The Bitter Cry of the Children

by John Spargo

XI

What are the reasons for the employment of children? It is almost needless to argue that child labor is socially unnecessary, that the labor of little boys and girls is not required in order that wealth sufficient for the needs of society may be produced. If such a claim were made, it would be an all-sufficing reply to point to the great army of unemployed men in our midst, and to say that the last man must be employed before the employment of the first child can be justified. When there is not an unemployed man, when there is not a man employed in useless, unproductive, and wasteful labor, if there is then a shortage of the things necessary for social maintenance, child labor may be necessary and justifiable. Under any other conditions than these it is unjustifiable and brutally wrong. In the primitive struggle with the hostile forces of nature, such struggles as pioneers have had in all lands before the deserts could be made to yield harvests of fruit and grain, the labor of wives and children has been necessary to supplement that of husbands and fathers. But what would be thought of the men, under such conditions, if they forced their wives and children to work while they idled, ate, and slept? Yet that is, essentially, the practice of modern industrial society. Here is a great country with natural resources unparalleled in human experience for their richness and variety; here labor is so productive, and inventive genius so highly developed, that wealth overflows our granaries and warehouses, and forces us to seek foreign markets for its disposal. The children employed in our factories are not employed because it would otherwise be impossible to produce the necessities of life for the nation. The little five-year-old girl seen by Miss Addams working at night in a Southern cotton mill was not so employed because it was necessary in order that the American people might have enough cotton goods to supply their needs. On the contrary, she was making sheeting for the Chinese Army![^[141]] Not that she or those by whom she was employed had any interest in the Chinese Army, but because there was a prospective profit for the manufacturer in the making of sheeting for sale to China for the use of her soldiers. The manufacturer would just as readily have sacrificed little American girls in the manufacture of beads for Hottentots, or gilt idols for poor Hindoo ryots, if the profit were equal.

A “KINDERGARTEN” TOBACCO FACTORY IN PHILADELPHIA

That is the root of the child-labor evil; it has no social justification and exists only for the sordid gain of profit-seekers. It is not difficult, therefore, to understand the manufacturers’ interest in child labor, or their opposition to all efforts to legislate against it. Cheap production is the maxim of success in industry, and a plentiful supply of cheap labor is a powerful contributor to that end. The principal items in productive cost are the raw material and the labor necessary, the relative importance of each depending upon the nature of the industry itself. Now, it is obviously to the interest of the manufacturer, as manufacturer, to get both raw material and labor-power as cheaply as possible, whether the industry in which he is interested is governed by competitive, or monopolistic, or any intermediate conditions. If competition rules, cheapness is vitally important to him, since if he can get an advantage over his competitors in that respect he can undersell them, while if he fails to get his supplies of labor and raw material as cheaply as his competitors, he will be undersold. If, on the other hand, monopoly conditions prevail, it is still an important interest to secure them as cheaply as possible, thereby increasing his profit.

It is an axiom of commercial economy that supply follows demand, and it is certain that the constant demand for the cheap, tractable labor of children has had much to do with the creation of the supply. At bottom the employers, or, rather, the system of production for profit, must be held responsible for child labor. There are evidences of this on every hand. We see manufacturers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania getting children from orphan asylums, regardless of their physical, mental, and moral ruin, merely because it pays them. When the glass-blowers of Minotola, N.J., went on strike, in 1902, the child-labor question was one of their most important issues. The exposures made of the frightful enslavement of little children attracted widespread attention. There is very little in the history of the English factory system which excels in horror the conditions which existed in that little South Jersey town at the beginning of the twentieth century.[^[142]] When the proprietor of the factory was asked about the employment of young boys ten and eleven years of age, many of whom often fell asleep and were awakened by the men pouring water over them, and at least two of whom died from overexhaustion, he said: “If two men apply to me for work and one has one or two or three children and the other has none, I take the man with children. I need the boys.” In actual practice this meant that no man could get work as a glass-blower unless he was able to bring boys with him. A regular padrone system was developed in consequence of this: the glass-blowers, determined to keep their own boys out of the factories if possible, secured children from orphan asylums, or took the little boys of Italian immigrants, boarded them, and paid the parents a regular weekly sum.

In the mills of the South it is frequently made a condition of the employment of married men or women that all their children shall be bound to work in the same mills. The following is one of the rules posted in a South Carolina cotton mill:—

“All children, members of a family, above twelve years of age, shall work regularly in the mill, and shall not be excused from service therein without the consent of the superintendent for good cause.”[^[143]]

Many times I have heard fathers and mothers—in the North as well as in the South—say that they did not want their children to work, that they could have done without the children’s wages and kept them at school a little longer, or apprenticed them to better employment, but that they were compelled to send them into the mills to work, or lose their own places. Even more eloquent as evidencing the keen demand of the manufacturers for child labor is the fact to which Mr. McKelway calls attention, that, in response to their demand, cotton-mill machinery is being made with adjustable legs to suit small child workers. Mr. McKelway rightly contrasts this with the experience in India when the first cotton mills were erected there. Then, for the first time, it was found necessary to manufacture spinning frames high enough from the floor to accommodate adult workers.[^[144]]

With such facts as these before us, it is easy to see that the urgency of the employers’ demands for child labor is an important factor in the problem. Underlying all other causes is the fundamental fact that the exploitation of the children is in the interests of the employing class. It may be urged that it is necessary for children to begin work at an early age because the work they do cannot be done by men or women, but the contention is wholly unsupported by facts. There is no work done by boys in the glass factories which men could not do; no skill or training is required to enable one to do the work done by breaker boys in the coal-mines; the work done by children in the textile mills could be done equally well by adults. The fact that in some cases adults are employed to do the work which in other cases is done by children, is sufficient proof that child labor is not resorted to because it is inevitable and necessary, but on account of its cheapness.

