The Bitter Cry of the Children

by John Spargo

X

These are some of the ills which child labor inflicts upon the children themselves, ills which do not end with their childhood days but curse and blight all their after years. The child who is forced to be a man too soon, forced too early to enter the industrial strife of the world, ceases to be a man too soon, ceases to be fit for the industrial strife. When the strength is sapped in childhood there is an absence of strength in manhood and womanhood; Ruskin’s words are profoundly true, that “to be a man too soon is to be a small man.” We are to-day using up the vitality of children; soon they will be men and women, without the vitality and strength necessary to maintain themselves and their dependants. When we exploit the immature strength of little children, we prepare recruits for the miserable army of the unfit and unemployable, whose lot is a shameful and debasing poverty.

This wrong to helpless childhood carries with it, therefore, a certain and dreadful retribution. It is not possible to injure a child without injuring society. Whatever burden society lays, or permits to be laid, upon the shoulders of its children, it must ultimately bear upon its own. Society’s interest in the child may be well expressed in a slight paraphrase of the words of Jesus, “Whatsoever is done to one of the least of these little ones is done unto me.” It is in that spirit that the advocates of child-labor legislation would have the nation forbid the exploitation, literally the exhaustion, of children by self-interested employers. For the abuse of childhood by individual antisocial interests, society as a whole must pay the penalty. If we neglect the children of to-day, and sap their strength so that they become weaklings, we must bear the burden of their failures when they fail and fall:—

“There is a sacred Something on all ways—

Something that watches through the Universe;

One that remembers, reckons and repays,

Giving us love for love, and curse for curse.”

It is a well-known fact that the competition of children with their elders entails serious consequences of a twofold nature,—first, in the displacement of adults, and, second, in the lowering of their wage standards. There are few things more tragic in the modern industrial system than the sight of children working while their fathers can find no other employment than to carry dinners to them. I know that many persons are always ready to suggest that the fathers like this unnatural arrangement, that they prefer to live upon the earnings of their little ones, and there are, no doubt, cases in which this is true. But in the majority of cases it is not true. Every one who is at all familiar with the lives of the workers must realize that when applied indiscriminately to the mass of those who find themselves in that condition of dependence upon their children’s labor, this view is a gross libel. Some months ago, I stood outside of a large clothing factory in Rochester, N.Y. Upon the front of the building, as upon several others in the street, there hung a painted sign, such as I have seen there many times, bearing the inscription, “Small Girls Wanted.” While I stood there two men passed by and I heard one of them say to the other: “That’s fourteen places we’ve seen they want kids to-day, Bill, but we’ve tramped round all week an’ never got sight of a job.” I have known many earnest, industrious men to be weeks at a time seeking employment while their children could get places without difficulty. The displacement of adult workers by their children is a stern and sad feature of the competition of the labor market, which no amount of cynicism can dispose of.

A brief study of the returns published in the bulletins and reports of the various bureaus of labor and the labor unions will show that child labor tends to lower the wages of adult workers. Where the competition of children is a factor wages are invariably lowest. Two or three years ago I was associated in a small way with an agitation carried on by the members of the Cigarmakers’ Union in Pennsylvania against the “Cigar Trust.” One of the principal issues in that agitation was the employment of young children. The labor unions have always opposed child labor, for the reason that they know from experience how its employment tends to displace adult labor and to reduce wages. In the case of the cigarmakers’ agitation the chief grievance was the fact that children were making for $2 and $2.50 per thousand the same class of cigars as the men were paid from $7.50 to $8 per thousand for making.[^[140]] The men worked under fairly decent, human conditions, but the conditions under which the children worked were positively inhuman. That such competition as that, if extensive, must result in the gradual displacement of men and the employment of children, accompanied by the reduction of the wages of the men fortunate enough to be allowed to remain at work, is, I think, self-evident. In their turn the unemployment of adults and the lowering of wages are fruitful sources of poverty, and force the employment of many children.

These are some of the most obvious immediate economic consequences of child labor, simple facts which we can readily grasp. But there are other, subtler and less obvious, economic consequences of even greater importance, so vast that their magnitude cannot be measured nor even guessed. It is impossible to conceive how much we lose through the lessened productive capacity of those who have been prematurely exploited, and even if that were possible, we should still have to face the stupendous problem of determining how much of our expenditure for the relief of poverty, caring for the diseased and crippled, and the expensive maintenance of a large criminal class in prisons and reformatories, has been rendered necessary by that same fundamental cause. It is an awful, bewildering problem, this ultimate economic cost of child labor to society. If it were proposed to saddle the bulk of these expenditures for the relief of the necessitous and the maintenance of the diseased, maimed, and criminal classes upon the industries in which their energies were used up, their bodies maimed, or their moral natures perverted and destroyed, there would be a great outcry. Yet, it would be much more reasonable and just than the present system, which permits the physical, mental, and moral ruin to be carried on in the selfish and sordid interests of a class, and the imposition of the resulting burden of misery and failure upon the shoulders of society as a whole.