The sound had suggested a sliding, the collapse of something; it was like the falling in of a gigantic house of cards. Fascinated, Ruth's eyes sought her father's face. It was transformed, livid; his hands clutched his chair—clutched it so convulsively that, plump though they were, the veins stood out on them in purple knots.
"The building," he whispered with bloodless lips. "It's gone."
The sliding stopped momentarily; the very air seemed to stay still in an awful hush of expectation; then it caught up a new sound—a sound that far exceeded the sliding in horror; a sound to freeze the blood, even the warm, quick blood of a child; a sound big with every emotion ever evoked by the voice of any tenor who ever has sung—the inarticulate protest of men about to be smothered—the wail of human beings caught in a trap, like rats.
Now, it would of course be preposterous to regard a cheap melodramatic novel in a fashion magazine as a subject for serious criticism; and it would be equally absurd to make the policy of such a magazine, taken in itself, an occasion for solemn moralizing or rebuke. But in publishing this rubbish, the Delineator is a magazine of fashion in more senses than one; it is but following, according to its lights, a fashion current in much higher circles of "uplift" literature. That this grotesque presentation of the ways of business appears, and is given all possible prominence and emphasis, not in a journal devoted to reform but in one which seeks its circulation among the women of the average "bourgeois" home, is precisely what gives significance to a piece of fiction otherwise too insignificant to mention. Evidently the editor of this magazine imagines, rightly or wrongly, that the state of mind prevailing among his readers is such as to make a thing of this kind go. They have become so accustomed to a diet of sensationalism and exaggeration, he may well reason, that they will never stop to inquire whether the building of collapsible skyscrapers is a common practice—whether indeed such a thing has ever happened at all—or in any other way to question the truth of a portrait evidently designed to represent a large part of the capitalist class. To ask whether either writer or editor really believes the picture to be true—to hark back to Dickens's solemn assurance of the truthfulness of his indictments against the evils he attacked—is the most that need be said on the subject, to anyone accustomed to sober or responsible thinking. But among the millions of defenceless people—young, half-educated, well-intentioned, untrained to serious thought—to whom such stuff is being fed every day, there is a vast number that are misled by it into a false view of the world, and into a state of mind that is most unwholesome and deplorable.
What is thus dealt out in popular fiction, what was for a time to be seen filling the pages of nearly every popular magazine professedly as plain fact, is met with in a hundred forms in the daily newspapers—even those of a good type—and in the outgivings of many excellent persons, and many worthy associations, engaged in social-betterment work. A very few instances must suffice for illustration.
"The outstanding infamy of certain of our modern industries is the linking to the belts of factories and mills of two million children." This statement, and variants of it which pile up the agony now in one direction now in another, we find continually cropping up in the high places of social reform. The quotation is from an address made a year ago by William B. Patterson, secretary of the commission on social service of the Philadelphia Federation of Churches. He was speaking before the first annual Progressive Conference of Pennsylvania, and presumably his object was to show the dire need of the Progressive movement for the remedy of a stupendous evil. But we turn to an article on child labor in the United States by Dr. Jacob S. Raisin, a Troy rabbi, printed very prominently in the Knickerbocker Press, for a more vivid realization of this gigantic horror. Here are some extracts from the article:
Two million children are virtually enslaved in our cotton mills, coal mines and sweat-shops over the breadth and length of our country—two million little ones!
At the same time that thousands of children in our city enjoyed their Christmas vacation and rejoiced over their newly acquired presents, two million children of the same tender age, of the same Caucasian race and citizens of the same prosperous land, were pining away in the dark subterranean caves of the coal mines in the east, in the dangerous cotton mills and tobacco factories of the south and the sweat-shops everywhere.
Two million souls are annually sacrificed to commerce and to greed. Parents do not get sufficient to keep the souls and bodies of their little ones together. Mothers must leave their suckling babes to seek for their livelihood, and these infants, in turn, if they survive until they are six, must begin the battle of life on their own account.
The United States Census of 1910 gives the total number of mine-workers under sixteen years of age in 1909 as 8,151, of whom 3,117 were working below ground and 5,034 above ground. The number of wage-earners under sixteen years of age in manufacturing industries is stated as 161,493; and it is shown that the percentage of workers under sixteen to the whole number of workers in these industries fell from 3.4 per cent. in 1899 to 2.9 per cent. in 1904 and 2.4 per cent. in 1909. Figures concerning sweat-shops are not given.
What we have before us, therefore, is a gross overstatement, on the face of it; after making all possible allowance for false returns of age in the census, it is evident that, merely as a matter of the surface figures, the case is enormously exaggerated. But this is not all. The impression is always sought to be conveyed that these two millions are, in large part at least little children; whereas even of the (say) two hundred thousand workers under sixteen who are actually "linked to the belts of factories and mills," and of the (say) four thousand who are laboring "in the dark subterranean caves of the coal mines," it is obvious that only a small fraction can be under fourteen. That there ought not to be a single one may be true enough; but unless we are to throw reason overboard altogether, we must make a distinction between a question concerning a few hundreds, or a few thousands, of little children, and one concerning two million. And these very agitators do recognize the distinction; else why make all this noise about the figures? Driven into a corner, they would doubtless fall back on the iniquity of having even a single child in all the land deprived of its birthright of happiness; but in the meanwhile they work the two million for all it is worth. As for the violation of the Ninth Commandment, the true Progressive, whether Christian or Jew, presumably finds in the principles of the New Morality ample exemption from any acute pangs of conscience on that score.
In the early part of the year 1910, the Consumers' League of New York obtained permission from the American Magazine to reprint as a leaflet a little article of two pages which had appeared in the January number of that periodical under the title Some Dangers from High Prices. The article which the excellent persons who conduct the work of that League considered so important a document was devoted in the first place to a very precise account of what had happened in a certain restaurant with which the writer was familiar, and which was frequented in part by shop-girls; and secondly to the issuing of a most solemn and tragic warning as to what this country was threatened with as a consequence of the situation which this happening indicated. This is the experience: