There are more than 80,000 children employed in the textile industries of the United States, according to the very incomplete census returns, most of them being little girls. In these industries conditions are undoubtedly worse in the Southern states than elsewhere, though I have witnessed many pitiable cases of child slavery in Northern mills which equalled almost anything I have ever seen in the South. During the Philadelphia textile workers’ strike in 1903, I saw at least a score of children ranging from eight to ten years of age who had been working in the mills prior to the strike. One little girl of nine I saw in the Kensington Labor Lyceum. She had been working for almost a year before the strike began, she said, and careful inquiry proved her story to be true. When “Mother” Mary Jones started with her little “army” of child toilers to march to Oyster Bay, in order that the President of the United States might see for himself some of the little ones who had actually been employed in the mills of Philadelphia, I happened to be engaged in assisting the strikers. For two days I accompanied the little “army” on its march, and thus had an excellent opportunity of studying the children. Amongst them were several from eight to eleven years of age, and I remember one little girl who was not quite eleven telling me with pride that she had “worked two years and never missed a day.”

One evening, not long ago, I stood outside of a large flax mill in Paterson, N.J., while it disgorged its crowd of men, women, and children employees. All the afternoon, as I lingered in the tenement district near the mills, the comparative silence of the streets oppressed me. There were many babies and very small children, but the older children, whose boisterous play one expects in such streets, were wanting. “If thow’lt bide till th’ mills shut for th’ day, thow’lt see plenty on ’em—big kids as plenty as small taties,” said one old woman to whom I spoke about it. She was right. At six o’clock the whistles shrieked, and the streets were suddenly filled with people, many of them mere children. Of all the crowd of tired, pallid, and languid-looking children I could only get speech with one, a little girl who claimed thirteen years, though she was smaller than many a child of ten. Indeed, as I think of her now, I doubt whether she would have come up to the standard of normal physical development either in weight or stature for a child of ten. One learns, however, not to judge the ages of working children by their physical appearance, for they are usually behind other children in height, weight, and girth of chest,—often as much as two or three years. If my little Paterson friend was thirteen, perhaps the nature of her employment will explain her puny, stunted body. She works in the “steaming room” of the flax mill. All day long, in a room filled with clouds of steam, she has to stand barefooted in pools of water twisting coils of wet hemp. When I saw her she was dripping wet, though she said that she had worn a rubber apron all day. In the coldest evenings of winter little Marie, and hundreds of other little girls, must go out from the super-heated steaming rooms into the bitter cold in just that condition. No wonder that such children are stunted and underdeveloped!

In textile mill towns like Biddeford, Me., Manchester, N.H., Fall River and Lawrence, Mass., I have seen many such children, who, if they were twelve or fourteen according to their certificates and the companies’ registers, were not more than ten or twelve in reality. I have watched them hurrying into and away from the mills, “those receptacles, in too many instances, for living human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect,” as Robert Owen’s burning phrase describes them.[[115]] I do not doubt that, upon the whole, conditions in the textile industries are better in the North than in the South, but they are nevertheless too bad to permit of self-righteous boasting and complacency. And in several other departments of industry conditions are no whit better in the North than in the South. The child-labor problem is not sectional, but national.

V

Of the fifteen divisions of the manufacturing industries, the glass factories rank next to the textile factories in the number of children they employ. In the year 1900, according to the census returns, the average number of workers employed in glass manufacture was 52,818, of which number 3529, or 6.88 per cent, were women, and 7116, or 13.45 per cent, were children under sixteen years of age. It will be noticed that the percentage of children employed is about the same as in the textile trades. There are glass factories in many states, but the bulk of the industry is centred in Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Jersey, and Ohio. The total value of the products of the glass industry in the United States in 1900 was $56,539,712, of which amount the four states named contributed $46,209,918, or 82.91 per cent of the entire value.[[116]] After careful investigation in a majority of the places where glass is manufactured in these four states, I am confident that the number of children employed is much larger than the census figures indicate.

Perhaps in none of the great industries is the failure to enforce the child-labor laws more general or complete than in the glass trade. There are several reasons for this, the most important, perhaps, being the distribution of the factories in small towns and rural districts, and the shifting nature of the industry itself. Fuel is the most important item in the cost of materials in the manufacture of glass, and the aim of the manufacturers is always to locate in districts where fuel is cheap and abundant. For this reason Pennsylvania has always ranked first in the list of glass-manufacturing states. Owing, mainly, to the discoveries of new supplies of natural gas in Indiana, the glass products of that state increased fourfold in value from 1890 to 1900.[[117]] When the supply of gas in a certain locality becomes exhausted, it is customary to remove the factories to more favorable places. A few rough wooden sheds are hastily built in the neighborhood of some good gas supplies, only to be torn down again as soon as these fail. Hence it happens that glass factories bring new industrial life into small towns and villages, which soon become to a very large extent dependent upon them. Almost unconsciously a feeling is developed that, “for the good of the town,” it will scarcely do to antagonize the glass manufacturers. I have heard this sentiment voiced by business men and others in several places. On the other hand, the manufacturers feel the strength of their position and constantly threaten to remove their plants if they are interfered with and prevented from getting boys.

I shall never forget my first visit to a glass factory at night. It was a big wooden structure, so loosely built that it afforded little protection from draughts, surrounded by a high fence with several rows of barbed wire stretched across the top. I went with the foreman of the factory and he explained to me the reason for the stockade-like fence. “It keeps the young imps inside once we’ve got ’em for the night shift,” he said. The “young imps” were, of course, the boys employed, about forty in number, at least ten of whom were less than twelve years of age. It was a cheap bottle factory, and the proportion of boys to men was larger than is usual in the higher grades of manufacture. Cheapness and child labor go together,—the cheaper the grade of manufacture, as a rule, the cheaper the labor employed. The hours of labor for the “night shift” were from 5.30 P.M. to 3.30 A.M. I stayed and watched the boys at their work for several hours, and when their tasks were done saw them disappear into the darkness and storm of the night. That night, for the first time, I realized the tragic significance of cheap bottles. One might well paraphrase Hood’s lines and say:—

“They are not bottles you idly break,

But human creatures’ lives!”

In the middle of the room was a large round furnace with a number of small doors, three or four feet from the ground, forming a sort of belt around the furnace. In front of these doors the glass-blowers were working. With long wrought-iron blowpipes the blowers deftly took from the furnace little wads of waxlike molten “metal” which they blew into balls and then rolled on their rolling boards. These elongated rolls they dropped into moulds and then blew again, harder than before, to force the half-shaped mass into its proper form. With a sharp, clicking sound they broke their pipes away and repeated the whole process. There was not, of course, the fascination about their work that the more artistic forms of glass-blowing possess. There was none of that twirling of the blowpipes till they looked like so many magic wands which for centuries has made the glass-blower’s art a delightful, half-mysterious thing to watch. But it was still wonderful to see the exactness of each man’s “dip,” and the deftness with which they manipulated the balls before casting them into the moulds.