The Century of the Child

by Ellen Key

The blows administered by society are inflicted on children whose poverty and neglected education are in most cases responsible for their faults. The victims, often emaciated by hunger, and trembling with shame or terror, can experience no spiritual emotion fit to be the basis of moral shame.

If the statistics of the life-history of those who are so disciplined were revealed, we should find that the majority come from, and return to, a home where the mother, as a result of working out of the home, is hindered from caring for her children. They have suffered from the custom of sleeping together, the result of overcrowded dwellings, with its demoralising influence. It may be the child has commenced to make his living on the street as messenger, cigar picker, or newspaper boy, or has been engaged in such like occupations, and so in his immediate neighbourhood has seen the luxurious living of the upper classes, which he strives to imitate. Hardly a week passes that the street youngster does not read about the embezzlements, fraudulent acts in the capitalistic classes, frequently committed by grey-headed men, whose childish impressions go back to the good old time, on whom the lax education of the present could not have any influence. No day passes in which he does not see how the representatives of the upper classes, old and young alike, satisfy their desires for pleasure. But from the child of the tenement and the street, people expect Spartan virtue or try to thrash it into him. It is hard to say which is greater here, stupidity or savagery.

While the upper classes show that they are crude, immoderate, lazy, devoted to enjoying themselves; while the majority are aiming at getting and spending money; while so many are able to eat without working, and so few can find work who look for it; while careless luxury lives side by side with careless necessity, the upper class has not the shadow of right to expect an improved lower class. The society of the present day creates and maintains a social system whose effects are notorious in the economic crimes of the upper and lower class alike. It is not surprising that great cities are full of tramps and street urchins, like a spoilt cheese full of maggots.

A destroyed home life, an idiotic school system, premature work in the factory, stupefying life in the streets, these are what the great city gives to the children of the under classes. It is more astonishing that the better instincts of human nature generally are victorious in the lower class, than the fact that this result is occasionally reversed.

There is another argument against child labour, to be found in its immediate effect on industry itself.

Working men trained in the schools are everywhere notoriously most efficient; even in Russia, where popular education is still so defective, this experience has been noted. The working man able to read and to write receives without exception on that account a higher pay than the illiterate ones who can be only used for the coarsest kind of work. The present development of German industry, as compared with English, is to be ascribed among other things to the superior educational training of the German people. The intensive and intelligent work of the American working man has apparently the same cause. But when children made sleepy by work in the factory enter evening schools, or when children are taken too early from school, they lose under continuous hard work the desire and possibility of adapting themselves to a higher education; they become organic machines which feed the inorganic ones. This must cause the value of their work to decline. These organic machines are passive, they do not try to improve their condition of life, as do the higher workmen. Besides living machines cannot increase the product of labour. Intelligent working men who watch over their own rights and increase them are also those who learn easiest new methods of work, discover new inventions which are of advantage to their line of work, and so increase the value of their product. It is only by the growth of this class of workmen, that any country to-day can stand the pressure of foreign competition. But the chief condition of this growth is that the bodily and mental powers of the child shall be used for his own development in school games and play; at the same time his capacity for work must be trained by occupation at home and in the technical school, not by work in a factory.

Some years ago, a poem created a furore over the whole civilised world, from Canada to the islands of Polynesia. The author of this poem, Edwin Markham, was inspired by Millet's simple and wonderful picture, The Man with the Hoe. An agricultural labourer with bowed back stands there, one hand folded on the other, supported on the handle of the hoe. Millet in him has eternalised the expression so often observed in old workmen, especially in those who are worn out by day labour. The man's face is empty, says nothing, every human aspect has disappeared; we only see in his face the look of the patient beast of burden. For while moderate work ennobles the animal in man, immoderate work kills humanity in the beast.

Millet's picture was to the poet, who was once himself a slave to bodily labor, a revelation, the eternal artistic type of the generation of man bowed down from childhood under the yoke of labour. In one strophe after another of that finely conceived poem he pictures this being that does not sorrow, and never hopes, his destroyed soul for which Plato and the Pleiades, the sunrise and the rose, all the treasures of mind and nature, are nothing. The poet asks sovereigns, masters, and governors how they will restore to this thing a soul, how they will give it music and dreams. What, he asks, will become of the people who have made this being what it is now; when after a thousand years' silence God's terrible question is answered,—What has become of his soul.

Many such employers of labour go to church, they hear explanations of texts like these, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto ... even the least of these, ... ye did it unto me. All that ye wish others should do to you, that do to them." It does not occur to them to think how Jesus, the most inconsiderate of men, at the right place, would have characterised their demands to have small children employed in glass works at ten years of age. It never occurs to them to ask whether they would like to see their own children in these factories or others like them.

This complete dualism between life and teaching in our present-day society will continue to exist until people realise that the opinions about life which are expressed by the lips, but are denied by deeds, should no longer be proclaimed as an absolute explanation of life and rule of life. The permanent element in Christianity can only be realised through the conviction that mankind is master of Christianity just as it is over all its other creations. The ardent idea of the Galilean carpenter, fraternity among men, will give man no rest until man has wiped out the last trace of injustice in his social relations. But the thought will not be realised by those ideals regarded by Jesus as absolute. This is the point of view which has crippled man's conscience and it applies equally to the realisation of this and all other ideals. An ideal impossible to carry out under the ordinary assumptions of human life, yet to which men have given the authority of a divine revelation, and which they conceive of as absolute, this is the main cause for the demoralisation which has gone on for nineteen hundred years. The history of humanity has really revealed to men how this absolute ideal of theirs has been betrayed. The cause of this demoralisation must cease before existence can be remodelled seriously by those who are convinced that ideals can really be binding.