Another consequence of the increasing strain is “race suicide”; which is simply a popular term for that “elimination of the middle class” which Karl Marx predicted half a century ago. The homilies of President Roosevelt may have caused a few more superfluous bourgeois babies to be born; but I rather fancy that in general it has been a case of “everybody’s business and nobody’s business”—that the average middle-class American has no idea of lowering his standard of living for the purpose of affecting the census returns. As a result of a confidential census of “race suicide,” taken in England and reported in the Popular Science Monthly, Mr. Sidney Webb found that the offspring had been voluntarily limited in two hundred and twenty-four cases out of a total of two hundred and fifty-two marriages; and out of the one hundred and twenty-eight cases in which the causes of limitation were given, economic causes were specified in seventy-three. Similar results would certainly follow an inquiry in this country; in fact Americans of refinement have come to have an instinctive feeling of repugnance to a large family; to have six or seven children is vulgar and “common,” and suggestive of foreigners. The reason is simply that conditions now prevail which make large families impossible, except to Poles and Hungarians and Italians and French-Canadians, people who are too ignorant to limit their offspring, and whose standards of life are close to animals—their children earning their own livings in sweatshops, mines and factories, as soon as they are able to walk.
And yet, low as our lowest classes have been ground, they are not low enough. Thousands of agents of steamship companies are gathering the outcasts from the sewers of Europe and shipping them here. The rate of immigration into this country was three hundred and eleven thousand in 1899, four hundred and eighty-seven thousand in 1901, six hundred and forty-eight thousand in 1902, eight hundred and fifty-seven thousand in 1903, and over a million in 1905—more than one-half of the last shipments being from Hungary, Russia, and southern Italy. All this, you must understand, is managed by the “System” which rules in our centres of industry. “In that unhappy anthracite country,” writes Mr. John Graham Brooks, a person of authority, “the employers will tell you openly, and with conscious bravado, that they must get cheaper and cheaper labour to keep wages down, else they could make no money.” And it was recently estimated by George W. Morgan, State Superintendent of Elections in New York, that in one past year over six hundred thousand dollars profit was made by selling false naturalisation papers. The Federal authorities who had been investigating the frauds believed that over one hundred thousand sets of such papers had been sold, and that thirty thousand of these had been issued in New York City. Fully thirty per cent. of the Italian citizens in the southern district of New York were estimated to hold false papers.
Cheaper and cheaper labour! Women’s labour and children’s labour! Over one million of women are at present working in factories alone in this country; and one million and three-quarters of children between ten and fifteen years of age are engaged in gainful occupations. In the cotton factories of the South, while the number of men employed increased seventy-nine per cent. in the past ten years, the number of women increased one hundred and fifty-eight per cent. and the number of children under sixteen increased two hundred and seventy per cent. The number employed in Alabama alone was estimated by the Committee on Child Labour to be fifty thousand, with thirty-four per cent. of them under twelve years, and ten per cent. under ten years. These children work twelve hours a day, and the oldest get fifty cents and the youngest get nine cents. Here are the descriptions of observers:
“A little boy of six years has been working 12 hours a day, from 6:20 A. M. to 6:20 P. M. (40 minutes off at noon), for 15 cents per day.
“Three boys aged respectively 9, 8, and 7 years. The boy aged 9 has been working two years, the boy aged 8 has been working three years; the boy aged 7 years has been working two years. These little fellows work 13 hours a day, from 5:20 A. M. to 6:30 P. M., with twenty minutes for dinner. In ‘rush’ periods their mill works until 9:30 and 10 P. M. They were refused a holiday for Thanksgiving and they obtained Christmas Day only by working till 7 P. M. in order to make up the time.”
Mrs. Irene Ashby-Macfadden says: “I have talked with a little boy of seven years, in Alabama, who worked for forty nights; and another child not nine years old, who at six years old had been on the night shift eleven months.”
Miss Jane Addams, of Chicago, says: “In South Carolina, in a large new mill, I found a child of five working at night. In Columbia, S. C., in a mill controlled by Northern capital, I stood at ten-thirty at night and saw many children who did not know their own ages, working from 6 P. M. to 6. A. M.”
Here is a description of their surroundings:
“An atmosphere redolent of oil, thick with lint, the deafening, incessant whir of machinery, in summer stifling heat, always the insensate machinery claiming the strained attention of young eyes and tiny fingers, broken threads clamorously crying for adjustment, all requiring not hard work, but incessant vigilance, springing feet and nimble fingers. Young eyes watching anxiously for a fault in these intricately constructed machines, paying with crushed or broken members for an error in judgment, for the crime of carelessness, how must the responsibility—lightly smiled at by adults—weigh upon the barely developed intelligence of a young child? And after long hours, lagging footsteps, throbbing heads, wandering attention—what sort of stone is this, O Brothers, to be placed in the children’s hands who cry for bread?”
Several years ago I saw in the Independent an advertisement setting forth the advantages of the State of Alabama as an investing-place for capital. I wish I had cut it out. The point of it was that there were no “labour-troubles” in Alabama; the boycott being prohibited there, and labour unions being sued for damages and smashed. The advertisement might have added that there is no factory-legislation to amount to anything, and that the percentage of native white illiteracy is fourteen and eight-tenths. There is factory-legislation in Massachusetts, and it is enforced, and the percentage of native white illiteracy is only eight-tenths of one per cent., or one-eighteenth of the proportion of Alabama. So in the last overproduction crisis the mills of Alabama were running, while those of Massachusetts were shut down; and the special correspondence of the New York Evening Post contained the following pregnant item: