CHILD LABOR
MARY ALDEN HOPKINS, Harper’s Weekly, 1915.
“Too many children is as great a danger to family life as too few children,” said Mr. Owen Lovejoy, General Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee. A secretary of this Committee, working for the abolition of child labor, the improvement of the compulsory education laws, and the raising of the standards of education in backward states, Mr. Lovejoy has first knowledge of the condition of children in every state in the Union.
“How many are too many?” he was asked. “I should say any more than the mother can look after and the father earn a living for. There are always too many children in a family if they have to go to work before they get their growth and schooling. It may be that some day the state will help support the children, but under present conditions, as soon as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by. In doing this they not only injure their tender growing bodies, but indirectly they drag down the father’s wage. They go to work to help the family, but they really injure it. The wage tends to become an individual wage, the father receiving only enough for his personal maintenance, the mother working both at home and outside, and the children supporting themselves as soon as they can toddle into the cotton fields or hang onto the back of a delivery wagon. Thus the home is dissolved into constituent parts and the burden of the struggle for existence is laid on each. The more that children work, the lower the father’s wages become; the lower the father’s wages become, the more the children must work. So we evolve the vicious circle. The home becomes a mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with weariness and minds drunk with sleep. No fine spiritual relation can exist between parents and children where the children are an economic asset to the parents. There are people who approve this state of affairs, but no one can who really cares for the welfare of children. We fight this condition with Child Labor Laws. If the children stay out of industry, the fathers have more work and make more money in the end. But one of the strongest factors against getting laws passed or enforced after they are passed, is the families’ immediate need of the children’s pitiful earnings. If there were fewer children in these families, it would be possible to keep them in school and leave the mines and factories to the fathers. There is another aspect to the matter. Not only do these unfortunate children drag down the physique and mentality of the race, but they keep many children of more thoughtful parents from being born at all. Just as long as there are many families that are too large, there will be other families that are too small. Yet these small families are potentially the best families of all. Serious-minded laboring people whose trades are being captured by child laborers are reluctant to bring offspring into a world which cannot promise a life of the simplest comforts in reward for hard labor. Here is the real danger of that race suicide so vigorously condemned by Ex-President Roosevelt and others; for while the man of virtue and strength is deterred from propagating his kind because of the jeopardy in which his children would stand, the vicious and the ignorant, the physically unfit and the discouraged are not deterred by any such consideration, but, regardless of consequences, continue to propagate their kind and swell the proportion of those who will be from birth to death a heavy liability against society. We regard the family—one father, one mother, a group of children to be fed, clothed, and educated during the years that precede maturity—as the fundamental institution of our civilization and the glory, thus far, of all social evolution. One of the causes out of which the family grew has direct bearing upon this matter—that to which Professor Fisk called attention as his chief contribution to the evolutionary theory—the prolonged period of infancy. The evolutionary trend has been to prolong infancy and adolescence, and thus to launch upon society better individuals. This is impossible where the older children in a family are crowded out of the home into the workshop.”
The Child Labor Bulletin, November, 1912, contains special articles on the child workers in New York tenement houses. Record after record shows a two-child income supporting a six-child family.
In connection with Mr. Lovejoy’s statement that a high birth rate encourages child labor, it is significant to find from the Galton Laboratories of the University of London, the statement that drastic child labor laws directly lower the birth rate. In “The Report on the English Birth Rate,” from the Eugenics Laboratory, Memoir XIX, Part 1, England, North of the Humber, Ethel M. Elderton, after touching on the influence of the raised standard of decency and comfort, lays the responsibility of the change chiefly upon the lessened economic value of the child to its parents.
Miss Elderton says, “Between 1871 and 1901 the number of children employed largely diminished. Neo-Malthusianism spread and the child ceased largely to be born, because it was no longer an economic asset. The Compulsory Education Act of 1876, the Factories and Workshops Act of 1878, and the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial of 1877 (concerning the lawfulness of publishing pamphlets on contraception) are not unrelated movements; they are connected with the lowered economic value of the child, and with the corresponding desire to do without it.” The relation which Miss Elderton traced between the higher ideals of protection to childhood and the lowered birth rate is the more interesting because she is deeply, passionately alarmed at England’s falling birth rate.
