Child labor

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One of the acknowledged evils of machinery is the exploitation of child labor which usually follows its introduction. Such was the case in England, and we find it repeated to-day in the new industrial districts of the South. In such industries where the repetition of a small mechanical process enables child labor to be employed, the temptation to take advantage of the opportunity is great; for children have no rights to assert, no wage scale to uphold or working time to protect. In that respect child labor is akin to slave labor. ”

“ The child worker does not as a rule develop into the skilled artisan, the expert business man, or the picked soldier. What child labor employer is there who would exhibit the children in his factory as ideal types of American children? How many employers of child labor give their own children the advantages of a life of factory toil? ”

“ The child who works loses the opportunity for the spontaneous expression of the new life that can come only through play. The child's body is forming at fourteen, and its growth should not be hampered or marred by imposing upon it the restrictions that come with factory life.
As the body of the developing child is denied its complete development by work, so its mental development is curtailed and its moral sensibilities are often stunted by work. Child labor does not necessarily mean stunting and degradation, but the probabilities are that child labor will mean child deterioration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here, then, is a real cause of child labor. It is clearly a social and economic one; social in so far as society is responsible for maintaining its children—economic in so far as the smallness of the income of a definite group in the community does not enable the man to provide adequately for the needs of his family. In no sense is it an individual cause.
The second important cause of child labor to which allusion has been made is the desire of the child to go to work. The average child has two alternatives—work and school. Few children choose the school. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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? ”

“ Still we are confronted by the sad spectacle of more than a million of the nation's children at work in factories and cotton mills for their living, and helping to support their families.
"The child is the embodied future. We can never have good citizenship without protected childhood. Child labor is a process of squandering future wealth to satisfy present need." ”

“ Child labor is really harmful to the child. Even if its body is not stunted, and its mind blunted, by the work performed, the child loses an opportunity for mind training in the schools, which can never be duplicated in later life. ”

“ It goes without saying that in the cases where the wages of the father of the family must be increased by the labor of the mother, the children also must be put to work at an age at which they ought to have their leisure time for play. For though child-labor in factories is a little limited by legislation, it is still commonly practiced in household industry. Further most of the children of the proletariat must, in their free hours, do all kinds of work harmful to their physique and their morals. ”

“ It may be either an influence exerted by the child in the family group to which it belongs as a child, or it may be an influence exerted by the child, grown to adult years, upon the family of which he or she is the head. Child labor may influence the family by taking children away from the home for eleven hours a day and giving them an attitude wholly independent of home control, or it may stunt them physically or mentally, thus making them incapable of fulfilling the functions of fathers and mothers, of home-makers and home-keepers. In either case, child labor thwarts the purpose of the home. ”

“ The statements which are constantly made, laying the entire blame for child labor upon the manufacturer, are, therefore, unfounded and unfair. The employer may, as in the case of industrial evolution, make child labor possible, but he does not actively cause it. ”

“ The present system of keeping a child from all work until his body and mind are formed and then plunging him into industrial life is only exceeded in folly and cruelty by the child slavery system commonly known as “child labor.” ”

“ The preceding analysis of industrial evolution, greed, necessity, and ignorance and indifference, narrows the field of causes to two. The average child laborer goes to work because his family needs the income, or because he "hates school." Often, both reasons are operating.
Family necessity is a prime cause of child labor. It is not, as many writers would lead us to believe, dire poverty which sends children to work. ”

“ In a community where child labor is extensively employed, the entire family is forced to work for what proves to be a bare living. Looking at the question from the standpoint of the family, it is not therefore economical to have the children at work. Dr. J. E. McKelway, Assistant Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, said in a recent address:—"Child labor reduces wages. Only 30 per cent, of the factory operatives of England are able to support their children through the sixteenth year without putting them to work. ”

“ We believe in the regulation of child labor in factories, workshops and mines, to the end that children of tender age shall not be made to slave out their lives in order that corporations shall have cheap labor and large dividends. ”

“ Even in the case of the minority who are ignorant of conditions, or indifferent to law, it cannot be fairly said that their attitude constitutes a cause of child labor. It helps to make child labor possible, but it is not a moving factor, leading children to the mills. ”

