Scott Nearing

“ At an early period in life the child is not prepared to take a place in the great work of affairs and when called upon to do so, it is overwhelmed just as a day laborer would be if called upon to take charge of the New York Central Railroad. The task would be one outside of the scope of his development. So to the child, thrust out early into the rush and clamor of the market-place, the task is overwhelming. The child in monotonous, subdivided industry is out of its natural environment, and it gasps for its native air of play as a fish on the sand gasps for water. ”

“ What refuge have the father and the children in such a family, save the open streets, the saloons, the public squares? Bad companions and unwholesome life are infinitely preferable to the dank, nauseating smell of clothes, forever washing and drying, and, as it seems, never washed or dried. The solidarity of family life can be maintained only by trained mothers and capable fathers, mothers who will make inhabitable homes to the extent of their means, and fathers who will use every effort to provide the means with which to make the home inhabitable. ”

“ Long youth means long life.
Slowly this truth is penetrating the public mind. After years of experiment and hesitating speculation, the nation is realizing that the child who goes into life without having learned to play, has taken the shortest road to the almshouse or the penitentiary; if he does not reach his destination, society is not responsible, for it presented him with a first-class passage to one of these institutions when it robbed him of his childhood. ”

“ How detrimental to the development of a strong body child labor may be, has already been indicated. That child labor may stunt physical development cannot be questioned,—having wrought havoc in the body, how easy it is to wreck the mind! "The greatest evil of child labor outside of the physical effects, is the mental and moral loss suffered in the deprivation of an education and the substitution of a daily round of monotonous labor, which is mere profitless drudgery so far as preparation for adult life is concerned, and is calculated to blunt the undeveloped faculties of the child." ”

“ Child labor is a process of mind stunting. First the child is removed from the possibility of an education, taken from the school and placed in the factory where he no longer has an opportunity to learn; and then he is subjected to monotonous toil, for long hours, often all night, in unwholesome places, until his body and mind harden into the familiar form of the unskilled workman.
When the child drops from the ideal of play and joy to the misery of work and pain, he exchanges a mental life for a physical one. ”

“ A demand for cheap finery, for bargains, for cheap goods of all kinds, is a demand on the sweat shop and on child labor. Child labor goods are cheap goods. The South has found this true to her cost. It requires skill to produce quality as much as it ever did before the invention of the machinery which is doing the heavy and mechanical work of the world.
But the public, by its insatiable demand for cheapness, furnishes the manufacturer with the incentive for cheap production. He, in turn, advertises for child labor. One factor is the complement of the other. ”

“ There is a child labor problem, first because a large number of children are at work, and second because the probable result of their work will be the stunting of body or mind. All child workers do not have stunted bodies. As one great man of the nation, towering to his full six feet two, exclaimed, "I went to work in a factory when I was seven, and look at me." There is only one answer,—thousands of other children have gone to work at seven and look at them. At ten they bear the factory stamp, and they carry it through life. ”

“ Child labor laws penalize the employer. The employer dismisses the child. What follows? If the dismissed child dislikes the school, as children who have been at work almost invariably do, he turns to street life. If the family of the dismissed child is in need of his income, he, with the other members of the family, suffers from under-nutrition after that income ceases. In either case, the dismissed child is the loser. While the reformer goes into ecstasies over the statistics of decreasing child labor, the victims of the decrease either run the streets, go hungry, or suffer from both evils. ”

“ It is becoming a universal rule in many houses to insist on the completion of a certain amount of high school or college work before starting in business. There is no longer a necessity for the child to go to work at an early age in order to learn to do his part of the world's work.
Clearly, then, from the standpoint of the child, there is no excuse for his working at an early age. There is no necessity of child labor for a "learning of the business." But there are other sides to the necessity problem. From the standpoint of the child, there is no necessity. ”

“ If children under sixteen were prohibited from working in the Southern cotton mills, would the manufacturers move? Would it not be a discovery pregnant with the most far-reaching importance for the future, if it were found that child labor is not at all necessary to industry, and that, after all, it entails just as great an industrial waste as it does a social one? ”

“ Instill into a boy's mind learning which he sees and feels not to have the highest worth, and which cannot become a part of his active life and increase it, and his freshness, spontaneity, and the fountains of his play slowly run dry. Such is the fate of the average child who spends his play time feeding with hand and body the modern industrial mill. ”

“ The child is the embryo citizen. The citizen is the unit of society, and the society of to-morrow, composed of its individual citizens, will depend for its standard upon the training received by the children of to-day. If the men and women of to-day decide to advance civilization, to build strong and safe for the future, to know that the coming generation is working out some of the problems which have so vexed the present age,—in short, if the men and women of to-day have social ideals, they must protect the children of to-day for the society of the future. ”

