Remember each position must be supported by proof, and your brief must set out the evidence you expect to use in your argument. The nature of that proof may vary, however. For example, suppose you were proving proposition II. 1. A., which properly set out at length would read: “No child below the age of sixteen should be allowed to work in a factory, for such labor injures the child’s health because confinement within the building under the conditions of factory employment checks the growth of the child and promotes many diseases.”
That proposition might be proved in a number of ways. (Remember now what we discussed in the chapter on evidence and read that chapter over again in connection with this discussion.) You could prove it first by the testimony of those who are familiar with children so employed; second, by statistics of mortality and morbidity among children so employed; third, by testimony of experts—like physicians—as to probable results of such employment because of probable effect of conditions named upon bodily organs and their functions.
Here are some specific facts testified to in a legislative hearing on the question of child labor in mills—factories. They are all admissible as testimony from the first class of witnesses (those familiar with children so employed) under the principles laid down in the chapter on evidence.
A French boy of fifteen was asked if he preferred ten hours to eight hours. “Oh no, ten hours is too long; it seems as though I never would see the afternoon go by.” The mill work showed its effect upon his pale, drawn face. He was tired out by it.
A pretty little French girl, fourteen years old, who had worked in the mill a few months at two or three dollars a week, had good reasons for her dislike of mill work. Getting up at 5.30 for a ten-hour day, standing nearly all the time, watching the threads so closely that her head ached, she was frequently sick. She had been replaced by an adult on September first, and since that time had been at home doing housework. Her health had improved greatly in the ten weeks, and when the investigators saw her, she had good color and got chance enough to play so that she was, as her mother said, much better off than in the mill.
A heavy-eyed, dull looking boy of fifteen was sent back to school as a result of the new law. He preferred to work, but he had not succeeded in securing an eight-hour job. He happened to live near the place in which the investigator stayed and there was good opportunity to watch the effect of the law on him from week to week. At the end of a month he had become noticeably lively and bright.
Robert Hunter tells us of a vagrant he once knew who “had for years—from the day he was eleven until the day he was sixteen—made two movements of his hands each second, or 23,760,000 mechanical movements each year, and was at the time I knew him,” says Hunter, “at the age of thirty-five, broken down, drunken and diseased, but he still remembered this period of slavery sufficiently well to tell me that he had ‘paid up’ for all the sins he had ever committed ‘by those five years in hell.’”
“As State Factory Inspector of Alabama, my attention has been called very forcibly to the child labor conditions in that State, and, as a vast majority of the child laborers are in the cotton mills and textile manufactories, I will confine my remarks to the cotton mill children.
“The health of the mill operatives is what one would expect. It varies in different mills. In certain localities the hookworm is pictured on the faces of nearly all the children. Red blood is conspicuous by its absence. The trained eye of the inspector is often unable to tell whether the age of a weazened, dried-up, anæmic specimen of the genus homo is twelve or eighteen.”