The Burley tobacco is made into plugs for chewing and is used in pipes. It is grown very extensively in central Kentucky. It was on one of these tobacco farms that this conversation took place. The worm that infests the plant looks like a caterpillar with a smooth skin. A small boy described it as a “bald-headed caterpillar.” It has huge eyes and is twice the size of the woolly caterpillar. These creatures crawl all over the plants, and, because of their size and their voracious appetite, unless they are closely looked after, soon destroy all the leaves. The plants cannot be sprayed with poison for obvious reasons. The only prevention is to have the worms picked off by hand. This work falls to the lot of the boys and girls in the district. It is not a very congenial task, and it is hard work for the children stooping and raising the leaves as they toil all day in the burning sun. The little girls wore their sunbonnets tied under their chins but pushed back on their necks. They were barefooted and carried a tin can in one hand to hold the worms. They followed down each row peering under the leaves and picking off the worms. “Wormin’ time” came just at the period when they ought to have been in school, but the tobacco had to be saved.
The Beet-Fields. There is a settlement of Russians near Billings, Montana. The fathers, mothers, and all the children work in the beet-fields. The work commences early in the spring when the beets have to be thinned out. Apparently no child is too young to pull beets. I saw boys in the beet-fields hoeing and the hoe-handle was almost as big as their little bare legs. When the crop is ready to harvest, the dirt is loosened about the beets and then they are pulled out by hand. The dirt is knocked off the roots and they are thrown to one side so that when a row of beets has been pulled they look like hay in a windrow. This work is heavy and hard, for a beet will average from seven to eight pounds, and by the time a person has lifted them all day long from five in the morning to seven at night, he has lifted several tons. After the beets are laid in rows they have to be topped with a strong, broad-bladed knife with a hook at the end. The beet is held against the knee of the worker, and with one stroke of the knife the top is severed from the root. In the beet-fields the beauties of nature are reduced to a dull round of production. According to a report made by the National Labor Committee there are five thousand children working in the beet-fields. “Money and not children is evidently the chief concern of these families” is the testimony given in the report made by Miss Ruth McIntire. She says: “An eleven-year-old girl was found, who with her sister aged seven, was kept out of school to work in the beet-field, although her family boasted that they had made ten thousand dollars last year from their farm. A certain parent declared to a school principal that his boy was worth $1,000 for work during the beet season. If he went to school he was nothing but an expense.”[6]
[6] “Children in Agriculture,” by Ruth McIntire, a pamphlet published by the National Child Labor Committee.
Mills, Factories, and Workshops. With the development of the cotton-mill there was opened up a wide field for the exploitation of childhood. The spools full of thread have to be put on the machine and the empty spools removed. Boys and girls of six and eight years can do this work even better than a grown man or woman. One worker in a mill can take care of several machines, and if there is a child to care for the spools the machines can be run very economically, and the profits will be large. Children are used in works and on the breakers in the coal-mines. In one of the silver-mills in the Cœur d’Alene mining district boys stand on the platform alongside the incline down which the ore rushes in a ceaseless stream going into the breakers. As it passes down their quick eyes detect the rocks, and especially the hard round stones that get mixed up with ore. These they pick out and throw to one side. This is a boy’s job. He can do it better than a man. Thus all modern processes of industry seem to be at work to make easy the utilization of the immature and the unskilled.
Why Child Labor. Because the machine produces so much it is possible to pay the child worker a wage that seems large in comparison to what a man would receive. The father of a boy who worked in one of the cotton-mills said, “I can make a dollar and seventy-five cents a day; but my nine-year-old kid makes anywhere from eighty cents to one dollar a day.” The quick returns from child labor appeal to the selfishness of the manufacturer as well as to the greed of the father and mother. It is not good business to have a man do anything that a machine can do; nor is it good business to put a man to work on a job that a boy can do just as well as a man. This is the dictate of business. Children are an expense, and with the increased cost of living there is always a temptation to utilize the children in the family as economic assets. “I have three children,” said a father in an Indiana town, “and all of them are working. We are about as happy a family as you want to find anywhere. Every month we are able to put a tidy sum in the savings-bank. Every member of the family is doing his or her full share. But now on the other hand, my brother has four children and not one of them is earning a cent. The oldest girl had to have a college education and that is just a drain on the family. Poor George has never known a moment’s ease or peace all of his life, what with an extravagant wife and four children eating their heads off!”
