What Kind of Americans?
"They are to become Americans, and through them, more than through any other agency, their own parents are being led into a knowledge of American ways and customs. All the statistics available prove that vice and crime are far more common among the children of immigrants than among the children of native parentage, and this is due no less to the yardless tenement and street playground than to widespread poverty. In a mass of cases the father and mother both work in that feverish, restless way of the new arrival, ambitious to get ahead. To overcome poverty they must neglect their children. Turned out of the small tenement into the street, the child learns the street. Nothing escapes his sharp eyes, and almost in the briefest conceivable time, he is an American ready to make his way by every known means, good and bad. To the child everything American is good and right. There comes a time when the parents cannot guide him or instruct him; he knows more than they; he looks upon their advice as of no value. If ever there was a self-made man, that man is the son of the immigrant. But the street and the street gang have a great responsibility; they are making the children of a hundred various languages from every part of the world into American citizens."
A Plain Duty
How long will American Christianity allow this process of degeneracy to go on, before realizing the peril of it, and providing the counteracting agencies of good? That is the question the young people ought to consider and help answer.
Child Labor
But far worse than all else, "the nation is engaged in a traffic for the labor of children." In this country over 1,700,000 children under fifteen are compelled to work in the factories, mines, workshops, and fields. These figures may mean little, for as Margaret McMillan has said, "You cannot put tired eyes, pallid cheeks, and languid little limbs into statistics." But we believe that if our Christian people could be brought for one moment to realize what the inhumanity of this child labor is, there would be such an avalanche of public opinion as would put a stop to it. This evil is a new one in America, begotten of greed for money. This greed is shared jointly by the capitalist employer and the parents, but the greater responsibility rests upon the former, who creates the possibility and fosters the evil.
Alien Victims
The immigrants furnish the parents willing to sell their children into child slavery in the factory, or the worse mill or mine—prisons all, and for the innocent. Into these prisons gather "tens of thousands of children, strong and happy, or weak, underfed, and miserable. Stop their play once for all, and put them out to labor for so many cents a day or night, and pace them with a tireless, lifeless piece of mechanism, for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, and you will have a present-day picture of child labor." But there is yet one thing which must be added to the picture. Give the child-slave worker a tenement for a home in the filthy streets of an ordinary factory city, with open spaces covered with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters running sewers, and the air foul with odors and black with factory smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe "back of the yards" in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the picture would be even darker than the one given.
The Shame of the Century
Think of it, young people of Christian America! In the twentieth century, in the country we like to think the most enlightened in the world, after all our boasted advancements in civilization, child slavery—more pitiful in some respects than African slavery ever was—has its grip on the nation's childhood.