Mr. Lovejoy does not regard the falling birth rate as a wholly undesirable phenomenon. He says: “Children should be born when the parents are in good health, at intervals that will allow the mother to recover her strength, and only as many should be born as the parents can care for. There is no deeper sorrow than to know that a child has died for causes that might have been prevented if the parents had had more wisdom and foresight. The ideals of care and education which we have for our own children should be our ideals for all children. I shall not consider it a calamity if the birth rate falls to a point where every child is so precious to the nation that not one will be allowed to work in a factory or workshop or mine or store under the age of sixteen, and up to that time every one will have proper food and clothes and education. Our race-suicide danger is a danger, nor of quantity, but of quality.”
LATEST OFFICIAL FIGURES ON CHILD LABOR. From United States Census of Occupations, 1910. New York State.
| Age | 10 to 13 years | 14 to 15 years |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing and mechanical | 518 | 18,502 |
| Extraction of Minerals | 3 | 47 |
| Agriculture | 1,566 | 5,034 |
| All other occupations | 2,765 | 36,659 |
| Total in all gainful occupations New York State | 4,852 | 60,242 |
| Total in all gainful occupations United States of America | 895,976 | 1,094,249 |
| Total child laborers in the United States of America | 1,990,225 |
WAGES AND THE COST OF LIVING. Together with its relation to Prevention of Conception. Compiled by C. V. Drysdale, D.Sc.
Apart from the special problems of experts, the great economic question of the day is that of the remuneration of labor and its relation to the cost of living. In Parliament and the press the questions of a minimum or living wage and of the purchasing power of existing wages are continually debated; and it is perfectly evident from the tone of these debates that we are confronted with a most serious difficulty, for which none of the political parties or economic authorities has any satisfactory solution. The recognition of this difficulty is due not to the fact that any new phenomena are present, or that the workers are worse off than at many periods in the past; but to the fact that the compilation of more accurate and official statistics during recent years has brought to light facts which were formerly only surmised, and has made two important conclusions practically indisputable. These are as follows:
A. That the wages of a large fraction of the working classes are insufficient, even when most skilfully employed, for the adequate support of a normal family.
B. That during the last ten or fifteen years of social legislation and of strenuous effort on the part of the working classes and social reformers, the purchasing power of average wages has declined instead of increasing, and this decline shows no definite sign of being arrested.
In order to improve the efficiency of production, it is important that the efficiency of the race should be improved. Hence the reduction of births should be especially encouraged among the poor and those suffering from physical or mental defect or disease, who, it may be noted, should have the strongest personal motives for voluntary restriction.
The restriction of births in proportion to economic or physiological deficiency would steadily improve economic conditions in the following ways:
(a) It would immediately reduce the burden upon the poor with their existing wages.
(b) It would immediately check increased demand, and therefore a further rise in price of food.
(c) It would reduce the burden of charity and taxation.
(d) It would permit the workers to be better nourished and educated.
(e) It would permit the children to be better educated and technically trained.
(f) In course of time it would reduce the number of workers competing and further raise wages.
(g) The evils of overcrowding, with its serious hygienic and moral dangers, would be rapidly diminished, and the housing problem made easier of solution. A three bedroom house only provides decency for a family not exceeding four children.
(h) It would give better opportunities for thrift among the workers and for their emancipation from the position of “wage slaves.” It would then give them an opportunity of co-operating and owning their own instruments of production.
In support of these statements it may be recalled that in Prof. Thorold Rogers’s Six Centuries of Work and Wages a striking example is given of the continued rise of wages after the Black Death of 1349, despite all efforts of Parliament to fix them.
“It is certain that the immediate consequence of the plague was a dearth of labor, an excessive enhancement of wages, and a serious difficulty in collecting the harvests of those landowners who depended on a supply of hired labor for the purpose of getting in their crops.... The plague, in short, had almost emancipated the surviving serfs.
