their delicate shoulders the burdens of life. But the loss of an education is calamitous, whether to the light-hearted boy or the heavy-hearted girl. The future has to be reckoned with in either case a manhood or womanhood handicapped, limited, darkened and saddened by illiteracy. I have sometimes tried in imagination to creep inside an illiterate soul. I have sometimes tried to imagine the sadly narrowed world of a man who cannot read, one to whom the comic supplement of the newspaper is the only intelligible part, to whom a library is an unassailable treasure-house, to whom the discourse of the learned is an unknown tongue; who is doomed to wander outside the glorious paradise where flourish poetry, music, science and the arts; who is humiliated by the consciousness that he is left behind in the race of life, and has a dim consciousness that somehow society has wronged him. Out of that consciousness grows a feeling of resentment, which, in times of popular tumult, is apt to break out into passionate and unreasoning violence. Of such are the hoodlums and the hooligans of our modern civilization. At Jackson, Mississippi, I made the statement, that manufacturers did not themselves know the conditions within their own mills. My statement was met with smiles of incredulity from some manufacturers present. Yet it must be, if we are to believe what they say. One superintendent assured me that I would not find any children in his department who could not read. He followed as I examined one after another and heard the children confess that they could neither read nor write. I believe that it was with genuine surprise and sorrow that he said, "I did not think it was so bad as that. I see there is something for me and my wife to do among these children." In a South Carolina mill I found a very little girl attending a machine. She was so small that I inquired whether she was on the pay-roll. On being told she was, I asked her age. She replied, "Seven." Others, close by, volunteered the information that she had been steadily working at the mill for eighteen months. She could neither read nor write. She had never been to school. When I reported this case to the office of the factory, the gentleman to whom I spoke, the secretary and treasurer of the company, took down the child's name and promised to inquire into the case. The question of the age of young children is one about which I am constantly at variance with the mill managers. Children, to all appearances under twelve, represent themselves and are represented by their parents and employers to be over that age. If indeed they are as old as represented, it is but too obvious that they are engaged in toil that robs them of normal growth and weight; but the irresistible conclusion is that children are taught by their parents to lie about their age and that manufacturers are much too complacent in conniving at the fraud. Everywhere the teachers warmly commend the crusade against child labor. Everywhere they say they could show so much better results for their work if the children were not so often taken from school because they are wanted in the mill. One school teacher, in a factory village where the mill owners claim that they do much in the way of welfare work, spoke of the cotton mills as the "curse of South Carolina." This denunciation, though strong, will not be unmerited so long as the cheap labor of children takes the place of the higher paid labor of the adult, leaving him to loaf around in idleness while the child, who should be in school, is doing the work of the adult. It is due to the manufacturers to say that many of them are in favor of compulsory education. This measure should be regarded as an essential accompaniment of child labor legislation. The victory is only half won, if, when we compel the young child to come out of the factory, we do not, at the same time, compel him to enter the school. THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION OF EDUCATION IN ABOLISHING BY OWEN R. LOVEJOY, General Secretary, National Child Labor Committee. Reforms of the abuses of child labor are accomplished by two methods: compulsion and attraction. The factors in the problem are three, the employer, the parent and the child. The beginnings. of social activity against child labor in this as in other countries, have been largely by repressive measures. Perhaps this is necessarily so, though it would be unfortunate to regard them as other than initial steps. Gradually and almost unnoticed the employment of children, many of them extremely young, has become a part of our industrial system. This was not, we believe, because of any abnormal excess of greed or cruelty, as often charged, but by the operation of a natural economic law coupled with the general lack of public recognition that America has ceased to be exclusively an agricultural country and has become intensely industrial. The sturdy farmer, merchant or professional man, who boasts himself the glorious example of all child labor because he went to work at eight years old and has been self-supporting since, for many years dominated the situation. His assumption that all child labor is to be promoted because work on the farm or in the country store, or in his father's or neighbor's office was a benefit to him, expresses the point of view of a large number of our citizens towards a system grown to such proportions that, by the latest census estimates not less than 688,207 children under sixteen, 186,358 of whom are under fourteen years of age, are in industries other than agricultural. This report, acknowledged by the Census Bureau to be imperfect because of lack of facilities for collecting accurate data, has practically omitted some industries in which child labor is particularly involved. For example, a recent report of the Bureau of Labor in New York State shows a large number of children, some as young as four or five years, employed in the various home industries in New York City, whereas none of these children under ten years are reported by the Census Bureau. Twelve cities are shown in the census to have 668 newsboys. None are reported for other cities. But by returns we have just received from authentic sources in thirty-three cities, there are now not less than 17,000 children engaged as newspaper carriers and newsboys, many of them as young as six and eight years of age. The City of Boston alone shows three times as many as the census reports for the entire United States. Legislation Necessary Obviously, with such a condition facing society, adding every year several thousand youth to the army of those unfitted for any but the most unskilled and precarious occupations, it has been necessary to seek measures that shall be more immediately effective than the tardy general appreciation of the proper use of the years of childhood. Among the first activities of the National Child Labor Committee was a careful and systematic field study in a number of sections and in various industries, of the extent of child labor and the specific conditions in which many children are employed. Although the reports we have collected frequently disprove the sensational stories of cruelty and oppression that have so often shocked the credulous, they have confirmed the convictions of school officials and other interested authorities, and the reports of serious students in earlier days. The net revelation of the various investigations has been sufficient to convince legislators of the necessity of putting a legal check on the system without waiting for a complete and scientific arraignment of the evil. The result has been that at present, in every state of the Union, with one exception, some form of legal prohibition or regulation of child labor has been enacted. Nor have these legislative acts been adopted against the united protest of those representing the industries affected. There is a growing disposition among employers, who recognize the shortsighted policy of child employment, to seek the aid of society in bringing their competitors up to their own higher standards. Many prohibitions secured have been chiefly based on a sense of pity for the wrongs of childhood, but more recently society. is becoming conscious that her first asset, citizenship, is being weakened, and next in importance, industry is being cheapened and impaired. These larger social aspects are being constantly made more prominent in attempts to secure legislative prohibition of child labor, or its more complete regulation. Through public interest, the beginnings of which date from the earlier activities of trade unions, women's clubs, consumers' leagues and many earnest. individual workers, there have been enacted important child labor laws in the past four years in thirty-four states. In the legislative sessions of 1906-07, eighteen states enacted new laws or revised existing laws. Eight of these states are Southern. Since January 1st, 1908, important changes in these laws have passed the Legislatures of Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi and Oklahoma,1 while important bills are pending in New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey and the District of Columbia. Compulsory School Laws But despite this somewhat formidable record of legislative enactments, we must not be misled. The end we seek, namely, adequate preparation of the American child for citizenship, is not attained, but only made possible of attainment by such prohibitions; and it is significant that although child labor laws reduce the number and force an improvement in the condition of working children, the field of usefulness of such measures is limited by their repressive nature. By multitudes of people affected, whether employers, parents or children, these laws are resented and looked. upon as detrimental, while a small army of officials is required to secure their enforcement against the connivance of these three interested factors. In most instances this negative has been accompanied by positive legislation for compulsory school attendance. In all the states having child labor laws, compulsory school attendance laws have been enacted, except in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. That such laws are effective is strikingly attested by the steady growth of the number of commonwealths adopting them. In 1870 less than 5 per cent. of the population were subject to compulsory school laws. To-day over 72 per cent. are subject to these laws. But this fact is of slight significance compared. with the distribution of the benefits of public education. The Oklahoma bill vetoed by the Governor June 10th. |