“ The boy of twelve who wishes to continue school has no choice. Be his mind square, triangular, or hexagonal, it will be hammered, pushed, and pulled through the same round hole, the school curriculum, which has been worn smooth and polished by the passage of other minds, square, triangular, hexagonal, which were one and all hammered, pushed, and pulled through the identical round school curriculum in the same manner. The boy of twelve who wishes to go to work has an infinite variety of choices before him. Each business holds out a different inducement, appealing to a peculiar temperament. ”

“ It is obvious that in his work he is wholly deficient in any desire to co-operate in the common labor of his group. If co-operation is desirable and group action advantageous, what utter folly it is to foster a system like child labor, which deadens the very instincts that lead to effective group action.
"Playing fair" means much to the child and to the community. It is the element that makes the desirable citizen and the desirable associate. The child who learns to play fair will, nine times in ten, work fair, in the world of business. "Play at its best is only a school of ethics." ”

“ It is a necessity so real that children are sent to the mills, not because parents are "greedy and indifferent," but because the whole amount which a hard-working day laborer can earn will not keep his family supplied with the necessities, not to mention the luxuries of life.
In addition to pleading for the widow and the orphan, the employer who fights child labor legislation invariably pleads for himself. ”

“ Is child labor "an industrial waste"? Among the thinking men who have gone carefully over the ground, there is but one answer. Child labor cheapens the product, lowers the industrial standard of the present, and threatens the industrial standard of the future. ”

“ That is why, unlike gymnastics, play has as much soul as body. "When a little girl plays 'dolls' or 'keeping house,' she is living herself into the deepest springs of human life." [10] The child who plays has the greatest opportunity for that soul growth for which there is always a demand far above the supply. Among the army of working children, there is more of cigarette smoking, loud talk, and bad talk than there is of play.
Play is to the child what poetry is to the man. ”

“ And here comes in the economic law that those occupations which admit the labor of women and children pay the whole family what the man alone receives in the occupations in which he is the sole bread-winner. ”

“ It is a noticeable fact that the "widowed mother" argument is always used by the employer—never by the labor union interests which, representing the interests of the woman and her children, to whom they may well be paying death benefits, is almost unanimous in urging greater restrictions on the employment of children.
The necessity of the "widowed mother," so often and so effectively used to prevent the change of bad conditions, is clearly representative of only a small portion of working children. Probably not more than one working child in a hundred is the sole support of a widowed mother. ”

“ The words, "greedy and indifferent parents" are often emphasized in speaking and writing about child labor. In the case of the unskilled worker, the parent who sends the children to work at fourteen or even thirteen, is neither greedy nor indifferent. Eliminating the "widowed mother," there is a family necessity, common in every industrial community, which results in the child's being sent to the mill. Here is a clear undoubted case of necessity,—a necessity which is being felt more keenly every day as the rise in wages lags behind the jump in the cost of living. ”

“ With the development of modern productive machinery, the nation piles up year by year a greater and greater mass of wealth in the form of a social surplus. As this surplus grows, the community is better prepared to keep its children away from monotonous toil until they are so mature that the development of their bodies and minds will not be seriously impaired by it.
The existence of a social surplus makes possible a long, well-rounded childhood. The increase of the social surplus makes possible a gradual extension of the period of childhood, and a fuller development of its possibilities. ”

“ Is the problem equally simple when one faces the family kept above the line of malnutrition by the earnings of child workers? What steps can be taken to maintain the family at an adequate standard of living, and yet place before the children an opportunity for education? ”

“ The working child at first has no time for play; then he forgets to play, and finally he has no desire to play. The factory has done its work,—the child's mind has changed from an impressionable, plastic mass, to a set, changeless thing for which education is no longer probable or even possible. The universal testimony of those who teach in night school is that children who perform monotonous labor for ten hours each day are not capable of learning when night comes. ”

“ When an outside opportunity offers any change, any counter-excitement, it is seized eagerly, no matter what its character may be, for the sake of the change. Very, very often it is of the wrong character. "Child labor is generally acknowledged to be an irreparable injury to the children and to society at large. Bodies and minds are stunted and deformed; crime, violence, and all of the social evils which spring from a brutalized population are fostered." ”

“ The children of America are not in the schools because the schools fail to prepare for life work. They do not assist in complete living, but train their pupils to follow one narrow intellectual path. The parents feel, and justly, that for many children, the school years are well-nigh wasted. The children resent the discipline, despise the curriculum, and eagerly avail themselves of the first opportunity to work. ”

“ What matter whether the true number of child workers be seventeen hundred thousand or twenty hundred thousand? Neither figure is within the bounds of definite comprehension and both are intolerable in their vastness. The child labor question is a question not of statistics, but of children. So long as children are wrongfully at work, there will be need for child labor reform. ”