Library Collections: Document: Full Text


American Charities

Creator: Amos G. Warner (author)
Date: 1908
Publisher: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York
Source: Straight Ahead Pictures Collection

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372  

"The sick, as long as they can hold their heads up, must work to pay for the cost of their living. As soon as they are convalescent, they must begin again. A child from three to ten or twelve years adds by its labor from fifty cents to $1.50 per week to the family income. The hours of the child are as long as its strength endures or the work remains. A child three years old can work continuously from one and one-half to two hours at a time; a child ten years old can work twelve hours. Obviously under such conditions the child is deprived of the two greatest rights which the parents and the state are bound to give each child: health and an education.

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"The particular dangers to the child's health are such as can be induced by the confinement in the house, in an atmosphere always foul. The bad light under which the child works causes a continual eye-strain, from the effects of which the child will suffer all its life. The brain of the child under eight years of age is not developed sufficiently to bear fixed attention. Hence it must be continually forced to fix its attention to the work, and in doing this an irreparable damage is done to the developing brain. A child forced to earn its bread has neither the time nor the opportunity to obtain an education." (124)


(124) Report of National Consumers' League, 1905, pp. 28-29.

374  

Mr. Owen B. Lovejoy cites as the results of different kinds of premature employment: (125) --


(125) "Child Labor and Philanthropy," N. C. C., 1907, p. 198.

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"The wrecking of the nervous system in young girls who spend the years of adolescence bent over sewing machines run at lightning speed; the bronchial and pulmonary affections of the child of the coal-breakers; the languor and backwardness of the little street-trader; the failing vision of the tenement-house worker, and the diseases of the feet and spine which have been recently so strikingly traced by Dr. Freiburg to the unnatural exactions of factory labor upon boys and girls."

376  

In some industries the chief danger to children lies in accident. A report on anthracite mines in Pennsylvania showed that one-half of the slate-pickers in the breakers were under sixteen years of age; yet 75 per cent of the accidents were to boys under sixteen years of age. (126) Mr. Lovejoy further points out that the subnormal wages of these children not only tends to lower the standard of living, but fosters the idleness of older boys, floods the market with unskilled laborers who had neither time nor opportunity to learn a trade in their youth, and thus precipitates labor conflicts.


(126) Lovejoy, "Child Labor in the Coal Mines," Annals, vol. xxvii., No. 2, pp. 293 ff.

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The interdependence of child labor and illiteracy is illustrated by Mrs. Florence Kelley, (127) who shows that arranging all the states in four groups according to the numbers of their illiterate children, five leading manufacturing states, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey, all stand near the bottom, and have more than 20,000 illiterate children; while the great cotton manufacturing states of the South stand at the very bottom. Massachusetts alone, of the great manufacturing states, lies in group two at the middle of the list.


(127) Kelley, "Illiterate Children," etc., Charities, March 14, 1903.

378  

Miss Jane Addams, from observation of tramps in lodging-houses, concludes: --

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"This inordinate desire to get away from work seems to be con-nected with the fact that the men have started to work very early, before they had the physique to stand up to it, or the mental vigor with which to overcome its difficulties, or the moral stamina which makes a man stick to his work whether he likes it or not. ... It is no figment of the imagination to say that the human system breaks down . . . and that general debility and many diseases may be traced to premature labor." (128)


(128) "Child Labor and Pauperism," N. C. C., 1903, pp. 114-121.

380  

Miss Addams shows that the employment of children in factory labor often pauperizes the parents. (129) The immigrant peasantry from Europe and the poor white farmers in the South have been accustomed to farm work from their childhood, and they see no difference between it and factory labor to which they consign their children. The children adapt themselves to the new conditions more easily than the parents, so the parents drop out, with the result that the parents become more and more dependent on the children's earnings. The parasitic character of sweating industries and of child labor has been pointed out by many modern writers. Sidney Webb, in discussing the labor of children who live at home and work for less than the cost of subsistence and nurture, and of adult women working at wages insufficient to keep them in full efficiency, who are, in fact, partially maintained by another class, says: --


(129) Corroborated by Lindsay, Annals, vol. xxvii., No. 2, p. 333.

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"An industry, to be economically self-supporting, must maintain its full establishment of workers, unimpaired in numbers and vigor, with a sufficient number of children to fill vacancies caused by death or superannuation. If the employers in a particular trade are able to take such advantage of the necessities of their work people as to hire them for wages actually insufficient to provide enough food, clothing, and shelter to maintain them in average health; if they are able to work them for hours so long as to deprive them of adequate rest and recreation; and if they can subject them to conditions so dangerous and unsanitary as positively to shorten their lives, that trade is clearly obtaining a supply of labor force which it does not pay for. Such parasitic trades are not drawing any money subsidy from the incomes of other classes, but in thus deteriorating the physique, intelligence, and character of their operatives they are drawing on the capital stock of the nation." (130)


(130) Webb, "Industrial Democracy," vol. ii., p. 749.

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