion of undersized, rachitic, and consumptive children, but they are too limited to be of more than suggestive value. So far as they go, however, they bear out the results obtained in more extensive investigations in European countries. It is the consensus of opinion among those having the best opportunities for careful observation that physical deterioration quickly follows a child’s employment in a factory or workshop.

It is a sorry but indisputable fact that where children are employed, the most unhealthful work is generally given them.[132] In the spinning and carding rooms of cotton and woollen mills, where large numbers of children are employed, clouds of lint-dust fill the lungs and menace the health. The children have often a distressing cough, caused by the irritation of the throat, and many are hoarse from the same cause. In bottle factories and other branches of glass manufacture, the atmosphere is constantly charged with microscopic particles of glass. In the wood-working industries, such as the manufacture of cheap furniture and wooden boxes, and packing cases, the air is laden with fine sawdust. Children employed in soap and soap-powder factories work, many of them, in clouds of alkaline dust which inflames the eyelids and nostrils. Boys employed in filling boxes of soap-powder work all day long with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. In the coal-mines the breaker boys breathe air that is heavy and thick with particles of coal, and their lungs become black in consequence. In the manufacture of felt hats, little girls are often employed at the machines which tear the fur from the skins of rabbits and other animals. Recently, I stood and watched a young girl working at such a machine; she wore a newspaper pinned over her head and a handkerchief tied over her mouth. She was white with dust from head to feet, and when she stooped to pick anything from the floor the dust would fall from her paper head-covering in little heaps. About seven feet from the mouth of the machine was a window through which poured thick volumes of dust as it was belched out from the machine. I placed a sheet of paper on the inner sill of the window and in twenty minutes it was covered with a layer of fine dust, half an inch deep. Yet that girl works midway between the window and the machine, in the very centre of the volume of dust, sixty hours a week. These are a few of the occupations in which the dangers arise from the forced inhalation of dust.

In some occupations, such as silk-winding, flax-spinning, and various processes in the manufacture of felt hats, it is necessary, or believed to be necessary, to keep the atmosphere quite moist. The result of working in a close, heated factory, where the air is artificially moistened, in summer time, can be better imagined than described. So long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed. The children who work in the dye rooms and print-shops of textile factories, and the color rooms of factories where the materials for making artificial flowers are manufactured, are subject to contact with poisonous dyes, and the results are often terrible. Very frequently they are dyed in parts of their bodies as literally as the fabrics are dyed. One little fellow, who was employed in a Pennsylvania carpet factory, opened his shirt one day and showed me his chest and stomach dyed a deep, rich crimson. I mentioned the incident to a local physician, and was told that such cases were common. “They are simply saturated with the dye,” he said. “The results are extremely severe, though very often slow and, for a long time, almost imperceptible. If they should cut or scratch themselves where they are so thoroughly dyed, it might mean death.” In Yonkers, N.Y., are some of the largest carpet factories in the United States, and many children are employed in them. Some of the smallest children are employed in the “drum room,” or print-shop, where the yarns are “printed” or dyed. Small boys, mostly Slavs and Hungarians, push the trucks containing boxes of liquid dye from place to place, and get it all over their clothing. They can be seen coming out of the mills at night literally soaked to the skin with dye of various colors. In the winter time, after a fall of snow, it is possible to track them to their homes, not only by their colored footprints, but by the drippings from their clothing. The snow becomes dotted with red, blue, and green, as though some one had sprinkled the colors for the sake of the variegated effect.

Children employed as varnishers in cheap furniture factories inhale poisonous fumes all day long and suffer from a variety of intestinal troubles in consequence. The gilding of picture frames produces a stiffening of the fingers. The children who are employed in the manufacture of wall papers and poisonous paints suffer from slow poisoning. The naphtha fumes in the manufacture of rubber goods produce paralysis and premature decay. Children employed in morocco leather works are often nauseated and fall easy victims to consumption. The little boys who make matches, and the little girls who pack them in boxes, suffer from phosphorous necrosis, or “phossy-jaw,” a gangrene of the lower jaw due to phosphor poisoning. Boys employed in type foundries and stereotyping establishments are employed on the most dangerous part of the work, namely, rubbing the type and the plates, and lead poisoning is excessively prevalent among them as a result. Little girls who work in the hosiery mills and carry heavy baskets from one floor to another, and their sisters who run machines by foot-power, suffer all through their after life as a result of their employment. Girls who work in factories where caramels and other kinds of candies are made are constantly passing from the refrigerating department, where the temperature is perhaps 20 degrees Fahr., to other departments with temperatures as high as 80 or 90 degrees. As a result, they suffer from bronchial troubles.