“Children are a blessing from the Lord,” says an old writer. But the modern interpretation is that they are industrial units that can be utilized to advantage. Another reason for child labor, however, is found in the stress of poverty. Here is the story told by another father: “I love my children just as much as anybody in the city and I would like to see them have a good time. Joe is selling papers on the street, May working as cash-girl in a dry-goods store, Frankie clerking in a five-and-ten-cent store, and William working in a pencil factory—but not just because I do not care to provide for them. You see it is this way. My folks were poor and there were nine of us children. When I was eight years old I had to go to work. To begin with I got good wages for a boy, and until I was eighteen or nineteen years old I got along all right. Just about that time other fellows came in that had more than twelve dollars a week. I began at six dollars. Now I am nearly fifty, and am already considered an old man, and I am getting forty dollars a month. How can I support my children and give them an education such as they ought to have?” This indicates the vicious circle that is formed between poverty and childhood. Poverty forces children into industry. They help out for the time being but it is not very long before they have used up all their initiative, and have gone just as far as they can go; and as they grow older their wages are reduced, and in turn their children have to go into the mills to help them out.
Poverty and the Cost of Living. Poverty is the chief enemy of humanity. It is the parent of nearly all of our ills. This is the demon that drives bad bargains. For the present the high wages that are being paid for labor everywhere has done away with a great deal of poverty; but even yet wages have not been advanced in proportion to the increased cost of living. Last fall in Scranton a gentleman whom I met was bitterly complaining of the high price of coal. “If it is so high now what in the world will the poor people of the city do when the cold weather really comes?” Scranton is built on the largest anthracite coal deposit in the world. It is said that in some places the vein is seventy-five feet thick. It is estimated that at the present rate of production the supply will last for one hundred years. If, therefore, the poor people of Scranton suffer for lack of coal what about the people in other places? We learned last winter how essential coal is to the life of the people. Combinations all tend to keep the prices high; our foodstuffs, our fuel, our clothes are high, not because of the law of supply and demand, for we have learned how to circumvent that law, but we are all “jobbed by the jobbers.”
Cold storage enables vast quantities of goods to be brought together and kept for a rise in the market. James E. Wetz, the so-called egg-king of Chicago, boasted early last winter that he had six million dozen eggs in storage, and in defiance of the Federal Prosecutor said, “All the investigation, legislative or otherwise, will not bring the price of eggs down this year. This is a broker’s year and as for me I am going to sit tight, watch the prices climb up, and the public can pay. Nobody can do anything to me.” In the French Revolution the queen appealed to one of the superintendents of finance and urged him to bring about a change, for the people were starving. He was obdurate, however, and in despair she said to him, “What will the people eat?” The contemptuous statement of the French official was, “Let the people eat grass.” With the increased cost of living, and the manipulation of the market so as to keep prices always above a certain level, the present rise in wages is not as great as under ordinary circumstances. As long as there is poverty there will always be a strong incentive for the piratical industrial agent and the greedy conscienceless father to join hands in exploiting childhood.
Effect of Child Labor. The children of the nations at war have been called the second line of national defense. The men in the front line are the soldiers and the children growing up will take their places. If the childhood of the nations at war is destroyed, there is no chance for men to take the places of the ones who fall at the front. It is perfectly clear then that in times of war the nations are dependent upon the growing boys. If, however, the children in times of war form the second line of defense, in times of peace they form the first line of defense. The future of a nation is in the hands of the boys and girls of the present generation. They are the men and women that will take the places of the business men, the workers in the factories and workshops, and the tillers of the soil. They must become the future people who will be responsible for transportation, producers of the raw materials of civilization, and those who with cunning hands and ingenious brains work these raw materials into finished fabrics that go to make up the wonders of civilization and of the age. We are robbing the nation when we set children to work and make producers out of them.
Physical Evils. The effects of child labor are so bad and so well known that there is no need of entering into a formal discussion of the question. I taught a class of boys in a settlement in Chicago some years ago. One of the little fellows had hands that were as black as a Negro’s, and he always held his hand in a certain position. One night after class I asked him to wait for a few minutes. I said, “Just a minute, Fred. I notice that you always hold your hand in a peculiar way.” “Gee, it is the only way I can hold it,” he replied. Then he showed me that his fingers were all pressed out of shape and that the black stain was ink that had been ground into his hand and into his very flesh. This boy looked to be about twelve years old but he was nearly nineteen. For almost nine years he had been working in a box factory. His job was to stencil the ends of boxes. He would lay the stencil on the wooden end of the boxes, then hold a brush resembling a shaving brush in his hand and this he would dip into the pot of black and rub it across the stencil. This constant work for ten hours a day for nine years had blackened his hands so that they would never be white again; and the constant pressure from the brush had deformed his right hand so that it was good for nothing else than to hold a stencil brush.