“Why, in cotton mills, stocking mills, candy factories, department stores. We got an Act some time ago forbidding the employment in factories of boys under twelve and girls under fourteen. But the proof of age required was simply a certificate from the parents! And the result was to make it appear that most boys had been born at the age of twelve, and most girls at fourteen. We are now agitating for an Act greatly increasing the penalties for employing children under age and for issuing false certificates.”
“Just before coming here,” I said, “I went into a boot-blacking ‘parlour.’ It was a long, close gallery; and there I had seen a dozen little boys working all this sweltering Sunday under a ‘boss.’ Unless he had relays of boys (which seems unlikely) they must have been at it, to my certain knowledge, for eight hours, and I don’t suppose they will shut down for another two hours at least.”
“If you had inquired,” said Miss Graham, “you would probably have found that they were all Greeks. The negro boot-blacks of New Orleans used to be quite a class by themselves—Eugene Field has written a poem about them. But now they have been quite ousted by the Greeks; while the negroes, in turn, have ousted the Italian organ-grinders. Yes, the boot-black boys are a bad case; but still worse is the case of the telegraph-messengers. Just think of their working young boys from six in the evening to six in the morning—sending them at all hours of the night into the lowest streets of the lowest quarters of this wicked city—and paying them two cents a message.”
“At what age do they take them?”
“Why, at any age when they can trot and have intelligence enough to find an address that is given them. And, mark you, it isn’t always—perhaps not generally—extreme poverty that makes the parents thus sacrifice their children. Often the children’s earnings will go to pay the two or two-and-a-half dollars a month demanded for a piano on the instalment system. That instalment system is a great curse to the ignorant poor. I have known a little child sent out to labour that its mother might acquire—of course at four or five times its value—what do you think?—a huge green plush album!
An Island Inferno.
“Just in these days,” Miss Graham continued, “we have had some terrible revelations of child-labour, at a certain place on the Gulf Coast, where more than 200 children, from nine years old upwards, are kept ‘shucking’ oysters for twelve hours a day, under the most horrible conditions, physical and moral. And the Law Committee of our S.P.C.C. reports that there is no remedy, because the factory law at present in force in Louisiana applies only to ‘cities or towns having a population of 10,000 or more;’ whereas this place is a little private inferno, owned by a single company and occupied solely by its serfs. But we are fighting a good fight for better laws and better conditions.”
My greatly condensed report of her conversation may lead the reader to mistake Miss Graham for a one-idea’d humanitarian. There could not be a greater error. She is an eminently practical, energetic, broad-minded young lady, with a keen sense of humour and an interest in many things outside the work to which she has devoted herself. I am sure the little children of New Orleans have in her not only a sincere but a very shrewd and efficient friend.
Miss Graham reported the relations between the white and coloured populations in New Orleans rather exceptionally good. The reason, I think, is not far to seek—namely, that the whites outnumber the blacks by about three to one. The acuteness of the problem in any given locality is apt to depend largely on the numerical proportions of the races.[[26]]
On the New Orleans street-cars the two races are kept apart, but the discrimination is certainly made with the utmost urbanity. The rear-seats of each car are marked “For Coloured Patrons Only.”