CHAPTER XV.
THE BOY WORKERS AT THE MINES.
In the coal mines of the United States boys are employed at two kinds of labor: to attend the doors on the traveling roads, and to drive the mules. This is known as inside work. Their outside work consists in picking slate at the breaker, and in driving the mules that draw mine cars on the surface. No one of these different kinds of employment is such as to overtax the physical strength of boys of a proper age, but they are all confining, some are dangerous, and some are laborious. Yet the system of child labor in the coal mines of America has never been comparable to that which was formerly in vogue in Great Britain. The British “Coal Mines Regulation Act” of 1872 remedied the then existing evils to a considerable extent; but the hardships still to be endured by children in the British mines are greater than those which their American brothers must suffer. The act of 1872, just referred to, provides that boys under ten years of age shall not be employed under ground, and that boys between ten and twelve years of age shall be allowed to work only in thin mines. It is the duty of these children to push the cars, or trams as they are called, from the working faces to the main road and back. Boys who are thus employed are called “hurriers” or “putters.” They are often obliged to crawl on their hands and knees, pushing the car ahead of them, because the roof of the excavation is so low. That is why boys who are so young are allowed to work here; because, being small, they can the more readily crawl through the passages cut in these thin seams, which often do not have a vertical measurement of more than from twenty to twenty-eight inches. The act of 1872 forbids the employment of females in the British mines; but formerly not only boys but girls and women also worked underground. There was then no restriction as to age, and girls were sent into the mines to labor at an earlier age than were boys, because they were credited with being smarter and more obedient. It was common to find children of both sexes not more than six years old working underground; and girls of five years were employed at the same tasks as boys of six or eight. They took the coal from the working faces in the thin mines to the foot of the pit. Sometimes they carried it, sometimes they drew it in little carts. The older children and young women had a sort of sledge, called a “corve,” on which they dragged the coal, but sometimes they preferred to carry it in baskets on their backs. They were called “pannier women.” The girls tucked their hair up under their caps, dressed like their brothers, and in the darkness of the mine could scarcely be distinguished from boys. And the girls and boys not only dressed alike, but worked alike, lived alike, and were treated alike at their tasks, and that treatment was rough and harsh at the very best. As the girls grew they were given harder work to do. On one occasion Mr. William Hunter, the mine foreman at Ormiston Colliery said that in the mines women always did the lifting or heavy part of the work, and that neither they nor the children were treated like human beings. “Females,” he said, “submit to work in places in which no man nor lad could be got to labor. They work on bad roads, up to their knees in water, and bent nearly double. The consequence of this is that they are attacked with disease, drag out a miserable existence, or are brought prematurely to the grave.” Says Robert Bold, the eminent miner: “In surveying the workings of an extensive colliery underground a married woman came forward, groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve, and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her. On coming up she said in a plaintive, melancholy voice: ‘Oh, sir! this is sore, sore, sore work. I would to God that the first woman who tried to bear coals had broken her back and none ever tried it again.’”
One cannot read of such things as these, of a slavery that condemned even the babes to a life of wretched toil in the blackness of the mines, and then wonder that the great heart of Mrs. Browning should have been wrenched by the contemplation of such sorrow until she gave voice to her feeling in that most pathetic and wonderful of all her poems, “The Cry of the Children.”
“Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers!
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in their nest,