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.
In a report upon the physical conditions of child workers in Pennsylvania, the Rev. Peter Roberts has discussed at some length the moral dangers of factory employment for children. He quotes an Allentown physician as saying, “No vice was unknown to many of the girls of fifteen working in the factories of the city;” and another physician in the same city said, “There are more unhappy homes, ruined lives, blasted hopes, and diseased bodies in Allentown than any other city of its size, because of the factories there.” Another physician, in Lancaster, is quoted as saying that he had “treated boys of ten years old and upwards for venereal affections which they had contracted.”[[134]] In upwards of a score of factory towns I have had very similar testimony given to me by physicians and others. The proprietor of a large drug store in a New England factory town told me that he had never known a place where the demand for cheap remedies for venereal diseases was so great, and that many of those who bought them were boys under fifteen.
Nor is it only in factories that these grosser forms of immorality flourish. They are even more prevalent among the children of the street trades, newsboys, bootblacks, messengers, and the like. The proportion of newsboys who suffer from venereal diseases is alarmingly great. The Superintendent of the John Worthy School of Chicago, Mr. Sloan, asserts that “One-third of all the newsboys who come to the John Worthy School have venereal disease, and that 10 per cent of the remaining newsboys at present in the Bridewell are, according to the physicians’ diagnosis, suffering from similar diseases.”[[135]] The newsboys who come to the school are, according to Mr. Sloan, on an average one-third below the ordinary standard of physical development, a condition which will be readily understood by those who know the ways of the newsboys of our great cities—their irregular habits, scant feeding, sexual excesses, secret vices, sleeping in hallways, basements, stables, and quiet corners. With such a low physical standard the ravages of venereal diseases are tremendously increased.
SILK MILL GIRLS AFTER TWO YEARS OF FACTORY LIFE
The messenger boys and the American District Telegraph boys are frequently found in the worst resorts of the “red-light” districts of our cities. In New York there are hundreds of such boys, ranging in age from twelve to fifteen, who know many of the prostitutes of the Tenderloin by name. Sad to relate, boys like to be employed in the “red-light” districts. They like it, not because they are bad or depraved, but for the very natural reason that they make more money there, receiving larger and more numerous tips. They are called upon for many services by the habitués of these haunts of the vicious and the profligate. They are sent out to place bets; to take notes to and from houses of ill-fame; or to buy liquor, cigarettes, candy, and even gloves, shoes, corsets, and other articles of wearing apparel for the “ladies.” Not only are tips abundant, but there are many opportunities for graft of which the boys avail themselves. A lad is sent, for instance, for a bottle of whiskey. He is told to get a certain brand at a neighboring hotel, but he knows where he can get the same brand for 50 per cent of the hotel price, and, naturally, he goes there for it and pockets the difference in price. That is one form of messengers’ graft. Another is overcharging for his services and pocketing the surplus, or keeping the change from a “ten-spot” or a “fiver,” when, as often happens, the “sports” are either too reckless to bother about such trifles or too drunk to remember. From sources such as these the messenger boy in a district like the Tenderloin will often make several dollars a day.[[136]]
A whole series of temptations confronts the messenger boy. He smokes, drinks, gambles, and, very often, patronizes the lowest class of cheap brothels. In answering calls from houses of ill-repute messengers cannot avoid being witnesses of scenes of licentiousness more or less frequently. By presents of money, fruit, candy, cigarettes, and even liquor, the women make friends of the boys, who quickly learn all the foul slang of the brothels.[[137]] The conversation of a group of messengers in such a district will often reveal the most astounding intimacy with the grossest things of the underworld. That in their adolescence, the transition from boyhood to manhood, fraught as it is with its own inherent perils, they should be thrown into such an environment and exposed to such temptations is an evil which cannot possibly be overemphasized. The penal code of New York declares the sending of minors to carry messages to or from a house of ill-fame to be a misdemeanor, but the law is a dead letter. It cannot possibly be enforced, and its repeal would probably be a good thing. While it may be urged that the mere existence of such a law has a certain moral value as a condemnation of such a dangerous employment for boys, it is exceedingly doubtful if that good is sufficient to counterbalance the harm which comes from the non-enforcement of the law.
