The burden of the African girl.
“The girl follows her mother to the plantation (distance one-half to one mile from the village), imitating her mother in carrying a basket on her back, its weight supported by a broad strap going around it and over her forehead. Some burden is always put into that basket, often one beyond the child’s strength, as a jug of water. The little one staggers under it, leaning far forward to lessen the direct traction over her forehead. With that daily bending the child would become deformed, were it not counteracted by the carrying at other times of a log of firewood or some lighter burden on her head.”[41]
Children at work in many lands.
The little coolie children of Hong Kong toiling up a steep road under the broiling sun with great loads of bricks slung on either end of a bamboo pole; the thousands of Chinese children gathering and carrying home great loads of fuel and manure; the Japanese girls sitting closely on their heels and painting cheap crockery for $1.00 a week; the little children of a Japanese village helping to support themselves by making match boxes for the sum of eight cents a thousand; the mere babies picking tea leaves under the hot sun in Bengal; the seven year old girls working from five in the morning to six at night in the cotton and silk mills in China;—these and countless others seem to be calling to us in the name of the Child of Bethlehem to lighten in some way their heavy load.
Little Manure Gatherers in a Persian Mountain Village
And, oh, what heroic efforts your missionaries are making to lessen the great evil, but how powerless they seem in lands where no law, no custom, no religion gives the child any rights. Once more we turn to Mrs. Napier Malcolm for a vivid word picture from Persia.[42]
The little carpet weavers of Persia.
But for the horrors of child labor in the carpet trade we must turn to the factories of Kirman.
These factories are filled with children from four years old upward, underfed, overworked, living a loveless, joyless, hopeless life. The factories are built without windows lest the children’s attention should be distracted, and the bad air, want of food, and the constantly keeping in one position produce rickets and deformity in nearly all. Of thirty-eight children examined in one factory, thirty-six were deformed.
One of the Governors of Kirman forbade the employment of children under twelve in the factories, but the order did not last beyond his governorship. The same Governor gave the order still in force, which forbids the employment of children before dawn or after sunset, thus reducing their working hours to an average of twelve hours a day. A recent Governor added to this an order limiting the Friday work to about two and a half hours, “from sunrise to full sunshine,” so now the children share in part the general Friday holiday of Mohammedanism.
One of our medical missionaries was called to attend the wife of the owner of one of these factories, and consented to do so on condition he made windows in his factory to allow the children air and light. He objected at first, saying that it would prevent their working, but finally consented, and admitted afterwards that the children did more work with the windows than they had done without them.
The factory owners are glad to get the children, for they say children work better than grown-up people at carpet-making, and of course they expect less wages. But how can the parents allow their children to live this cruel life? You will find the answer in the Persian saying that “of every three persons in Kirman, four smoke opium.”... Over and over again comes the terrible story, the father and mother smoke opium; the little deformed child toils through the long days to earn the money that buys it.
Is the picture sad enough, are the colors gloomy enough, are the weary cries loud enough to reach and touch every womanly heart in a Christian land,—every mother or sister or teacher who has ever loved or helped or taught a child? Ah, but we must go into darker depths than these if we are to be even ordinarily intelligent concerning child life and its needs. What of the little slave children who are stolen from their homes “in darkest Africa,” who are sold by their parents in China and Assam, who live lives of unspeakable misery in Korea, in Siam, in Turkey, Morocco, and Arabia? Paid child labor is terrible enough, but the countless slave children of the world live under a far more cruel system.