It does not, of course, necessarily follow that low-priced labor is really cheap labor; it may prove to be just as uneconomical to employ such labor as to buy poor raw materials merely because they are low-priced. The quantitative measure is no more satisfactory as a standard of value when applied to labor than when applied to other things. Thomas Brassey, the famous English engineer and contractor, used to declare that the cost of carrying out great works in different countries did not vary according to the wages paid, and that his experience had been that in countries where wages were highest the rate of profit was also highest. Very similar testimony has been given by many large employers of labor, and the point seems to be fairly well established. It is said, for instance, that the cost of erecting large buildings does not differ very much in the great capitals of the world, though the rate of wages differs enormously, and that in America, where wages in the building trades are much higher than anywhere else in the world, the labor cost is really less than elsewhere.[^[145]] In view of this economic fact, it has been urged that child labor is not cheap labor, except in a false and uneconomic sense, that it is inefficient, and that it would be to the interest of the employers themselves to employ adult labor instead.

Doubtless this argument has been used in the true propagandist spirit of appealing to as many interests as possible, and proving the sweet reasonableness of the demand for the abolition of child labor, but I am inclined to doubt its value. We may, I think, trust the employers to look after their own interests. It is true that if you put an underpaid and underfed Italian laborer at a dollar a day to work, and alongside put a decently fed American laborer at double that wage, you will probably find the labor of the latter the more profitable; just as cheap, miserably paid coolie labor is the most expensive of all. But I do not think it follows that adult labor would be cheaper than child labor to the employer. Most child labor is made possible by machinery and conditioned by it, and adult labor would be conditioned by it in the same manner. There is very little scope for individual differences to manifest themselves where the machine is the controlling power. In other industries, such as glass manufacture, where machinery plays a relatively unimportant part as yet, the labor of the boys is conditioned by the speed of the men they serve. The men, urged on by the piecework system, work at their utmost limit of speed, and the boys must keep pace with them. It is unlikely that if men were employed to do the work now done by the “snappers-up,” they would be able to increase the speed of the glass-blowers, the only way in which their labor could prove cheaper. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that men would not consent to be driven as boys are driven. I have gathered from glass-blowers themselves that they are very often as much opposed to the introduction of adult helpers as are their employers, for the reason that they believe adults would not serve them with the same speed as boys. For these reasons, and many others into which it is impossible to enter here, I am convinced that little good will result from a propaganda aiming to show the employers that their economic interests would be best served by the abolition of child labor.

In a similar way it has been urged, with ample evidence of its truth, that the employment of children retards the introduction of mechanical devices and their fullest development.[^[146]] This is perfectly true, not only of child labor, but of almost all forms of labor that are unhealthful or degrading. There is absolutely no need of human street sweepers, exposed in all weathers and constantly inhaling foul, disease-laden dust, any more than there is need of little boys working in the glass factories, carrying red-hot bottles to the ovens. In each case machinery has been invented to do the work, and it is used to a small extent. If these occupations, and scores of others, were absolutely prohibited, and the prohibitory law rigidly enforced, streets would still be swept, but by mechanical sweepers, and bottles would still be taken to the annealing ovens, but by mechanical means. The world will probably, let us hope, never become the paradise dreamed of by the German dreamer, Etzler, who believed that all the work of the world would be done by machinery in the future, and human labor become altogether unnecessary.[^[147]] But there is no doubt that much of the work which to-day degrades body, brain, and soul could be done just as well by mechanical agents. Not, however, through sermonizing or appealing to the employers will these mechanical devices be generally adopted to take the place of the life-destroying labor of boys and girls; but by making it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, for them to employ child labor at all.

Not long ago I was in a glass factory where the “carrying-in boys” had been displaced by automatic machinery. As I watched the machine doing the work I had been accustomed to seeing little boys perform, I asked the manager of the factory why it had been introduced. His answer was simple and direct, “Why, because it had become too difficult to get boys.” A few days later I went into another factory where boys were, as usual, employed in doing the work. I asked the owner of the factory why he did not use machinery instead of employing boys. “Because it is not practicable,” he replied. “We must have boys and can’t do without them.” When I told him that I had seen the work done by machinery with perfect satisfaction, he laughed. “Yes, that is true, but I still say that it is not a practicable proposal,” he rejoined. “I mean that it is not a practical business proposition. I am not interested in machinery, as machinery, and if I can get all the boys I want, at wages making their labor no more expensive than the cost of running machinery, why should I tie up two or three thousand dollars of my capital to install machines? So long as I can get boys enough, I don’t want to bother with machines.” Then I asked: “What would you do if you could not get boys—if their employment was forbidden, and the law strictly enforced?” His reply was suggestive. “Why, then machinery would be the only thing; then it would be a practical business proposition,” he said.

A GLASS FACTORY AT NIGHT

I have given this manufacturer’s opinion, as nearly as possible in his own words, because it is an admirably clear statement of what I believe to be the natural attitude of the employing class upon a grave question. All that stands in the way of a general use of machinery to do the work now performed at such an enormous cost in human life and happiness, is the temporary inconvenience of the employers from having to tie up some of their capital. Just as the woollen manufacturers in England, as soon as they were debarred from employing children, adopted the piecing machine,[^[148]] so the employers of America to-day would have no difficulty about securing machinery, much of it already invented, if the employment of children should be forbidden. But, generally speaking, they will not of themselves make the change.