The virtual breakdown of our school system is one of the gravest problems indicated by the table and enforced by general observation. The children who go to work in factories and mines because they are “tired of school,” or “because they could not learn,” are, it is to be feared, not always but too often, the victims of undernutrition. The school spends all its energies in the vain attempt to educate wasting minds in starving bodies, and then the child, already physically and mentally ruined, goes to the mine or the factory, there to linger on as half-starved plants in arid soil sometimes linger, or to fade away as a summer flower fades in a day. Poverty began the ruin of the child by denying it proper nourishment, and ignorance and greed combine to complete the ruin by sending the child in its weakness forth to labor.
The other reasons for the employment of children shown in the table cannot be discussed separately. The moral contagion of poverty and ignorance, evidenced by the number of those who work, not from necessity, but because their friends work, is not new to those who have studied this and kindred problems. The influence of a single family in lowering the moral and economic standards of a whole street, especially in our smaller towns, is notorious. The pathos of the mothers of families who are worse than widows, with their drunken, dissolute husbands, and the tragedy of little child lives crushed by brutal, selfish, indolent fathers who place the responsibility of maintaining the family upon their young shoulders, are familiar phases of the problem of child labor.
It is a solemn responsibility which the presence of this menacing evil of child labor places upon the nation. It is not only the interests of the children themselves that are menaced; even more important and terrible is the thought that civilization itself is imperilled when children are dwarfed physically, mentally, and morally by hunger, heavy toil, and unwholesome surroundings. If one of the forts along our far-stretching coasts were attacked by an enemy, or if a single square mile of our immense territory were invaded, the nation would rise in patriotic unison, and there would be no lack either of men or money for the defence. Surely, it is not too much to hope that, before long, the nation will realize in the destruction of its future citizens by greed and ignorance a far more serious attack upon the republic than any that could be made by fleets or armed legions. To sap the strength and weaken the moral fibres of the children is to grind the seed corn, to wreck the future for to-day’s fleeting gain.
A great Frenchman once said of the alphabet, “These twenty-six letters contain all the good things that ever were, or ever can be, said,—only they need to be arranged.” To complete the truth of this aphorism, he should have included all the bad things as well. And so it is with the children of a nation. Capable of expressing all the good or evil the world has known or may know, it is essentially a matter of arrangement, opportunity, environment. Whether the children of to-day become physical, mental, and moral cretins, or strong men and women, fathers and mothers of virile sons and daughters, depends upon the decision of the nation. If the responsibility of this is fully recognized, and the employment of children under fifteen years of age is forbidden throughout the length and breadth of this great country; if the nation realizes that the demand for the protection of the children is the highest patriotism, and enfolds every child within its strong, protecting arms, then and not till then will it be possible to look with confidence toward the future, unashamed and unafraid.
[E]. “Messenger boys” includes errand boys in stores.
[F]. No inquiry was made among mine workers because, on account of the large number of boys whose fathers have been killed or permanently disabled, the data would be less representative. (See Roberts’ Anthracite Coal Communities, p. 176.)
[G]. Mostly foreign born or the children of foreign-born parents, Slavs and Italians. The entire absence of reference to school matters is suggestive. Most of them never entered a school.
IV
REMEDIAL MEASURES
“But pity will not right the wrong,