Out of this dismal and precocious experience sprang two results,—a passionate resolve not to be what circumstances were conspiring to make him, and an insight into the uncalculating habits which deepen and soften poverty. Dickens—once free of institutions—wrote of the poor, even of the London poor, with amazing geniality; but it cannot be denied that his infallible recipe for brightening up the scene is the timely introduction of a pot of porter, or a pitcher of steaming flip. If we try to think of him writing in a prohibition state, we shall realize that he owed as much to beer and punch as ever Horace did to wine. Imagination fails to grasp either of them in the rôle of a water-drinker. The poor of Dickens are a sturdy lot, but they are jovial only in their cups. His wholesome hatred of institutions would have been intensified could he have lived to hear the Camberwell Board of Guardians decide—at the instigation, alas! of a woman member—that the single mug of beer which for years had solaced the inmates of Camberwell Workhouse on Christmas Day, should hereafter be abolished as an immoral indulgence. The generous ghost of Dickens must have groaned in Heaven over that melancholy and mean reform.
II
'To achieve what man may, to bear what man must,'—since the struggle for life began, this has been the purpose and the pride of humanity. We Americans were trained from childhood to believe that while, in the final issue, each of us must answer for himself, the country—our country—gave to all scope for effort, and chance of victory.
This was not mere Fourth of July oratory, nor the fervent utterances of presidential campaigns. It was a serious and a sober faith, based upon some knowledge of the Constitution, some inheritance of experience, some element of democracy which flavored our early lives. The mere sense of space carried with it a profound and eager hopefulness. Those of us whose fathers or whose grandfathers had crossed the sea to escape from more cramping conditions, felt this atmosphere of independence keenly and consciously. Those of us whose fathers or whose grandfathers brought up their families in an alien land with decent industry and thrift, were aware, even in childhood, that the Republic had fostered our growth. Therefore am I pardonably bewildered when I hear American workmen called 'slaves' and 'prisoners of starvation,' and American employers called 'base oppressors,' and 'despots on their thrones.' This fantastic nomenclature seems immeasurably removed from the temperate language in which were formulated the temperate convictions of my youth.
The assumption that the American laborer to-day stands where the French laborer stood before the Revolution, where the English laborer stood before the passing of the first Reform Bill and the repeal of the Corn Laws, shows a lack of historical perspective. The assumption that all strikes represent an agonized protest against tyranny, an agonized appeal from injustice, is a perversion of truth. The assumption that child-labor in the United States is the blot upon civilization that it was in England seventy years ago, denies the duty of comparison. If the people who write verses about 'Labor Crucified' would make a table of the wages paid to skilled and unskilled workmen, from the Chicago carpenter to the Philadelphia street-cleaner, they might sing in a more cheerful strain. If the people who to-day echo the bitterest lines of Mrs. Browning's 'Cry of the Children' would ascertain and bear in mind the proportion of little boys and girls who are going to school in the United States, how many years they average, and how much the country pays for their education, they might spare us some violent invectives. Even Mr. Robert Hunter permits himself the use of the word 'cannibalism' when speaking of child-workers, and this in the face of legislation which every year extends its area, and grows more stringently protective.
There is a great deal of loose writing on this important theme, and it stands in the way of amendment. It is assumed that parents are seldom or never to blame for sending their children to work. The mill-owner snatches them from their mothers' arms. It is assumed that the child who works would—if there were no employment for him—be at school, or at play, happy, healthy, and well-nourished. No one even alludes to the cruel poverty of the South, which, for generations before the cotton mills were built, stunted the growth and sapped the strength of Southern children. They lived, we are told, a 'wholesome rural life,' and the greed of the capitalist is alone responsible for the blighting of their pastoral paradise.
There is no need to write like this. The question at issue is a grave and simple one. It makes its appeal to the conscience and the sense of the nation, and every year sees some measure of reform. If a baby girl in an American city, a child of three or five, is forced to toil all day, winding artificial daisy stems at a penny a hundred, let the name of her employer and the place of her employment be made public. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children can deal peremptorily with such a case. It is not even the privilege of parents to work a little child so relentlessly. If the pathetic story is not supported by facts, or is not in accord with facts, it is neither wise nor well to publish it. Why should a sober periodical, like the Child-Labor Bulletin, devoted to a good cause, print a poem called 'A Song of the Factory,' in which happy children are portrayed as sporting in beautiful meadows,
Idling among the feathery blooms,
until a sort of ogre comes along, builds a factory, drives the poor innocents into it, and compels them to
Crouch all day by the spindles, wizened, and wan, and old,