Part 9

A somewhat similar method of feeding the children has been tried for three years at Speyer School, the practice and experimental school of Teachers College, Columbia University.[82] The children of the lower grades are supplied with milk and crackers at ten o’clock in the morning, and “the teachers are unanimous in the statement that the children are all happier and more able to work” in consequence of being fed. These various experiments demonstrate beyond question that underfeeding is responsible for much of the mental degeneracy among school children and the resulting failure of so many of them to profit by the education which we provide for them. More than that, they point unerringly to the remedy.

XI

Summarizing, briefly, the results of this investigation, the problem of poverty as it affects school children may be stated in a few lines. All the data available tend to show that not less than 2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are the victims of poverty which denies them common necessities, particularly adequate nourishment. As a result of this privation they are far inferior in physical development to their more fortunate fellows. This inferiority of physique, in turn, is responsible for much mental and moral degeneration. Such children are in very many cases incapable of successful mental effort, and much of our national expenditure for education is in consequence an absolute waste. With their enfeebled bodies and minds we turn these children adrift unfitted for the struggle of life, which tends to become keener with every advance in our industrial development, and because of their lack of physical and mental training they are found to be inefficient industrially and dangerous socially. They become dependent, paupers, and the procreators of a pauper and dependent race.

Here, then, is a problem of awful magnitude. In the richest country on earth hundreds of thousands of children are literally damned to lifelong, helpless, and debasing poverty. They are plunged in the earliest and most important years of character formation into that terrible maelstrom of poverty which casts so many thousands, ay, millions, of physical, mental, and moral wrecks upon the shores of our social life. For them there is little or no hope of escape from the blight and curse of pauperism unless the nation, pursuing a policy of enlightened self-interest and protection, decides to save them. In the main, this vast sum of poverty is due to causes of a purely impersonal nature which the victims cannot control, such as sickness, accident, low wages, and unemployment. Personal causes, such as ignorance, thriftlessness, gambling, intemperance, indolence, wife-desertion, and other vices or weaknesses, are also responsible for a good deal of poverty, though by no means most of it as is sometimes urged by superficial observers. There are many thousands of temperate and industrious workers who are miserably poor, and many of those who are thriftless or intemperate are the victims of poverty’s degenerating influences.[83] But whether a child’s hunger and privation is due to some fault of its parents or to causes beyond their control, the fact of its suffering remains, and its impaired physical and mental strength tends almost irresistibly to make it inefficient as a citizen. Whatever the cause, therefore, of its privation, society must, as a measure of self-protection, take upon itself the responsibility of caring for the child.

There can be no compromise upon this vital point. Those who say that society should refuse to do anything for those children who are the victims of their parents’ vices or weaknesses adopt a singularly indefensible attitude. In the first place it is barbarously unjust to allow the sins of the parents to bring punishment and suffering upon the child, to damn the innocent and unoffending. No more vicious doctrine than this, which so many excellent and well-intentioned persons are fond of preaching, has ever been formulated by human perversity. Carried to its logical end, it would destroy all legislation for the protection of children from cruel parents or guardians. It is strange that the doctrinaire advocates of this brutal gospel should overlook its practical consequences. If discrimination were to be made at all, it should be in favor of, rather than against, the children of drunken and profligate parents. For these children have a special claim upon society for protection from wrongs in the shape of influences injurious to their physical and moral well-being, and tending to lead them into evil and degrading ways. The half-starved child of the inebriate is not less entitled to the protection of society than the victim of inhuman physical torture.

Should these children be excluded from any system of feeding adopted by the state upon the ground that their parents have not fulfilled their parental responsibilities, society joins in a conspiracy against their very lives. And that conspiracy ultimately and inevitably involves retribution. In the interests and name of a beguiling economy, fearful that if it assumes responsibility for the care of the child of inebriate parents, it will foster and encourage their inebriety and neglect, society leaves the children surrounded by circumstances which practically force them to become drunkards, physical and moral wrecks, and procreators of a like degenerate progeny. _Then_ it is forced to accept the responsibility of their support, either as paupers or criminals. That is the stern Nemesis of retribution. Where an enlightened system of child saving has been followed, this principle has been clearly recognized. In Minnesota, for example, the state assumes the responsibility for the care of such children as a matter of self-protection. To quote the language of a report of the State Public School at Owatonna: “It is for economic as well as for humane reasons that this work is done. The state is thus protecting itself from dangers to which it would be exposed in a very few years if these children were reared in the conditions which so injuriously affect them.”[84] Whatever steps may be taken to punish, or make responsible to the state, those parents who by their vice and neglect bring suffering and want upon their children, the children themselves should be saved.

