CHILD LABOR AND ITS ATTENDANT EVILS "The employment of children in factories depresses wages, destroys homes and depreciates the human stock. Whatever interferes with the proper education and nurture of the child contradicts the best interests of the nation. We call then on Christian employers and on Christian parents to endeavor after such betterment of the local and general laws as shall make the labor of children impossible in this Christian country."-Resolution unanimously adopted by the Protestant Episcopal General Convention of 1904, and repeated in substance by a resolution adopted by the Convention of 1907. This resolution, said to have been framed by that great friend of the children, Jacob Riis, contains so admirable a summary of the evils that attend the child labor system as to warrant its use as a text for this article: "Depresses wages, destroys homes, depreciates the human stock"- this is the indictment presented against the institution. The January number of THE SEWANEE REVIEW contained two important articles on education in the South, one from the pen of Dr. S. C. Mitchell, on "The School as an Exponent of Democracy," and the other by George F. Milton, on "Compulsory Education in the Southern States." It may be easily proved that the greatest foe of democracy in this nation is the child labor system, and by the same token, the most effective promoter of illiteracy. A third article in the same number, by Winifred Snow, was a charming dissertation on "The Child in Eighteenth Century Literature." There is another view of the child for which we are indebted to the eighteenth century, of which we have considerable mention in its literature, and that is, the child as an industrial asset. For in the England of the eighteenth century are to be found the beginnings of the child labor evil, and it was not until the nineteenth that there began the protest against it by way of parliamentary action. Defoe was filled with enthusiasm in the description of a district in which "scarce anything of five years old," but could earn its own living. In an account of the workhouses of England, written in 1732, the writer says: "They that pick oakum are continually refreshed by the balsamic odor of it; the spinners and knitters with an exercise so moderate that it fits any age or sex, at the same time that it qualifies those that are young for most handicrafts." From an "Essay on Trade," published in 1770, we extract this quotation: "Being constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, .... we hope the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it will at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them. . . . . From children thus trained up to constant labor we may venture to hope the lowering of the price." Yet in this twentieth century, two of our Southern States, North Carolina and Georgia, still allow by law the employment of children for twelve hours a day, the hours being sixty-six a week, which, with the half-holiday given on Saturday, means twelve hours a day for the first five working days. And Georgia allows children as young as ten, who are already unfortunate enough to be orphans, or the children of dependent parents, to work for twelve hours a day, and both States allow children of fourteen to work a twelve-hour night. But the first recorded protest against this evil also belongs to the closing years of the eighteenth century, and the protest was such sound doctrine that it is applicable to our own problem today. The physicians of Manchester, England, attributed an epidemic of fever in the Radcliffe Cotton Works, in part, to "the injury done to young persons through confinement and too long-continued labor. . . . . For the active recreations of childhood and youth are necessary to the growth and right conformation of the human body. And we cannot excuse ourselves from suggesting this further important consideration, that the rising generation should not be debarred from all opportunities of instruction at the only season in life at which they can be properly improved." This was in 1784; and again in 1796 the Manchester Board of Health passed the following resolution: "The untimely labor of the night and the protracted labor of the day, with respect to children, not only tend to diminish future expectations as to the general sum of life and industry, by impairing the strength and destroying the vital stamina of the rising generation, but it too often gives encouragement to idleness, extrav agance and profligacy in the parents, who, contrary to the order of nature, subsist by the oppression of their offspring." And they recommend "parliamentary aid to establish a general system of laws for the wise, humane, and equal government of all such works." The first factory act was passed by Parliament in 1802, limiting the hours to twelve a day, forbidding night work for children of tender years, providing for factory inspection and securing the instruction of appentices in reading, writing and arithmetic. This was the beginning of a hundred years of battle for a proper standard of legislation on this vital subject, to which England has but just attained. If it were not such a tragedy that the remedial measures should have been so slowly adopted, it would be a humorous study, the various protests of the manufacturers and other employers of child labor to the effect that their business would be ruined by the next small advance proposed. Dickens satirizes this in "Hard Times," when