The Spirit of America

by Henry Van Dyke

For our present purpose, however, it will be better to take an example which is less complicated, and in which the coöperation of the State and the good-will of the private citizen can be more closely and simply traced. I mean the restriction and the regulation of child labour.

Every intelligent nation sees in its children its most valuable asset. That their physical and moral development should be dwarfed or paralyzed by bondage to exhausting and unwholesome labour, or by a premature absorption in toil of any kind, would be at once a national disgrace and a national calamity.

Three kinds of societies have been and still are at work in America to prevent this shame and disaster. First, there are the societies which are devoted to the general protection of all the interests of the young, like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Then there are the societies which make their appeal to the moral sense of the community to condemn and suppress all kinds of inhumanity in the conduct of industry and trade. Of these the Consumers’ League is an example. Founded in New York in 1890, by a few ladies of public spirit, it has spread to twenty other States, with sixty-four distinct societies and a national organization for the whole country. Its central idea is to persuade people, rich and poor, to buy only those things which are made and sold under fair and humane conditions. The responsibility of men and women for the way in which they spend their money is recognized. They are asked to remember that the cheapness of a bargain is not the only thing for them to consider. They ought to think whether it has been made cheap at the cost of human sorrow and degradation, whether the distress and pain and exhaustion of overtasked childhood and ill-treated womanhood have made their cheap bargain a shameful and poisonous thing. The first work of the leagues was to investigate the actual condition of labour in the great stores. The law forbade them to publish a black list of the establishments where the employees were badly treated. That would have been in the nature of a boycott. But they ingeniously evaded this obstacle by publishing a white list of those which treated their people decently and kindly. Thus the standard of a “Fair House” where a living wage was paid, where children of tender years were not employed, where the hours of work were not excessive, and where the sanitary conditions were good, was established, and that standard has steadily been raised.

Then the leagues went on to investigate the conditions of production of the goods sold in the shops. The National League issues a white label which guarantees that every article upon which it is found has been manufactured in a place where, (1) the State factory law is obeyed, (2) no children under sixteen years of age are employed, (3) no night work is required and the working-day does not exceed ten hours, (4) no goods are given out to be made away from the factory. At the same time the Consumers’ League has been steadily pressing the legislatures and governors of the different States for stricter and better laws in regard to the employment of women and children.

The third class of societies which are at work in this field are those which deal directly with the question of child labour. It must be remembered that under the American system this is a matter which is left to the control of the separate States. Naturally there has been the greatest imaginable diversity among them. For a long time there were many that had practically no laws upon the subject, or laws so defective that they were useless. Even now the States are far from anything like harmony or equality in their child-labour laws. Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin are probably in the lead in good legislation. If we may judge by the statistics of children between ten and fourteen years who are unable to read or write, Tennessee, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama are in the rear.

It must be remembered, also, that the number of children between ten and fifteen years employed in manufacturing pursuits in the United States increased from 1890 to 1900 more than twice as fast as the population of the country, and that the Census of 1900 gives the total of bread-winners under fifteen years of age as 1,750,000. A graphic picture of the actual condition of child labour in the United States may be found in The Cry of the Children, by Mrs. John Van Vorst (New York, 1908).

Here is a little army—no, a vast army—of little soldiers, whose sad and silent files are full of menace for the republic.

The principal forces arrayed against this perilous condition of things have been the special committees of the Women’s Clubs everywhere, the Child-Labour Committees in different States, and finally the National Child-Labour Committee organized in 1904. Through their efforts there has been a great advance in legislation on the subject. In 1905, twenty-two States enacted laws regulating the employment of children. In 1906 there were six States which legislated, including Georgia and Iowa, which for the first time put a law against child labour on their statute-books. In 1907 eight States amended their laws. In the same year a national investigation of the subject was ordered by Congress under direction of the Federal Commissioner of Labour.

A bill was prepared which attempted to deal with the subject indirectly through that provision of the Constitution which gives Congress the power to “regulate commerce.” This bill proposed to make it unlawful to transport from one State to another the product of any factory or mine in which children under fourteen years of age were employed. It was a humane and ingenious device. But it is doubtful whether it can ever be made an effective law. The best judges think that it stretches the idea of the regulation of interstate commerce beyond reasonable limits, and that the national government has no power to control industrial production in the separate States without an amendment to the Constitution. If this be true (and I am inclined to believe it is), then the best safeguard of America against the evils of child labour must be persistent action of these private associations in each community, investigating and reporting the actual conditions, awakening and stimulating the local conscience, pushing steadily for better State laws, and, when they are enacted, still working to create a public sentiment which will enforce them.