Newer ideals of peace

by Jane Addams

Adolescence is filled with strange pauses of listlessness and dreaminess. At that period the human will is perhaps further away from the desire of definite achievement than it ever is again. To work ten hours a day for six days in a week in order to buy himself a pair of stout boots, that he may be properly shod to go to work some more, is the very last thing which really appeals to a boy of thirteen or fourteen. If he is forced to such a course too often, his cheated nature later re-asserts itself in all sorts of decadent and abnormal ways.

An enlightened state would also concern itself with the effect of child labor upon the parents. We have in Chicago a great many European immigrants, people who have come from country life in Bohemia or the south of Italy, hoping that their children will have a better chance here than at home. In the old country these immigrants worked on farms which provided a very normal activity for a young boy or girl. When they come to Chicago, they see no reason why their children should not go to work, because they see no difference between the normal activity of their own youth and the grinding life, to which they subject their children. It is difficult for a man who has grown up in outdoor life to adapt himself to the factory. The same experience is found in the South with the men who come to the textile towns from the little farms. They resent monotonous petty work, and get away from it; they will in preference take more poorly paid work, care of horses or janitor service—work which has some similarity to that to which they have been accustomed. So the parents drop out, and the children, making the adaptation, remain, and the curious result ensues of the head of the household becoming dependent upon the earnings of the child. You will hear a child say, “My mother can’t say nothing to me. I pay the rent;” or, “I can do what I please, because I bring home the biggest wages.” All this tends to break down the normal relation between parents and children. The Italian men who work on the railroads in the summer find it a great temptation to settle down in the winter upon the wages of their children. A young man from the south of Italy was mourning the death of his little girl of twelve; in his grief he said, quite simply, “She was my oldest kid. In two years she could have supported me, and now I shall have to work five or six years longer until the next one can do it.” He expected to retire permanently at thirty-four. That breaking down of the normal relation of parent and child, and the tendency to demoralize the parent, is something we have no right to subject him to. We ought to hold the parent up to the obligation which he would have fulfilled had he remained in his early environment.

A modern state might rightly concern itself with the effect of child labor upon industry itself. There has been for many years an increasing criticism of the modern factory system, not only from the point of view of the worker, but from the point of view of the product itself. It has been said many times that we can not secure good workmanship nor turn out a satisfactory product unless men and women have some sort of interest in their work, and some way of expressing that interest in relation to it. The system which makes no demand upon originality, upon invention, upon self-direction, works automatically, as it were, towards an unintelligent producer and towards an uninteresting product. This was said at first only by such artists and social reformers as Morris and Ruskin; but it is being gradually admitted by men of affairs and may at last incorporate itself into actual factory management, in which case the factory itself will favor child labor legislation or any other measure which increases the free and full development of the individual, because he thereby becomes a more valuable producer. We may gradually discover that in the interests of this industrial society of ours it becomes a distinct loss to put large numbers of producers prematurely at work, not only because the community inevitably loses their mature working power, but also because their “free labor quality,” which is so valuable, is permanently destroyed.

Exercise of the instinct of workmanship not only affords great satisfaction to the producer, but also to the consumer, if he be possessed of any critical faculty, or have developed genuine powers of appreciation. Added to the conscience which protests against the social waste of child labor, we have the taste that revolts against a product totally without the charm which pleasure in work creates. We may at last discover that we are imperiling our civilization at the moment of its marked materialism, by wantonly sacrificing to that materialism the eternal spirit of youth, the power of variation, which alone is able to prevent it from degenerating into a mere mechanism.

It would be easy to produce many illustrations to demonstrate that in the leading industrial countries a belief is slowly developing that the workman himself is the chief asset, and that the intelligent interest of skilled men, the power of self-direction and co-operation which is only possible among the free-born and educated, is exactly the only thing which will hold out in the markets of the world. As the foremen of factories testify again and again, factory discipline is valuable only up to a certain point, after which something else must be depended on if the best results are to be achieved.

Monopoly of both the raw material and the newly-opened markets is certainly a valuable factor in a nation’s industrial prosperity; but while we spend blood and treasure to protect one and secure the other, we wantonly destroy the most valuable factor of all, intelligent labor. Nothing can help us here save the rising tide of humanitarianism, which is not only emotional enough to regret the pitiless and stupid waste of this power but also intelligent enough to perceive what might be accomplished by its utilization.

We are told that the German products hold a foremost place in the markets of the world because of Germany’s fine educational system, which includes training in trade-schools for so many young men. We know, too, that there is at the present moment a strong party in Germany opposing militarism, not from the “peace society” point of view, but because it withdraws all the young men from the industrial life for the best part of three years during which their activity is merely disciplinary, with no relation to the industrial life of the nation. This anti-military party insists that the loss of the three years is a serious matter, and that one nation cannot successfully hold its advance position if it must compete with other nations which are also establishing trade-schools but which do not thus withdraw their youth from continuous training at the period of their greatest docility and aptitude.

England is discovering that the cheap markets afforded by semi-savage peoples, which she has thrown open to her manufacturers, are now reacting in the debasement of her products and her factory workers. The manufacturer produces the cheap and inferior articles which he imagines the new commerce will demand. The result upon the workers in the factories producing these unworthy goods, is that they are robbed of the skill which would be demanded if they were ministering to an increasing demand of taste and if they were supplying the market of a civilized people. It would be a curious result of misapplied energy if those very markets which the Briton has so eagerly sought, would finally so debase the English producers that all the increased wealth the markets have brought to the nation would be consumed in efforts to redeem the debased working population.

We have made public education our great concern in America, and perhaps the public-school system is our most distinctive achievement; but there is a certain lack of consistency in the relation of the State to the child after he leaves the public school. At great expense the State has provided school buildings and equipment, and other buildings in which to prepare professional teachers. It has spared no pains to make the system complete, and yet as rapidly as the children leave the schoolroom, the State seems to lose all interest and responsibility in their welfare and has, until quite recently, turned them over to the employer with no restrictions.

At no point does the community say to the employer, We are allowing you to profit by the labor of these children whom we have educated at great cost, and we demand that they do not work so many hours that they shall be exhausted. Nor shall they be allowed to undertake the sort of labor which is beyond their strength, nor shall they spend their time at work that is absolutely devoid of educational value. The preliminary education which they have received in school is but one step in the process of making them valuable and normal citizens, and we cannot afford to have that intention thwarted, even though the community as well as yourself may profit by the business activity which your factory affords.