XII
It is less easy to understand the problem of child labor in its relation to parental responsibility. It is continually asked: “Why do parents send their little ones to work at such an early age? Is it possible that there are so many parents who are so indifferent to the welfare of their children that they send them to work, and surround them with perils and evil influences, or are there other, deeper reasons? Are the parents helpless to save their little ones?” These are questions which have never yet been satisfactorily answered; they deal with a phase of the problem which has never been fully investigated, notwithstanding that it is of vital importance.
As already noted, when the manufacturers of England sought first to get child workers for the cotton and woollen mills, they found the parents arrayed against them, defending their children. For a long time no self-respecting father or mother would allow a child to go to the factories to work, and it remained for many years a brand of social disgrace to have one’s children so employed. Not until their pride was conquered by poverty, not until they were subjugated by hunger and compelled to surrender and accept the inevitable, did the parents send their children into the factories. It was poverty, bitter poverty, which led the first “free” child into the mills to economic servitude, and I am disposed to think that poverty is still the main reason why parents send their children to body-and-soul-destroying toil.
Many of those whose work for the enactment of legislation to protect the children from the ills of premature labor entitles them to lasting honor and gratitude, have shown an inclination to minimize the extent to which poverty is responsible for child labor. The opponents of child-labor legislation have so strongly insisted upon the hardships which would follow if parents were deprived of their children’s earnings, and have so eloquently pleaded the cause of the “poor widowed mothers,” as almost to make the employment of children appear as a philanthropic enterprise. Very often, it seems to me, the advocates of child-labor legislation, in their eagerness to refute their critics, have resorted to arguments which rest upon exceedingly slight foundations of fact, and, in this case especially, laid insufficient stress upon the logical answer. The more closely the problem is scrutinized and investigated, the larger the influence of poverty will appear, I think. At the same time, it is well to remember that poverty is not the only cause by any means. There are many other causes, some closely associated with poverty, others only remotely or not at all. Ignorance, cupidity, indifference, feverish ambition to “get on,”—these are a few of the many other causes which might be named.
It is declared, then, that actual inquiry has shown that the claim that the earnings of the children are necessary to the support of the family, and that widows and others would suffer serious poverty if their children under fifteen were not permitted to work, is “rarely if ever justified.” Mrs. Frederick Nathan, of the Consumers’ League of the City of New York, whose splendid devotion to the cause of social righteousness lends weight to her words, expresses this view with admirable clearness. She says: “Whenever preventive measures for child labor are enacted or enforced, there is always a wail heard to the effect that the child’s labor is absolutely requisite for the living expenses of the family. Yet, upon investigation, this statement is rarely corroborated. In Illinois, there was recently enacted a law prohibiting children under sixteen from working more than eight hours a day, or after 7 P.M. Thousands of diminutive toilers were discharged. Then a cry of hardship went up in behalf of hundreds of families. Philanthropic women undertook an investigation, supposing they would find a number of cases in which the wages of the working child were absolutely necessary to the family income. To their amazement they found only three families in Chicago, and five in the remainder of the state, where this was true. In every other case it was discovered that either the parent or older children could support the family, or some relative was willing to assist until the child reached the legal age.”[[149]]
Where there are so many coöperating causes, it would be easy to overestimate the importance of any one, and correspondingly easy to underestimate it. How the investigations in Illinois were conducted, what standards were adopted by the investigators, I do not know, and cannot, therefore, in the absence of specified data, express an opinion upon the validity of the conclusions drawn. Frankly, however, I distrust them. Not long since I heard of a case in which a “philanthropic lady investigator” decided that the wages of a child of thirteen were not necessary to the maintenance of the family, because she “had a father in regular employment.” It did not, apparently, occur to her that $9 a week was too little to support decently a family of six persons.
Whatever the nature of the Illinois investigation, I am certain that in my own experience the proportion of cases in which there is actual dependence upon what the children earn is very much larger. It must not be forgotten in discussing this question that although a child may earn only $1.50 a week, that sum may mean a great deal to the family. It may mean the difference between living in a comparatively good house on a decent street and going to a foul tenement in a bad neighborhood. It may mean the difference between coal and no coal in winter, or ice and no ice in summer. As a poor woman said to me quite recently, “Joe only earns thirty cents a day, but that thirty cents means supper for all five in the family.” The investigations of Mr. Nichols in the coal-mining and textile-manufacturing towns,[[150]] of Mr. Kellogg Durland,[[151]] and, particularly, the inquiries made in New Jersey concerning the immediate effects of the Child Labor Law of 1904,[[152]] all tend to show that the dependence of families upon children’s earnings is much greater than the Illinois figures would indicate. I venture the opinion that there is not a Settlement worker in America who has studied this problem whose experience would confirm the optimism of the Illinois investigators. I am certain that within a radius of three blocks from the little Settlement in which this is written, and with which I am at present most familiar, there are more families known to be absolutely dependent upon the earnings of young children than were found in the whole State of Illinois, according to the report quoted. I know of at least twice as many such families as were found in Illinois living in this little city with its population of about sixty thousand as against the nearly 5,000,000 in Illinois. Settlement workers in various parts of the country have, without exception, declared the Illinois report to be absolutely at variance with their experience.