I have dwelt mainly upon the grosser vices associated with street employment, as with employment in factories and mines, because it is a phase of the subject about which too little is known. I need scarcely say, however, that these vices are not the only ones to which serious attention should be given. Crime naturally results from such conditions. Of 600 boys committed to the New York Juvenile Asylum by the courts, 125 were newsboys who had been committed for various offences ranging from ungovernableness and disorderly conduct to grand larceny.[[138]] Mr. Nibecker, Superintendent of the House of Refuge at Glen Mills, near Philadelphia, was asked, “Have you, in disproportionate numbers, boys who formerly were engaged in some one particular occupation?” He replied promptly, “Yes, district messengers.”[[139]] It seems to be the almost unanimous opinion of probation officers and other competent authorities in our large cities that messenger boys and newsboys furnish an exceedingly large proportion of cases of juvenile delinquency. I wrote to six probation officers in as many large cities asking them to give me their opinions as to the classes of occupation which seem to have the largest number of juvenile delinquents. Their replies are summarized in the following schedule:—
| Occupations of Juvenile Delinquents in Six Large Cities, showing the Relative Number of Each Occupation | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Report | A | B | C | D |
| 1 | Messenger boys | Newsboys | Factory boys | Miscellaneous |
| 2 | Newsboys | Messenger boys | Factory boys | Truants |
| 3 | Newsboys | Messenger boys | Truants | Factory boys |
| 4 | Messenger boys | Factory boys | Newsboys | Miscellaneous |
| 5 | Messenger boys | Newsboys | Truants | Miscellaneous |
| 6 | Factory boys | Truants | Messenger boys | Newsboys |
In six smaller cities, where the number of factory workers is much larger in proportion than in the great cities, and the number of newsboys and messengers is much smaller, the results were somewhat different. The following schedule is interesting as a summary of the replies received from these towns:—
| Occupations of Juvenile Delinquents in Six Towns of Less than 100,000 Inhabitants, showing the Relative Number of Each Occupation[[E]] | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Report | A | B | C | D |
| 1 | Mine boys | Truants | Messenger boys | Miscellaneous |
| 2 | Glass-house boys | Other factory boys | Miscellaneous | Truants |
| 3 | Mill boys | Messenger boys | Truants | Miscellaneous |
| 4 | Mill boys | Mine boys | Truants | Miscellaneous |
| 5 | Mill boys | Truants | Newsboys | Miscellaneous |
| 6 | Mine boys | Messenger boys | Miscellaneous | Truants |
These facts, and other facts of a like nature, are only indicative of the ill effects of child labor upon the morals of the children. In some cases the moral peril lies in the nature of the work itself, while in others it lies, not in the work, but in the conditions by which it is surrounded. In the Chicago Stock Yards, for example, judging by what I saw there, I should say that in most, if not all, of the departments the work itself is degrading and brutalizing, and that no person under eighteen years of age ought to be permitted to work in them. In large laundries little girls are very commonly employed as “sorters.” Their work is to sort out the soiled clothes as they come in and to classify them. While such work must be disagreeable and unwholesome for a young girl, there is nothing necessarily demoralizing about it. But when such little girls are compelled to work with men and women of the coarsest and most illiterate type, as they frequently are, and to listen to constant conversation charged with foul suggestions, it becomes a soul-destroying occupation. At its best, even when all possible efforts are made to keep the place of employment pure and above reproach—and I know that there are many such places—still the whole tendency of child labor is in the direction of a lower moral standard. The feeling of independence caused by the ability to earn wages, the relaxation of parental authority, with the result that the children roam the streets at night or frequent places of amusement of questionable character; the ruthless destruction of the bloom of youthful innocence and the forced consciousness of life properly belonging to adult years—these are inevitably associated with child labor.