“ In many families a real need exists for the wages that the child can earn, because the wage of the father is so low that he cannot support himself. In many other cases, the parents are not actively interested in the question of the school and of child labor. ”

“ The labor of children in factories and other industrial institutions has sprung very largely from the same general causes. While child labor may have the merit of giving the child some industrial training, still it has been shown that it dwarfs the child in body and mind, produces a one-sided development, fails to prepare for citizenship in the higher sense, and so must be regarded as altogether an evil. ”

“ Many give attention and study to the child labor problem, because they feel that it is hurting them as well as the public at large, but there are a group of manufacturers who are madly struggling for wealth, and so madly do they struggle, that they overlook all human relations and obligations. ”

“ Child labor was thought to be cheap, and from the employer’s point of view it was; but in the long run society found it to be incalculably expensive. Unrestricted child labor increased the number of illiterates, 415promoted the spread of disease and crime, augmented poverty, and bred discontent. The child is the father of the man; and as our children are cared for so will the future manhood and womanhood of the nation be. No fewer than two million persons under fifteen years of age are engaged in some form of wage-earning occupation in the United States today. ”

“ A vigorous attempt has been made to cope with the child labor problem by organizing a Child Labor Campaign, the object of which may be summed up in one word—Legislation. Philanthropists, social workers, and public-spirited citizens, roused by the tales of child work in mine and factory, have turned eagerly to the American cure-all, negative legislation, and have secured the passage of laws which forbid children under a certain age to work, and which penalize the employer who violates the law. ”

“ The man who has a family of half-grown children must send them to work in an endeavor to supplement the family income, and the man who has a family of small children to keep, or no children at all, must suffer because of this child competition. In some cases, child labor is impossible, because of the character of the work, but in the textile industries, the glass works, and the tobacco factories, children are employed and men discharged. ”

“ They do, however, reach with light and leading some of the darker sides of modern industry as related to the younger workers.
Child-labor.—The student of industrial history knows that child-labor is not a new evil. Children were often overworked and cruelly driven when parents, guardians, and those to whom they were "bound out" as apprentices were the only taskmasters and their labor was wholly within the household. ”

“ In necessarily passing over the social and economic aspects of the question, we do not wish it thought that we advocate child labor for the purpose of killing off an undesirable stock prematurely. We are only concerned in pointing out that the effects of child labor are many and various. ”

“ The average child who enters industry at an early age closes behind him the door of opportunity to a higher and better industrial plane. The child laborer becomes a less effective producer than the child who had additional schooling advantages. ”

“ This hysterical agitation against child labor, for instance; while warranted in exceptional cases, it is in the main destructive of the formation of the habit of industry which cannot be acquired too young. When the State presumes to teach a mother how to feed her child, when and where to educate it, when and where to send it to work, the State goes too far. ”

“ But for most it is not intelligent dissatisfaction, but the absorbing press of getting a living that compels the employment of child-labor, and thus brings physical and moral degeneration, not only for this generation but for many to come. It is not alone the nine thousand in factories that we must deal with, but many hundred thousands uncounted and unrecognized, the same spirit dominating all. ”

“ CHILD LABOR LAWS.—Since 1870 the growing acuteness of the child labor problem, together with an aroused public opinion, has served to increase the number of laws restricting child labor. At the present time, forty-five states forbid the employment in certain industries of children under fourteen years of age. ”

“ Yet these cases are the exception rather than the rule. "Greedy and indifferent parents" are not so prevalent in the community as many writers on child labor would have their readers suppose. Cases constantly come to light, where, for a mess of pottage, parents sell their children into industrial slavery. Yet a close acquaintance with the parents of working children shows that they are very much like other parents. They love their children as much and have as much care for their well-being as other fathers and mothers. They send them to work, as a rule, only when necessity demands it. ”

“ However, in the matter of the regulation of child labor, a curious anomaly has arisen—no one may employ a child under fourteen years in a factory for even one hour a day without being liable to prosecution for disobeying the law of the state, because such work might interfere with the child's growth and education; all of which is right and indorsed by public opinion, but—merely because a child is working independently of any employer, he is allowed to sell newspapers, peddle chewing gum and black boots for any number of hours, providing he attends school during school hours! ”