In the hope that I might be able to gather sufficient accurate data to warrant some fairly definite conclusions upon this point, I spent several weeks making careful personal investigations into the matter in four states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. I made inquiries into 213 cases, first getting the children’s stories and then carefully investigating them. The results are clearly set forth in the accompanying schedule, but explanation of a few points may be helpful to the reader.
In choosing a wage standard to represent the primary poverty line, I somewhat arbitrarily fixed upon $10 per week. In either of the four states named, such a wage must mean poverty and lead to the employment of children at the earliest possible moment. Intemperance appears in four cases, but that does not mean that it did not enter into other cases at all. In the four cases noted the fathers were earning from $12 to $18 per week, and while it is possible that with such wages they might be honestly and honorably poor, since even $18 is not a very princely wage, it is a fact that their expenditures upon drink constituted the real cause of the poverty which forced their children to work. On the other hand, I do not suppose that all the cases of child labor due to the primary poverty of their families are noted. In the last column several cases are given of children who were “sick when attending school,” or who “could not get on at school.” For reasons given in an earlier chapter, I am inclined to believe that these cases would have to be transferred to the other column if it were only possible to investigate them more fully.
| Table showing Reasons for the Employment of 213 Children | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. of Children | Occupations[[F]] | Reasons given which indicate Primary Poverty | Reasons given Other than Apparent Primary Poverty | ||||
| Boys, | 34. | Glass factory Workers.[[G]] | Wages of father less than $10 per week | 9 | Parents saving money to buy their homes, etc. | 8 | |
| Father sick or injured | 5 | Children working to keep father who is able to work but won’t | 2 | ||||
| Father dead | 2 | ||||||
| Father unemployed | 1 | ||||||
| Father in prison | 1 | Not determined | 6 | ||||
| Boys, | 23. | Textile mill workers. | Wages of father less than $10 per week | 14 | Tired of school | 13 | |
| Girls, | 57. | Father unemployed | 6 | Discouraged by being “put back” at school every time family moved | 6 | ||
| Father dead | 5 | Parents saving the money | 5 | ||||
| Father sick or injured | 6 | Because companions went to work | 9 | ||||
| Father deserted family | 2 | To get better clothes | 4 | ||||
| Father drunkard | 1 | Not determined | 9 | ||||
| Boys, | 33. | Cigarette, cigar, and tobacco workers. | Father’s wage less than $10 per week | 14 | Because friends worked | 6 | |
| Girls, | 22. | Father dead | 3 | Tired of school | 5 | ||
| Father sick or injured | 4 | Parents saving money | 4 | ||||
| Father unemployed | 4 | To get better clothes | 3 | ||||
| Father drunkard | 3 | Sick while at school | 2 | ||||
| Not determined | 7 | ||||||
| Boys, | 18. | Delivery wagon boys | 4 | Wages of father less than $10 per week | 15 | Couldn’t get on at school | 6 |
| Girls, | 26. | Match packers | 12 | Father dead | 2 | To get better clothes | 4 |
| Candy factory girls | 10 | Father sick or injured | 4 | Because friends went to work | 3 | ||
| Wire factory workers | 7 | Father unemployed | 2 | Sick while at school | 3 | ||
| Rubber factory workers | 11 | Father deserted family | 2 | Not determined | 3 | ||
| Boys, | 108. | Low wages | 52 | School difficulties | 30 | ||
| Girls, | 105. | Unemployment | 13 | Because friends went to work | 18 | ||
| Father’s death | 12 | To get better clothes | 11 | ||||
| Father’s sickness | 19 | To enable parents to save | 17 | ||||
| Father’s desertion of family | 4 | Sickness of child while at school | 5 | ||||
| Father’s intemperance | 4 | Father’s laziness | 2 | ||||
| Father in prison | 1 | Not determined | 25 | ||||
| Total, | 213. | Total, 105 = 49.30% | Total, 108 = 50.70% | ||||
I do not offer this table as conclusive testimony upon the point under discussion. The number of cases investigated is too small to give the results more than suggestive value. Personally, I believe that the cases given are fairly typical, and that is the opinion also of some of the leading authorities upon the subject to whom I have submitted the table. No private investigator can ever hope to investigate a sufficient number of cases to establish anything conclusively in this connection. What is needed most of all is a coöperative investigation under the direction of the leading sociological students of the country until such extensive returns are gathered as will justify more positive conclusions. In the meantime such tables as this can at best only serve to call attention to what may be a general fact.
