The subject for discussion this afternoon is one which, as you know, has been agitating different sections of the country at different periods. Your Committee has succeeded in securing a representation of the different points of view in the discussion of the afternoon. We are also fortunate in having, as presiding officer of the afternoon, one of the leading manufacturers, and it is safe to say, one of the most public-spirited citizens of Philadelphia. You all know his services to our city, but I am not sure whether many of you know how close and careful a student of industrial conditions in both the North and South he has been. I take pleasure in presenting to you Mr. Frank Leake.
On taking the chair, Mr. Leake said:
Mr. President and Members of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
It was with pleasure that I accepted your President’s invitation to preside here to-day. The particular subject which you are to discuss is one having a very important bearing on the future of this country, because at the bottom of all progress is education, and child labor, if not properly regulated, will certainly prevent proper education.
I am, as your President has said, a practical manufacturer, and yet here in Philadelphia, where my work lies, we have very little of the child labor problem to contend with; it is almost self-regulating. There are very few manufacturers who do not fall in line, not only gracefully but gladly, with the laws of our state which regulate that matter for them. There is very little of child labor in the textile mills of this city, or of this state, so far as I am acquainted.
Whatever is done in the way of regulating child labor should be done in a very conservative and openminded spirit. The one seeking progress should be willing to consider local conditions. The key to the whole situation will be found in local conditions, because child labor at one point in our country does not present anything like the same problem that it does in another portion of the country.
The Pennsylvania laws, for the most part, are wise in their treatment of this question. I know of no organized opposition to the entire and careful enforcement of these laws. I am speaking more particularly in regard to textiles. That is my business and that is the line in which the New South is finding her great industrial development. In the South, textile mills started originally with the idea that proximity to the cotton fields was the great desideratum. It has been found that the question of proximity does not have much to do with their success. Freights on raw materials North are as low, or lower, than freights on the finished product, and in the North and West is where the finished product finds its largest market. Such being the case, the mills in the South have had to study the other problems that have come to be talked about in making their success sure, but in studying these problems they have found instinctively that the same conditions make for their success as made for the success of the mills in the North. Long years ago our New England forefathers found a sterile and rocky soil. They found it very difficult to get a living from the farm, and so turned their attention to manufacturing. In the South along the coasts and in the middle country the soil is very rich and very fertile and the people get their profit from the farm. It has always been an agricultural section, but the mountain farms are the ones where the ground is sterile, where the soil is frequently washed into the streams and where farming is on a very small scale. The Southern mountaineer has his home in a little cabin with a little patch of corn at the rear. Corn and bacon are the staple articles of food. The whites largely predominate in the mountain sections. At the foot of the Allegheny Mountains, the Appalachian Chain, extending through North and South Carolina, Northern Georgia and Northern Alabama, are conditions which should be considered in taking up the problem of child labor. The people live in little mountain huts year in and year out, scarcely seeing ten, twenty, very few of them seeing fifty dollars in cash a year. The cotton mill has come in there, going on the farms, taking the workers from them and bringing whole families into the manufacturing town. The farmer takes the little cottage built for him by the company, with a little patch of ground, given him on the supposition that he will cultivate it. Frequently the ground is not cultivated, and the man finds his employment in carrying the dinner-pail, while the wife, the older daughters and the older boys work in the mill. The younger ones are anxious to follow. These conditions are an advance over what they have had, and they should be advanced slowly and by degrees to anything which would be more theoretically correct. Practically they have the advance. In any question involving child labor, it is well to consider the local situation and the previous condition of those whom you are seeking to benefit.
The first speaker this afternoon is a gentleman who has had every opportunity to study the subject given to him. I am very glad that your President has had the wisdom, instead of picking those who look at these things solely from an academic standpoint, to take those men who have come into actual contact with the subject itself, men who have brought their best thought to the practical solving of this question, who desire in their everyday walk of life to be of benefit to their fellow-men, and while they are solving the hard problems of life, with which they must necessarily deal in their business, are seeking always to help and uplift those around them. Such a man is Mr. Franklin N. Brewer, General Manager of the largest department store in this city, who will address you on the subject of “Child Labor in the Department Store.”
Mr. Brewer then read his paper, which is printed on pages 165–177 of this volume.
In introducing Mr. Henry White, Mr. Leake said: