PARENT.

MRS. FLORENCE KELLEY,

General Secretary, National Consumers' League, New York

We are confronted by the question, why have we so many child breadwinners, so many dependent parents, and who are the dependent parents?

Many children are at work because their fathers have deserted. We suffer particularly from desertion in the great port of entry of the State of New York. Fathers who cannot endure the strain of family life with precarious work leave, trusting to charity to care for their dependent children and wives better than they have been able to do. And so foolish has been much of our charity that that calculation has not by any means always been an error. It is, however, cheering, that exactly the people in the state in which desertion is a more serious problem than elsewhere, in relation to child labor, the people who are under the sorest temptation to desert, the poorest of the immigrants, the Russian-Jewish exiles, have themselves taken the initiative for bringing back recreant fathers. It is extraordinary to see in the Yiddish papers in New York City photographs of deserters and exact descriptions of them, and a request that the Garment Workers' Unions or the Cigar Makers' Unions-or whatever the trade of the fellow workers may be of these particular fathers will send them home. In more than one state it has now been made a felony to desert minor children. It should be a felony everyhere—an extraditable offence. A cowardly father who leaves his children should be sent back to face his own community. That is one set of working children for whom surely pity, the deepest pity, must arise in the human heart-the children upon whom our ruthless society puts the burden of earning support which should be borne by the deserting father.

Industrial Accidents Produce Child Breadwinners.

Then there are the orphan children whose fathers have been killed in industry. We have an undue number of them because,

for instance, in the second greatest manufacturing state in this Union, in Pennsylvania, for many years, the highest court of the state held that, where a working man who was killed was an alien whose family lived abroad, no claim could be made through any representative for any damages payable to that alien family living abroad. The consequence of that was the employment in Pennsylvania industries of so great a mass of detached alien men, who could be killed and maimed without claims for damages being brought against the employers, that the court's decision constituted a premium upon neglect of necessary safe-guards. In our second greatest state, thousands of men were hurt, were killed or permanently disabled without danger to the employer of claims pressed in behalf of their dependents. The inevitable consequence of that was a generally prevailing recklessness, through which our own working people have suffered with the alien employes. Hence we have in Pennsylvania so great a body of working children in dangerous employments as I believe cannot be found in a like population anywhere else in the world to-day. I think no other state has had so sinister a decision of its highest court, putting a premium on cruelty and recklessness.

We have no adequate workmen's compensation law sustained by any court in this country. And until we have adequate workmen's compensation laws sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States and the highest courts in the states, we shall always be having communities attempting to lay the burden of self-support, and the support of dependent mothers and dependent younger brothers and sisters, upon the too slender shoulders of the eldest child in such families, and of younger children, too.

Preventable Industrial Disease, a Cause.

Besides the children of deserting fathers, and the children of widows, and the children of men disabled by industrial injuries, we have another set of boys and girls upon whom industry, through ruthlessness towards the parents, places an undue burden. Those are the children whose fathers have been disabled by preventable industrial diseases. We have heard at this conference of the bad air which is characteristic of cotton mills from Georgia to Maine.

We have no good breathable air in spinning rooms that ever I have visited; and I have never heard of one where precautions for ventilation were taken with such interest in the lungs of the workers, as in the quality of the cotton spun, and the moisture and heat that are good for cotton. What is true of the cotton industry is true all the way down. We have nowhere any adequate premium put by any insurance, or by any compensation laws, on protecting the health of the breadwinner and keeping the breadwinner really the head of the family, alive and in the field of industry at his maximum earning power. We are far behind Germany and England in that respect. Even the most enlightened and advanced of our manufacturing states, even Massachusetts, which takes the lead in the medical inspection of the workers at their work, is still far behind Germany in this.

Multitudes of children work whose parents are dependent because their pay is too little. Here in Jacksonville I have been horrified at the spectacle of newsboys in the streets with no badges on their arms to show that they are allowed to sell papers as a premium on good behavior in school; with no indication that they are looked after by any official as future citizens of importance in the community. Of course, boys who are neglected, who are allowed to sell papers at any age, are going to be important citizens, for they are going to be very expensive convicts later on. When I asked about this, my attention was called to one particular boy as suggesting a complicated difficulty-a barefoot little chap who cannot go to school because he has no proper clothes, and has to sell papers in order to get what insufficient clothes he has. I asked whether his father was dead. "No, his father is living." "Is his father a drunkard?" "No, he is a working man." "Is he a lazy working man?” "No, he is a very hard working man." "What is the matter? That is a sinister thing if both father and son work, and the boy is out of shoes, and out of school for lack of shoes." "The City of Jacksonville pays the father only $1.35 a day for hard laboring work, and since he has a wife and seven children he cannot keep his oldest boy in shoes to be in school." There we have a dependent father with a vengeance, made dependent by the employer, which is the community in which he lives. And that kind of dependent parents we have all over our Republic-parents who are made dependent by their employers, whether public or private.

The Dependent Parent.

The dependent parent is usually the mother, for the reasons that I have suggested. The father deserts, or he becomes ill by reason of his occupation, or he is maimed by his occupation, or he is killed by his occupation. Ordinarily the dependent parent, so far as the child breadwinner is concerned, is the mother; because the tuberculous father is (or, should be) taken care of as a charity patient in the sanatorium. Then what about the dependent mothers? They usually work. But they receive such insufficient wage for their work that they usually, even in the more enlightened industrial states, have both to work taking care of the children in the home and then for the employer.

They may take goods into the home, or may go out of the home. And whichever they do, sooner or later they suffer a physical breakdown. That is what ordinarily happens when the mother of four, five or six children tries to be both mother and breadwinner, however much she may be helped by the child breadwinners in the families. There could not be a worse investment for any community in this age, than boys engaged in the messenger service and newspaper selling. There could not be a worse investment for the community than letting the widowed mother and her breadwinning children stagger along alone, as we do ordinarily, with doles from charity, but no adequate substitute for the wages which the departed or disabled father no longer affords.

In other words, dependent parents are, as a rule, dependent because we do not make Industry pay its way, and we try to make the unhappy children pay the bills due to the family from Industry. I think that is one of the very blackest spots of the whole black child labor stain upon this Republic, that we have gone on doing this as our industry has developed for the last sixty years. We have gone on letting the children pitifully try to make up in some small measure for the bills which industry has not paid.

For twenty years I have been urging that we should take care of the school children who are now by thousands out of the public schools, the children whose fathers are dead or disabled; and I am profoundly thankful that that subject has been forced upon the attention of charitable societies all over this country. The charitable societies have never efficiently and adequately met the needs of the

children who are either forced into industry cruelly or forced out of industry and into the school by compulsory education laws, equally cruelly if no financial provision is made for their physical welfare. But now that we are getting mothers' pensions-they exist already in Missouri and Utah and Oklahoma and Oregon and California and Illinois-I am not altogether pleased at the way we are getting them, because we are now discussing charity, whereas we ought to be discussing the immeasurably more important question how to make industry pay its debts to these children. There ought not to be any suggestion of charity in relation to a child who has been deprived of his breadwinner, because industry has killed or disabled or sickened or tempted beyond his powers of resistance that breadwinner. The bill ought to be sent in to the Steel Trust if it has killed the breadwinner; or it ought to be sent in to the railway if that is responsible for the child's loss; and it ought to be sent in continuously as long as the period of the natural dependence of the child runs, or the period of statutory school attendance in states. where, as in New York State, for instance, the period of enforced attendance continues until the child is sixteen years old, unless it has met a fairly rigid educational and physical test. And besides that we ought to send in the bill to industry for an adequate wage for the father who is working, when he has not been killed or disabled or sickened or tempted beyond his powers of resistance. We should not forget that.

So it seems to me that we are taking the third class first; that we ought first to get workmen's compensation laws effective for collecting the needed money for the child's education to the sixteenth birthday, and we ought to get minimum wages boards. They have begun in Massachusetts and Oregon and Washington and Utah already. There are already laws providing for minimum wages boards in those states. But they are very poor laws; they apply only to women and the great essential thing is that they should apply to men also, that they should apply to all the underpaid people in all the underpaid industries, and the underpaid industry is the industry which does not enable a man and woman to bring up a family of at least four children according to the standard that is set in the state in which the industry is carried on. Then, after we have collected from industry the bill for the necessaries of life for the children who have lost their breadwinners, or whose breadwinners