To the contention that society, having assumed the responsibility of insisting that every child shall be educated, and providing the means of education, is necessarily bound to assume the responsibility of seeing that they are made fit to receive that education, so far as possible, there does not seem to be any convincing answer. It will be objected that for society to do this would mean the destruction of the responsibility of the parents. That is obviously true. But it is equally true of education itself, the responsibility for which society has assumed. Some individualists there are who contend that society is wrong in doing this, and their opposition to the proposal that it should undertake to provide the children with food is far more logical than that of those who believe that society should assume the responsibility of educating the child, but not that of equipping it with the necessary physical basis for that education. The fact is that society insists upon the education of the children, not, primarily, in their interests nor in the interests of the parents, but in its own. All legislation upon child labor, education, child guardianship in general, is based upon a denial of proprietary rights to children by their parents. The child belongs to society rather than to its parents.

Further, private charity, which is the only alternative suggestion offered for the solution of this problem, equally removes responsibility from the parents and is open to other weightier objections. In the first place, where it succeeds, it is far more demoralizing than such a system of public support provided at the public cost, as the child’s birthright, could possibly be. Still more important is the fact that private charity does not succeed in the vast majority of instances. To their credit, it must be remembered that the poor as a class refuse to beg or to parade their poverty. They suffer in silence and never seek alms. Pride and the shame of begging seal their lips. Here, too, the question of the children of inebriate, dissolute, worthless parents enters. Every one who has had the least experience of charitable work knows that these are the persons who are most relieved by charity. They do not hesitate to plead for charity. “I have not strength to dig; to beg I am ashamed,” is the motto of the self-respecting, silent, suffering poor. The failure of charity is incontestable. As some witty Frenchman has well said, “Charity creates one-half the misery she relieves, but cannot relieve one-half the misery she creates.”

It is impossible to enter here into a discussion of the question of cost, but the argument that society could not afford to undertake this further responsibility must be briefly considered. In view of our well-nigh boundless resources there is small reason for the belief that we cannot provide for the needs of all our children. If it were true that we could not provide for their necessities, then wholesale death would be merciful and desirable. At any rate, it would be far better to feed them first, neglecting their education altogether, than to waste our substance in the brutally senseless endeavor to educate them while they starve and pine for bread. There can be little doubt that the economic waste involved in fruitless charity, and the still vaster waste involved in the maintenance of the dependent and criminal classes whose degeneracy is mainly attributable to underfeeding in childhood, amount to a sum far exceeding the cost of providing adequate nutrition for every child. It is essentially a question of the proper adjustment of our means to our needs. Otherwise we must admit the utter failure of our civilization and confess that, in the language of Sophocles, it is

“Happiest beyond compare Never to taste of life; Happiest in order next, Being born, with quickest speed Thither again to turn From whence we came.”[D]

Footnote D:

_Œdipus Coloneus._

III THE WORKING CHILD

“In this boasted land of freedom there are bonded baby slaves, And the busy world goes by and does not heed. They are driven to the mill, just to glut and overfill Bursting coffers of the mighty monarch, Greed. When they perish we are told it is God’s will, Oh, the roaring of the mill, of the mill!” —ELLA WHEELER WILCOX.

I

It is a startling and suggestive fact that the very force which Aristotle, the profoundest thinker of antiquity, regarded as the only agency through which the abolition of slavery might be made possible, served, when at last it was evolved, not to destroy slavery, but to extend it; to enslave in a new form of bondage those who hitherto had been free. Aristotle regarded slavery as a basic institution and saw no possible means whereby it might ever be dispensed with, “except perhaps by the aid of machines.” He said, “If every tool ... could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Dædalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephæstos went of their own accord; if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need of apprentices for the master workers, or slaves for the lords.”[85] When more than two thousand years had passed, a machine, a wonderful, complex tool, almost literally fulfilling his conditions, was invented.