he mentions how often Coketown had been "destroyed" and how often the ultimatum had been delivered by the factory owners that they would prefer pitching their mills "into the Atlantic ocean" rather than submit to the proposed restriction, whatever it hap pened to be. They were the advocates of the last abuse and the opponents of the next reform. Robert Owen, Sir Robert Peel and Lord Shaftesbury are the three great names of the last century, factory owners all of them, in their protest against the child labor evil. And now that the proper standard of legislation and of effective enforcement of the law has been reached, an English authority testifies that "in spite of keenest foreign competition, the Lancashire cotton mill, in point of technical efficiency, now leads the world, and the Lancashire cotton spinner, once in the lowest depths of social degradation, now occupies, as regards the general standard of life as a whole trade, perhaps the foremost position among English wage-earners." So much for the economic folly of child labor. But the system at the time of its unchecked abuses left its mark upon national life and vigor. It had been foretold, as we have seen, by the Manchester physicians. Lord Macaulay, at first an advocate of the doctrine called "Manchesterism," that economic laws would bring their own cure of this and kindred evils, later became deeply aroused on the subject and an advocate of child labor laws in Parliament. He argued that "intense labor, beginning too early in life, continued too long every day, stunting the growth of the mind, leaving no time for healthful exercise, no time for intellectual culture must impair all those high qualities that have made our country great." And he made this prophecy, which has been fulfilled to the letter: "Your overworked boys will become a feeble and ignoble race of men, the parents of a more feeble progeny; nor will it be long before the deterioration of the laborer will injuriously affect those very industries to which his physical and moral interests have been sacrificed." Great Britain and the rest of the world wondered why it took so long, and at such a fearful cost of blood and treasure, for that mighty empire to conquer a handful of South African farmers. Great Britain had to put 320,000 soldiers in the field against the Boer army of 28,000. As a matter of fact, the war was won at last by the Colonials, the Irish and the Scotch. And England began in humiliation and at first with secrecy to study the causes of her loss of prestige. Meanwhile the papers and the magazines began to present their own theories. Dr. Robert Jones, an eminent London physician, wrote to The Times that insanity among the masses was constantly increasing and that out of one thousand consecutive cases of males between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five examined by himself, the average weight and stature were so far below the normal that, he concluded, "there is an alarming impairment of the national physique." The president of a Manchester improvement association testified that there were large districts in which there were "no well grown children or men and women except those who have been born in the country"- which was the natural result of "Manchesterism," of course. During the period when regiments were being patched together to be sent to the front, a London newspaper published the startling statement that out of 11,000 men examined in Manchester, 10,000 were rejected, and that after the standards had been lowered again and again and the tests made as conveniently easy. The news came back from Africa that these regiments never reached the firing line, but were swept off by enteric fever before they found the front. As one of the magazines expressed it, "The men that faced the Malakoff and stormed Sebastopol were no more. When the typical Englishman that went to war-the John Bull of tradition was broad-shouldered and deep-chested, a ruddy-cheeked giant, then the brawn and endurance of the Englishman were a proverb. Against him Hooligan, anæmic, neurotic, emaciated, too often degenerate, dull of wit and feeble of will, showed like a figure of fright." Then a formidable series of blue-books were published on the theme that was occupying so deeply the English mind. From the report of the Royal Commission we select one or two abstracts. In the enlistment reports the following figures are suggestive: 1897- Number medically inspected, 59,986; total rejections, 22,813 In connection with this is the statement in the British Sessional papers: "When examining these totals it must be borne in mind that they do not represent anything like the total number of the rejection of candidates for enlistment into the army. A large number of men are rejected by the recruiters themselves for the causes above mentioned, and in consequence are never medically inspected, and do not appear in any returns." In the same report we have this testimony from Dr. Neston, of Newcastle: "There is an undoubted falling off in the physical condition of the infants vaccinated and young persons presented for employment during the last quarter of a century." Says Factory Inspector Harry Wilson: "Personally, the poorest specimens of humanity I have ever seen, both men and women, are working in the preparing and spinning departments of certain Dundee jute mills." Now there has been no opportunity to observe this physical degeneration in the older manufacturing States of New England |