The table shows more than mere poverty. First of all there is the senseless, feverish, natural ambition of the immigrant to save money, to be rich. “Ma boy getta much mona—I get richa man,” said one of the Italians included in the first line of the fourth column of the foregoing table. How often I have heard that speech! Not always in the broken music of Italian-English, but in the many-toned, curious English of Bohemian, Lithuanian, Scandinavian, Russian, Pole, and Greek—all drawn by the same powerful magnet of wealth—all sacrificing, ignorantly and blindly, the lives of themselves and their children in their fevered quest. In this, as in so many other problems of the republic, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of people of alien races, customs, and speech enters. Whether their admission is wise or unwise is a subject outside the scope of this discussion, but one thing is certain, and as vital as it is true, namely, that hospitality has its obligations and duties. If the nation is to receive these immigrants, the nation must accept the responsibility of protecting them and itself. It must protect the immigrants from the dangers which their ignorance does not permit them to see, and protect itself from having to bear in the near future an Atlantean load; an economic burden which must come to it if these “strangers within the gates” in their ignorance are allowed to barter the manhood of their sons and the womanhood of their daughters for gold.
The virtual breakdown of our school system is one of the gravest problems indicated by the table and enforced by general observation. The children who go to work in factories and mines because they are “tired of school,” or “because they could not learn,” are, it is to be feared, not always but too often, the victims of undernutrition. The school spends all its energies in the vain attempt to educate wasting minds in starving bodies, and then the child, already physically and mentally ruined, goes to the mine or the factory, there to linger on as half-starved plants in arid soil sometimes linger, or to fade away as a summer flower fades in a day. Poverty began the ruin of the child by denying it proper nourishment, and ignorance and greed combine to complete the ruin by sending the child in its weakness forth to labor.
The other reasons for the employment of children shown in the table cannot be discussed separately. The moral contagion of poverty and ignorance, evidenced by the number of those who work, not from necessity, but because their friends work, is not new to those who have studied this and kindred problems. The influence of a single family in lowering the moral and economic standards of a whole street, especially in our smaller towns, is notorious. The pathos of the mothers of families who are worse than widows, with their drunken, dissolute husbands, and the tragedy of little child lives crushed by brutal, selfish, indolent fathers who place the responsibility of maintaining the family upon their young shoulders, are familiar phases of the problem of child labor.
It is a solemn responsibility which the presence of this menacing evil of child labor places upon the nation. It is not only the interests of the children themselves that are menaced; even more important and terrible is the thought that civilization itself is imperilled when children are dwarfed physically, mentally, and morally by hunger, heavy toil, and unwholesome surroundings. If one of the forts along our far-stretching coasts were attacked by an enemy, or if a single square mile of our immense territory were invaded, the nation would rise in patriotic unison, and there would be no lack either of men or money for the defence. Surely, it is not too much to hope that, before long, the nation will realize in the destruction of its future citizens by greed and ignorance a far more serious attack upon the republic than any that could be made by fleets or armed legions. To sap the strength and weaken the moral fibres of the children is to grind the seed corn, to wreck the future for to-day’s fleeting gain.
A great Frenchman once said of the alphabet, “These twenty-six letters contain all the good things that ever were, or ever can be, said,—only they need to be arranged.” To complete the truth of this aphorism, he should have included all the bad things as well. And so it is with the children of a nation. Capable of expressing all the good or evil the world has known or may know, it is essentially a matter of arrangement, opportunity, environment. Whether the children of to-day become physical, mental, and moral cretins, or strong men and women, fathers and mothers of virile sons and daughters, depends upon the decision of the nation. If the responsibility of this is fully recognized, and the employment of children under fifteen years of age is forbidden throughout the length and breadth of this great country; if the nation realizes that the demand for the protection of the children is the highest patriotism, and enfolds every child within its strong, protecting arms, then and not till then will it be possible to look with confidence toward the future, unashamed and unafraid.
[E]. “Messenger boys” includes errand boys in stores.
[F]. No inquiry was made among mine workers because, on account of the large number of boys whose fathers have been killed or permanently disabled, the data would be less representative. (See Roberts’ Anthracite Coal Communities, p. 176.)
[G]. Mostly foreign born or the children of foreign-born parents, Slavs and Italians. The entire absence of reference to school matters is suggestive. Most of them never entered a school.
IV
REMEDIAL MEASURES
“But pity will not right the wrong,
Nor doles return the stolen youth;
When tasks are done without a song
And bargains wrung at cost of truth,
’Tis mockery to talk of ruth.”
—David Lowe.