[184]. In England this outrage on humanity was forbidden, in 1878, by Clause No. 35 of the Factory Bill, which provided that “no young person, or woman, shall be employed in any part of a factory in which the wet spinning of flax, hemp, jute, or tow is carried on, unless sufficient means be employed and continued for protecting the workers from being wetted, and, where hot water is used, for preventing the escape of steam into the room occupied by the workers.”
[185]. Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence. Thirteenth Annual Report, Massachusetts Bureau Statistics of Labor.
[186]. Public attention was first directed to this hideous phase of the child labor question through the discovery of the fact that large numbers of orphan children, varying from eleven to fourteen years of age, were being exported from St. John’s Asylum, Brooklyn, N. Y., to the glass factories of Fostoria and Findlay, O. Other asylums, including the organization known as the Children’s Aid Society, were said to be equally guilty with St. John’s Home in carrying on the business of child trading for a money consideration.
[187]. New York newspapers November 23–26, 1888; Brooklyn Citizen, November 23, 1888; Correspondence of Factory Inspectors, Harry Dorn, Ohio, November, 1888; Correspondence of Factory Inspectors, John Franey, Albany, N. Y., November, 1888.
[188]. New Jersey, 1883; Ohio, 1884; New York, 1886; Wisconsin, Rhode Island, 1887; Connecticut, 1888; Maine, 1888; State factory inspection in Pennsylvania in 1889; municipal factory ordinance in Chicago, 1889.
[189]. Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1875, pp. 183–84.
[190]. Whenever “socialism” is referred to in this essay, by the term should be simply understood the meaning given to the word in recent editions of Webster’s “Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language,” viz.: “A theory of society which advocates a more precise, orderly, and harmonious arrangement of the social relations of mankind than that which has hitherto prevailed.” This necessarily is the very opposite of anarchy, described, in the same authority, as “The state of society where there is no law or supreme power, or where the laws are not efficient and individuals do what they please with impunity.” Socialism is therefore the antithesis of anarchism. The former is constructive and altruistic, the latter destructive, and the absolute sovereignty of the individual, consequently, disregard of others. Nor is by socialism meant communism. Socialism recognizes the right of the individual to the product of his own labor and certainly not the division thereof; whereas communism means that common ownership of property which has only been successfully carried out in the conventual orders of the Roman Catholic Church and in the Buddhistic Lamaseries. This is the position taken in a recently published article from the pen of the well-known social-economist Charles Sotheran, formerly literary editor of the New York Star, but better known under his noms-de-plume of “Colmolyn” and “Southernwood.”
[191]. See chapter, Work for the Criminal Classes.—Ed.
[192]. See chapter on Woman in Industry.—Ed.
[193]. See chapter, Woman in Industry.—Ed.