We speak of the power-loom as Cartwright’s invention, but in truth it was the joint production of numberless inventors, most of them unknown to history, and some of whom lived and labored long before Aristotle sat at Plato’s feet in the great school at Athens. Looking at a modern power-loom in one of our great factories not long ago, I asked the name of the inventor, which was readily enough given. But as I watched the marvellous mechanism with its many wheels, levers, and springs, I wondered how much of it could be said to have had its origin in the brain of the inventor in question. Who invented the wheel, the lever, the spring? Who invented the first rude loom, reproduced, in principle, in the wonderful looms of the twentieth century? No man knows. We do not know the name of the inventor of the loom figured in all its details upon the tomb of the ancient Egyptian at Beni Hassan;[86] we do not know who invented the loom which the Greek vase of 400 B.C. depicts,—a loom which, so William Morris tells us, is in all respects like those in use in Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the latter half of the nineteenth century.[87] Many thousands of years ago, in the simple tribal communism of primitive man, the great bed-rock inventions were evolved. Thousands of years of human experience led up to the ribbon-loom which, in the early part of the sixteenth century, brought sentence of death upon the poor inventor of Danzig[88] whose very name has been forgotten. This ribbon-loom was a near approach to the wonderful tool of which Aristotle dreamed as the liberator of enslaved man.

The work of improvement went on, and the power-loom came; “weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves” in a well-nigh literal sense. The great machine tool became an accomplished fact. It had been forged upon the anvil of human necessity through countless centuries. But the revolution it wrought, or, rather, the revolution of which it was the expression, was not a revolution of liberation. A hundred and twenty years have elapsed since then, and still the prophecy of freedom has not been fulfilled; there are still “slaves for the lords.”

“Fast and faster, our iron master, The thing we made, for ever drives, Bids us grind treasure and fashion pleasure, For other hopes and other lives.”

Children have always worked, but it is only since the reign of the machine that their work has been synonymous with slavery. Under the old form of simple, domestic industry even the very young children were assigned their share of the work in the family. But this form of child labor was a good and wholesome thing. There may have been abuses; children may have suffered from the ignorance, cupidity, and brutality of fathers and mothers, but in the main the child’s share in the work of the family was a good thing. In the first place, the child was associated in its work with one or both of its parents, and thus kept under all those influences which we deem of most worth, the influences of home and parental care. Secondly, the work of the child constituted a major part of its education. And it was no mean education, either, which gave the world generation after generation of glorious craftsmen. The seventeenth-century glass-blower of Venice or Murano, for instance, learned his craft from his father in this manner, and in turn taught it to his son. There was a bond of interest between them; a parental pride and interest on the part of the father infinitely greater and more potent for good than any commercial relation would have allowed. On the part of the child, too, there was a filial pride and devotion which found its expression in a spirit of emulation, the spirit out of which all the rich glory of that wonderfully rich craft was born. So, too, it was with the potters of ancient Greece, and with the tapestry weavers of fourteenth-century France. In the golden age of the craftsman, child labor was child training in the noblest and best sense. The training of hand and heart and brain was the end achieved, even where it was not the sole purpose of the child’s labor.

But with the coming of the machine age all this was changed. The craftsman was supplanted by the tireless, soulless machine. The child still worked, but in a great factory throbbing with the vibration of swift, intricate machines. In place of parental interest and affection there was the harsh, pitiless authority of an employer or his agent, looking, not to the child’s well-being and skill as an artificer, but to the supplying of a great, ever widening market for cash gain.

It is not without its significance that the ribbon-loom which in the latter part of the seventeenth century caused the workmen of England to riot, the same machine which, later, was publicly burnt in Hamburg by order of the Senate, should have been described as “enabling a totally inexperienced boy” to set the whole loom with all its shuttles in motion, “by simply moving a rod backwards and forwards.”[89] It was as though the new mechanical invention had been designed with the express purpose of laying the burden of the world’s work upon child shoulders; as though some evil genius had deliberately contrived that the nation of progress should

“—Stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart.”

II

There is no more terrible page in history than that which records the enslavement of mere babies by the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century in England. Not even the crucifixion of twenty thousand slaves along the highways by Scipio excels it in horror.

