Children of Persia

by Mrs. Napier Malcolm

“No, I am an apprentice-baker,” he said with an evident sense of importance; he felt he was a wage-earner—a halfpenny a day, I think was the amount, but where a labourer often only earns fivepence a day, even a halfpenny a day counts for something in the family.

Seven years old seems to be a very common age for apprenticing boys in Persia. A boy of that age can make himself useful and gradually learn his trade, and if his master and his fellow-apprentices are kind he may be very happy, like my little baker. He probably fetched and carried, brought sticks for heating the oven, laid out the long thin flat loaves in rows as they were handed to him from the oven, and later carried them in a tray on his head, or hanging over his shoulder, to some of the customers.

Probably our Lord Jesus Christ Himself started work in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth as soon as He could be of any use. He would fetch and carry tools, sort out the nails, help to clear away the shavings, and later He would learn to hammer nails, to saw and plane, just as the little Persian apprentices do to-day, and He would thoroughly enjoy helping Joseph in the workshop and Mary in the house.

There was a little “apprentice-carpenter” who looked such a baby he can hardly have been as old as seven. He used to run back to the shop for tools or nails, and hold the hammer, and he even succeeded in pulling some nails out of a packing-case. But his master was not always kind to him, and sometimes beat him, and he did not seem as happy as the baker boy.

Servants will often bring their little boys to the house to help them in their work, and gradually fit themselves for service. When they begin to be really useful the master generally gives them a small wage. A servant who has no boy of his own will often bring a nephew or a cousin.

In every trade you find them, little boys whose business it is to lighten their elders’ work a little in any way they can, for the Persians are not over fond of hard work.

You find them too in the houses of poor people, who cannot afford to keep a regular servant, but pay a few coppers or a meal to a little boy to come in and make himself useful, sweeping the floor and watering it in hot weather, preparing the qaliān, or hookah, running errands, chopping firewood, and a hundred other things. It is a system that works very well when it is worked with kindness and consideration, but it is a terrible system when it is abused.

In the Persian carpet trade we see this. In the villages the whole family works at one carpet, and as the children grow old enough they are taught and made to join in the work. There need be no cruelty in this, and often the little things are only too proud and happy to do as their elders do, and join in the family task. But unhappily even in the family there are many cases of cruel overwork and ill-treatment.

But for the horrors of child labour 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.