The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

Leaving out of discussion the notion that by God's help the battlefields are covered with torn, maimed beings, with whose destroyed brains innumerable thoughts and feelings are extinguished which could have enriched humanity, I know no more abnormal idea than the custom of people speaking of a guardian angel when a chance has kept two children from an accident. Where is this guardian angel in the innumerable other cases of misfortune: when children remain alone because their mother must go to work and they fall out of the window or into the fire? When they lose their eyesight in dark cellars? When they are pressed to death because in miserable lodgings they have to share a bed with their parents? When the parents are drunk and the children lose their lives? Where is this guardian angel when parents murder their children, from religious fanaticism or disgust of life: when the children themselves, tired of life or through fear of parental cruelty, take their own lives? Where are these protective angels on the occasions when they are most wanted?—in the narrow streets of great cities, in the great industrial centres where lack of sunlight, of pure air, and of all the other primary conditions for the development of soul and body, undermines the bodily strength and efficiency of children before their birth?

To see the hand of Providence in an accidental case of preservation, while the same Providence is released from all share in natural occurrences, from all part in the terrible phenomena of society, that fill every second of the earth's existence with terror, is a relic of superstition to be overcome if man is to be filled with a sense of obligation to conditions he must master and mould. Modern man is ever becoming more and more his own Providence; he has already protected himself against fire by fire engines and fire insurance; against the sea by life-saving stations; against smallpox and cholera, diphtheria and tuberculosis, he has found other means of defence. The blind belief that death is dependent on God's will man is losing by the witness of statistics which declare that duration of life increases with improved sanitary condition; which show that when disease or summer heat mows down the children of the poor in dark tenements the rich man can preserve his own children in his healthy, light dwelling.

Every man who has his heart in the right spot does not wait for an angel, but rushes to save a child from danger. But the superstitious belief of the majority of people in God's Providence perhaps will cause the same man to regard with complete apathy conditions by which millions and millions of children are yearly sacrificed. Doctors know that the destruction caused by bacteria is insignificant, as compared with pauperism as a cause of disease. Mothers who have over-exerted themselves, drunken fathers, bad dwellings, like those where the poor dry out newly built houses for the rich, induced by the low rate of rents, insufficient nourishment, inherited diseases, especially syphilis, too early work,—all this shows its result in the emaciated, shrivelled, ulcerated bodies of children who occasionally are cured of their momentary disease in hospitals, but cannot be freed from the results of the conditions of life under which they were born and brought up. The efforts of doctors will be in vain while they, like the other factors in society, do not devote their whole energy to avoiding diseases, instead of healing them. What they can now do in the way of prevention is but a palliative in comparison with the incurable evil which flourishes in abundance. The situation will remain as it is so long as hygiene does not receive the same attention in society as the soul. This solicitude may take the form of religious edification, or intellectual enlightenment, but it remains nothing but a cut flower, stuck in a dust heap.

It is possible, with sufficient certainty, to show from criminal statistics that degenerate children are the creation of society itself. By allowing them to be forced into "the path of virtue," by punishment, society behaves like a tyrant, who has put out a man's eyes and then beats him because he cannot by himself find his road.

The categorical imperative for the social consciousness at the present moment, is an effective legislation for the protection of children and women.

Wherever industry is developed, the woman is taken away from the home, the child from play and school. In the period of guilds, women and children worked in the house, and in the workshop of the husband. But since the factory system has constantly restricted the household work of woman, industrial occupations on the scale of modern capitalism can satisfy its needs for cheaper work by woman's work. This like children's work has forced down in many places the pay of adult workmen. The pay with which a married man can care for his family by his work is now divided among several members of the family. As long as special work required great personal bodily strength or developed manual dexterity, it fell as a rule to the men, not to women or children. But the natural protection of women and children disappeared with the introduction of machinery. In many cases working a machine required neither strength nor dexterity. In other cases, like cotton spinning or mining, delicate fingers were more valued because they were more adaptable, tender bodies more desirable because they were smaller.

In England the work of women and children first reached its highest point. The poorhouses sent crowds of children to the wool weaving industry in Lancashire, children who worked in shifts at the same machine and slept in the same dirty beds. The population in the industrial districts pined away, as the result; diseases unknown before came into existence; ignorance and roughness increased. Women and children from four to five years old worked fourteen to eighteen hours. The report of the investigations made on this subject caused Elizabeth Barrett to write her poem, "The Cry of the Children" that made the employers of children so indignant, but which helped to produce the Ten Hour bill. This bill laid down that women, children, and young persons should not work more than ten hours a day in textile factories. This law was succeeded by others of the same type. Similar conditions in other lands have produced similar legislation. In Saxony, Belgium, Alsace, and the Rhine Provinces the results of the system seemed to be just as frightful as in England. On the Rhine, as early as the year 1838, a Prussian army officer noticed that the number of those able to bear arms had diminished as a result of the degenerating influence of woman and child labour. But notwithstanding the introduction of this legislation generally, the labour of women and children continues. It takes the most destructive forms in those occupations which lie outside of the sphere of legislation. There are places in which child labour is as shocking as it was in England in 1848. In Russia, in the Bastmat weaving industry, children of three or four years have been found at work; and masses of children under ten working as much as eighteen hours a day. In Germany the toy industry can show as cruel figures in connection with children's work, all the more cruel because in order to provide enjoyment for happy children the living energy of others is forced out of existence. Industrial work at home is done by children four to five years old, while the age limit for child labour in factories, both in Germany and in Switzerland, is fourteen years. The government of Denmark has proposed the same limit of age. In Italy most of the crippled young children were brought up in the sulphur districts of Sicily, crowded together in low galleries, burdened with heavy sacks at an age at which their tender limbs under such conditions must inevitably and incurably be contorted. As early as twelve and thirteen years old many of them are incapable of work. In the magnesium mines of Spain, quantities of children six to eight years old are kept at work; through the poisonous odours they fall victims to severe diseases. Other children carrying heavy pitchers on their head are employed to water dry places. The child is a cheaper means of transportation than the ass.

Despite protective legislation the average of height and weight in the Lancashire children is and continues to be lower than anywhere else. Of the two thousand children investigated in this district only one hundred and fifty-one were really sound and strong; one hundred and ninety-eight were seriously crippled; the rest more or less under the standard of good health. All work in the cotton industry done from six o'clock in the morning till five in the evening changes, so this doctor says, the hopeful ten-year-old child into the thin pallid thirteen-year-old boy. This degeneration of the population in industrial districts is becoming a serious danger for England's future.

After people are convinced that all civilised nations are exposed to this same danger, industrial and street work of children will be everywhere forbidden. This will be a victory for the principle of child protection, which, in this as in other like spheres, was opposed at first on both economic and industrial grounds. Among these was the uncontested right of fathers to decide on the work of their children.

It is not alone the question of child labour that reveals the low standpoint taken by the civil authorities of Europe, but it is proved also by the introduction of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one, when the blow is delivered in cold blood long after the act occasioning it has been done. Most of the victims are so accustomed to blows already that the physical effect is little or nothing, but they awaken feelings of detestation against a society which so avenges its own faults. If the soul of the child is sensitive, corporal punishment can produce deep spiritual torment, as was the case with Lars Kruse, the hero of Skagen, who some years ago met his death by drowning. Everybody knows his story from the fine account of him by the Danish poet, Drachmann. Lars, in his childhood, had taken a plank, a piece of driftwood, and sold it. For this he was condemned to be punished. Till late in life, what he had suffered was ever present with him. He was not ashamed of his action but of his punishment—a punishment which embittered the whole life of a really great character.