Writing in 1795, Dr. Aikin gives a vivid account of the evils which had already been introduced in the factory districts by the new system of manufacture.[90] He mentions the destruction of the best features of home life, the spread of filth, thriftlessness, poverty, and disease, and says that the demand for “children for the cotton mills” had become very great. To get children for the cotton mills was not easy at first. Parental love and pride were ranged against the new system, denying its demands. Accustomed to the old domestic system, the association of all the members of the family in manufacture as part of the domestic life, they regarded the new industrial forms with repugnance. It was considered a degradation for a child to be sent into the factories, especially for a girl, whose whole life would be blasted thereby. The term “factory girl” was an insulting epithet, and the young woman who bore it could not hope for other, better employment, nor yet for marriage with any but the very lowest and despised of men. Not till they were forced by sheer hunger and misery, through the reduction of wages to the level of starvation, could the respectable workers be induced to send their children into the factories. In the meantime they made war upon the “iron men,” as the machines were called, but of course in vain. To such a conflict there could be only one end,—human beings of flesh and blood could not prevail against the iron monsters, their competitors.

But the manufacturers wanted children, and they got them from the workhouses. It was not difficult to persuade Bumbledom to get rid of its pauper children, especially when its conscience was salved by the specious pretext that the children were to be taught new trades, as apprentices. “Alfred,” the anonymous author of the _History of the Factory Movement_,[91] gives a thrilling description of the horrible inhumanity and wickedness of this practice of sending parish apprentices, “without remorse or inquiry, to be _used up_ as the cheapest raw material in the market.” The mill owners would first communicate with the overseers of the poor, and the latter would fix suitable dates for the manufacturers or their agents to examine the children. Those chosen were then conveyed to their destination, closely packed in wagons or canal-boats. Thenceforth they were doomed to the most miserable slavery. A class of “traffickers” in child slaves arose. These men made a profitable business of supplying children to the manufacturers. They deposited their victims in dark, dank cellars, where the sales to the manufacturers or their agents were made. “The mill owners, by the light of lanterns being able to examine the children, their limbs and stature having undergone the necessary scrutiny, the bargain was struck, and these poor innocents were conveyed to the mills.” Their plight was appalling. They received no wages, and they were so cheap, their places so easily filled, that the mill owners did not even take the trouble to give them decent food or clothing. “In stench, in heated rooms, amid the whirling of a thousand wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.”

Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice who, at seven years of age, was sent from a London workhouse to a cotton mill near Nottingham, gives a harrowing but well-authenticated account of actual experience.[92] He tells how the apprentices used to be fed upon the same coarse food as that given to the master’s pigs, and how he and his fellow-victims used joyfully to say when they saw the swine being fed, “The pigs are served; it will be our turn next.” ... “When the swine were hungry,” he says, “they used to grunt so loud, they obtained the wash first to quiet them. The apprentices could be intimidated, and made to keep still.” Blincoe describes how, for fattening, the pigs were often given meat balls, or dumplings, in their wash, and how he and the other apprentices who were kept near the pigsties used to slip away and slyly steal as many of these dumplings from the pigs as possible, hastening away with them to a hiding-place, where they were greedily devoured. “The pigs ... learned from experience to guard their food by various expedients. Made wise by repeated losses, they kept a sharp lookout, and the moment they ascertained the approach of the half-famished apprentices, they set up so loud a chorus of snorts and grunts, it was heard in the kitchen, when out rushed the swineherd, armed with a whip, from which combined means of protection for the swine this accidental source of obtaining a good dinner was soon lost. Such was the contest carried on for some time at Litton Mill between the half-famished apprentices and the well-fed swine.”

The children were worked sixteen hours at a stretch, by day and by night. They slept by turns and relays in beds that were never allowed to cool, one set being sent to bed as soon as the others had gone to their toil. Children of both sexes and all ages, from five years upward, were indiscriminately herded together, with the result that vice and disease flourished. Sometimes the unfortunate victims would try to run away, and to prevent this all who were suspected of such a tendency had irons riveted on their ankles with long links reaching up to their hips. In these chains they were compelled to work and sleep, young women and girls as well as boys. Many children contrived to commit suicide, some were unquestionably beaten to death; the death-rate became so great that it became the custom to bury the bodies at night, secretly, lest a popular uprising be provoked.[93]