These are only a few of the many occupations of children that are inherently unhealthful and should be prohibited entirely for children and all young persons under eighteen years of age. In a few instances it might be sufficient to fix the minimum age for employment at sixteen, if certain improvements in the conditions of employment were insisted upon. Other dangers to health, such as the quick transition from the heat of the factory to the cold outside air, have already been noted. They are highly important causes of disease, though not inherent in the occupation itself in most cases. A careful study of the child-labor problem from this largely neglected point of view would be most valuable. When to the many dangers to health are added the dangers to life and limb from accidents, far more numerous among child workers than adults,[133] the price we pay for the altogether unnecessary and uneconomic service of children would, in the Boer patriot’s phrase, “stagger humanity,” if it could be comprehended.

No combination of figures can give any idea of that price. Statistics cannot express the withering of child lips in the poisoned air of factories; the tired, strained look of child eyes that never dance to the glad music of souls tuned to Nature’s symphonies; the binding to wheels of industry the little bodies and souls that should be free, as the stars are free to shine and the flowers are free to drink the evening dews. Statistics may be perfected to the extent of giving the number of child workers with accuracy, the number maimed by dangerous machines, and the number who die year by year, but they can never give the spiritual loss, if I may use that word in its secular, scientific sense. Who shall tally the deaths of childhood’s hopes, ambitions, and dreams? How shall figures show the silent atrophy of potential genius, the brutalizing of potential love, the corruption of potential purity? In what arithmetical terms shall we state the loss of shame, and the development of that less than brute view of life, which enables us to watch with unconcern the toil of infants side by side with the idleness of men?

IX

The moral ills resulting from child labor are numerous and far-reaching. When children become wage-earners and are thrown into constant association with adult workers, they develop prematurely an adult consciousness and view of life. About the first consequence of their employment is that they cease almost at once to be children. They lose their respect for parental authority, in many cases, and become arrogant, wayward, and defiant. There is always a tendency in their homes to regard them as men and women as soon as they become wage-earners. Discipline is at once relaxed, at the very time when it is most necessary. When children who have just entered upon that most critical period of life, adolescence, are associated with adults in factories, are driven to their tasks with curses, and hear continually the unrestrained conversation, often coarse and foul, of the adults, the psychological effect cannot be other than bad. The mothers and fathers who read this book need only to know that children, little boys and girls, in mills and factories where men and women are employed, must frequently see women at work in whom the signs of a developing life within are evident, and hear them made the butt of the coarsest taunts and jests, to realize how great the moral peril to the adolescent boy or girl must be.

No writer dare write, and no publisher dare publish, a truthful description of the moral atmosphere of hundreds of places where children are employed,—a description truthful in the sense of telling the whole truth. No publisher would dare print the language current in an average factory. Our most “realistic” writers must exercise stern artistic reticence, and tone down or evade the truth. No normal boy or girl would think of repeating to father or mother the language heard in the mill—language which the children begin before long to use occasionally, to _think_ oftener still. I have known a girl of thirteen or fourteen, just an average American girl, whose parents, intelligent and honest folk, had given her a moral training above rather than below the average, mock a pregnant woman worker and unblushingly attempt to caricature her condition by stuffing rags beneath her apron. I do not make any charge against the tens of thousands of women who have worked and are working in factories. Heaven forbid that I should seek to brand as impure these women of my own class! But I do say that for the plastic and impressionable mind of a child the moral atmosphere of the average factory is exceedingly bad, and I know that none will more readily agree with me than the men and women who work, or who have worked, in mills and factories.

I know a woman, and she is one of many, who has worked in textile factories for more than thirty years. She began to work as a child before she was ten years old, and is now past forty. She has never married, though many men have sought her in marriage. She is not an abnormal woman, indifferent to marriage, but just a normal, healthy, intelligent woman who has yearned hundreds of times for a man’s affection and companionship. To her more intimate friends she confesses that she chose to remain lonely and unwed, chose to stifle her longings for affection, rather than to marry and bring children into the world and live to see them enter the mills for employment before they became men and women. When I say that the moral atmosphere of factory life is contaminated and bad, and that the employment of children in mills and factories subjects them to grave moral perils, I am confident that I shall be supported, not, perhaps, by the owners of the mills and factories, but by the vast majority of intelligent men and women employed in them.