“I shall point out below what were the actual effects of this great and sudden scarcity of labor. At present I merely continue the narrative. Parliament was broken up when the plague was raging. The King, however, issued a proclamation, which he addressed to William, the Primate, and circulated among the sheriffs of the different counties, in which he directed all officials that no higher than customary wages should be paid, under the penalties of amercement. The King’s mandate, however, was universally disobeyed, for the farmers were compelled to leave their crops ungathered or to comply with the demands of the laborers. When the King found that his proclamation was unavailing, he laid, we are told, heavy penalties on abbots, priors, barons, crown tenants, and those who held lands under mesne lords, if they paid more than customary rates. But the laborers remained masters of the situation. Many were said to have been thrown into prison for disobedience; many, to avoid punishment or restraint, fled into forests, where they were occasionally captured. The captives were fined, and obliged to disavow under oath that they would take higher than customary wages for the future. But the expedients were vain; labor remained scarce and wages, according to all previous experience, excessive.”
Mr. Thorold Rogers tells us of all the expedients employed by Parliament, in the Statute of Laborers, in order to check the rise of wages, and how they broke down and were evaded by the employers themselves. “The rise in agricultural labor is, all kinds of men’s work being taken together, about 50 per cent., of women’s work fully 100 per cent.” Artisans fare equally well. And, despite the rise in price of manufactured articles consequent upon this rise of wages, “there was no corresponding rise in the price of provisions.... The free laborer, and, for the matter of that, the serf, was in his way still better off. Everything he needed was as cheap as ever, and his labor was daily rising in value.”
It would, of course, be absurd to apply the lesson of one period of history to another, without consideration of the changed circumstances. But it is equally absurd to pass over such a vivid object lesson as the above without giving it due consideration, especially when it has a sound theoretical basis. Prof. Thorold Rogers was not a disciple of the Malthusian school, and he takes Mill and others to task for the importance they ascribed to the population difficulty. Yet he tells us that the reign of prosperity lasted for some time after the reduction of population by the Black Death, and that a rapid growth of population followed. This is quite in accordance with the doctrine of Malthus, and justifies our belief that, if this increase had been prudentially restricted, prosperity would have been permanently maintained.
A modern illustration of the same principle appears to be given in New Zealand, where the practice of family restriction seems to be almost universal. In the Standard of June 20th, 1912, appeared a note commenting upon the great and increasing prosperity of New Zealand; and it contains the following significant passage:—
“The wages paid to employees and the output of the printing establishments in the country have pretty nearly doubled in the same ten years, rising respectively from £284,605 to £490,246 and £704,285 to £1,377,926. A curious point in connection with the grain mills is that while there were fewer establishments and fewer hands employed in 1910 than in the previous years—although wages are higher—yet the value of the output has almost doubled, being £1,248,001 as against £682,884.”
Some mention should be made of the question of emigration. Strange as it may seem, emigration does not, as a rule, greatly mitigate the population difficulty (though it may have done so to a certain extent in Ireland), and it may even enhance it. The reason for this apparent paradox is not far to seek, and it serves to explain a good many common fallacies as regards the population question. Human beings are not all of equal producing power. Each child born into the world is an immediate consumer, and he remains a consumer without being a producer until his education and training are completed. After that time he becomes a producer, and, if of average talents, he may for a certain period produce enough to support himself and perhaps a wife. It is at the beginning of the effective period that emigration so frequently takes place, so that the old country is burdened with all the consumption of immature children, without any possible return. Emigration can only be a remedy for over-population when it is emigration of non-producers, i.e., children, aged people, tramps, paupers, or lunatics; and it need hardly be said that these are not the types which emigrate, or who are wanted by the colonies. It is quite possible for an already greatly over-populated country to be in great need of further accessions of ready trained workers; but until someone discovers how our children may be born at this stage of development it is absolutely absurd to say that such a country is “calling out for population,” in the sense of needing a higher birth-rate. The fact that Ontario, in Canada, has experienced an increase of its death-rate following on an increase of its birth-rate is a vivid illustration of this absurdity.
It is interesting to note, as a confirmation of this theory, that considerable changes in the rate of emigration appear to have had very little influence upon the death-rate. It may be, however, that emigration increases in times of dearth, and thus tends to prevent increased mortality.
NEO-MALTHUSIANISM AND EUGENICS. C. V. Drysdale, D.Sc.
The last few years has been a period of continual persecution of the Neo-Malthusians whenever they try to instruct the poorer classes, and more stringent laws are being framed against them in many countries.
I am glad to say that a recent attempt on the part of the dominant agrarian party in Hungary in this direction has been foiled by a judgment of the Hungarian Medical Senate, which has strongly reported against any attempt to check the practice of family limitation, in the interests of the quality of the race.