CHAPTER V

WAGE-EARNING CHILDREN

Children and home work—Boot making—Box making—All night at match box making—“Can do nearly everything”—A boy tooth brush maker—A boy belt maker—Polishing “spindle legs”—Children and laundry work—Errands—Street sellers—Boys in bakehouses—In brick fields—Girls and heavy trays of jam—Half timers’ heavy loads—Things as they were—Terrors of the early cotton mills—A five year old maker of “blonde net”—Miss Edgeworth’s “Ellen”—Mrs Hogg and wage-earning children—Children in American cotton mills—The glass bottle works—Effects of juvenile work on health—On education—On morals—On industrial efficiency.

The very worst feature of underpaid labour is that it tends to make wage earners of children and, in so doing, deteriorates the coming generation of adult wage earners. Where work is carried on in the home, the temptation to press children into the service is very great. The tedious process of fetching and carrying work from and to the factory or workshop generally falls to their lot; indeed, workers who have no children of their own not infrequently hire a child, for a few pence, to perform that duty. The time of a child is considered to be of little value—of less value than the three halfpence or twopence earned by the home worker in the hour or more that is often spent in waiting. Not a few children are habitually late for school, in consequence of being thus employed. Here is an instance.

“Jane B. Standard 6. Age 13. Father a potman at 25s. a week. Mother machines uppers of boots; common goods, 10d. a dozen; better, 1s. 3d. a dozen. Jane sews on buttons, cuts apart work, inks round button holes. A little brother, aged nine, does buttons” (_i.e._, I suppose, sews them on). “Mother, who does sometimes three dozen in a day, sometimes only three pairs, begins work at 7 A.M. Jane begins at 7.45. She goes to the shop for work, in the morning, and carries it in—a heavy load of three dozen pairs sometimes—when she comes home from school. She gets late for school, and is only in time in the afternoons.”

At the same school, a girl of eleven, Alice J., pastes in the soles of babies’ shoes and sews together the pairs. A sister “sews and beats.” These are white buck shoes, and are paid at the rate of 1s. 1d. to 1s. 3d. a dozen. Two dozen can be done in a day. The father is a cabinet maker in regular work; the mother a cleaner (apparently at an office or warehouse). The sister, of 18 or 19, makes 10s. a week. The little Alice works from 12 to 1, and again from 5.30 to 6.30, doing in that time a dozen or fifteen pairs; she reckons that it takes her five minutes to finish a pair, or perhaps twenty minutes for six pairs.

Esther S., aged ten, and a sister aged six, help their mother at the midday break, and also in the evening, in lining and covering boxes. 5d. a gross is paid for the smaller sort; 1s. 9d. for the larger sort. The work of the children is said to be absolutely necessary. “Dreadful home; nice woman,” is the observation of the visitor whose notes I have been permitted to use.

A schoolfellow of Esther’s, Sarah W., is thirteen years old and in Standard 4. Her father was in prison. Her mother drinks. These parents hid their children for eight months, and the educational authorities had great difficulty in finding them. This child, “a very bright girl,” used to stay up all night making match boxes, so as to get them taken in by 11 the next morning. She now works, between school times, at capping sticks.

Another little girl sews and opens Japanese fish and poultry baskets, and sews the handles upon string bags; she also sometimes makes the bags. She does not like the work, because it makes her hands sore and is hard work. “I can do nearly everything,” this person of thirteen is reported as saying.

Employment out of school hours is not of course confined to girls. Stanley G., aged eleven, works from 5 to 7, wiring tooth brushes, and can do seven in an hour; 3½d. a dozen is paid for them. The visitor notes that he had a sore face.

Alfred D., age 13, Standard 7, helps in making white kid belts, receives 1d. in the dozen, and can do fifteen or sixteen dozen in the week.

George W., who is thirteen years old, and only in Standard 3, does wood chopping and dislikes it, because it hurts his hands. His mother “does frame work,” and his father, looking glasses.

Thomas P., who is thirteen, and in Standard 5, polishes spindle legs for a cabinet maker, from 5 to 8 every evening, and from 9 to 2 on Saturdays. He receives 2s. 6d. a week; and announces that he is going to be a tobacconist—a calling for which the polishing of furniture legs hardly seems a valuable preparation.

Cases like these might be multiplied almost indefinitely.

“At a recent enquiry during the spring of this year, it was found that in a Hackney school one-fourth of the girls were engaged in match box making, steel covering, baby shoe making and fish basket sewing. This latter work is of a specially disagreeable character, and little girls often complain that the manipulation of the reeds is a most painful process. Children working with their parents at home are frequently kept at their sewing or pasting until ten or eleven o’clock at night. They are sent to “shop” before coming to school in the morning, and many of them are never marked for regular attendance. Particularly severe is the lot of the children of small laundresses, who are often employed, both in housework and in ironing in a steam laden atmosphere, two or three nights weekly till ten o’clock, and all day Saturday.”[32]

Other children are employed by shopkeepers; milk and newspapers are delivered before and after school, boys are employed by grocers, greengrocers, &c., to carry out goods, and—sometimes for incredibly long hours—by barbers. Girls run errands and match stuffs and trimmings. In the Parliamentary Return obtained from school teachers by Sir John Gorst in 1899, out of 144,026 children, about 12% were described as engaged in street trading, exposed inevitably to every inclemency of weather and to all the hazards of promiscuous companionship, while acquiring habits that unfit them for regular work later in life. Moreover, the street seller, juvenile no less than adult, is apt to seek for customers in the public house. Very few, comparatively, of employed children are engaged in work that is likely to be of use to them industrially in their maturer life; and even of those few, some are working under bad conditions. The Factory Inspectors’ Reports are seldom free from instances of the overwork of children. In last year’s, for example, mention is made of boys under thirteen years of age, and even under twelve, being found, on several occasions, at work in bakehouses. One boy of twelve, who was found by the inspector clearing ashes from the oven, before 6 in the morning, had for two or three years been employed, before school, in delivering rolls, and at the midday break, as well as after school, in running errands.[33]

Several children under 13 years of age were found working full time in brick fields.[34]

A bad case is noted on p. 99: “A lad of 15, employed in a large tin works in West Wales, had started work at 6.30 A.M. on a certain Monday morning and continued working till 6 A.M. on the following Tuesday. During this period he only left the works for one hour, viz., 5 till 6 P.M. on Monday, when he went home and took a short rest. He had therefore worked during the whole twenty-four hours with only about one hour’s rest.”

The chief lady Inspector says, on pp. 302–3, “Carrying of jam and of jam-pots, empty or full, is still done largely by women and girls, and I have cautioned several occupiers about the weights I have found little girls lifting. A 40-pound tray is a heavy load for a girl of fourteen, and the repeated carrying of such trays all day long must have a bad effect.”

Nor are jam makers the only employers who offend in this way. Cases have occurred in “textile factories, the places where one most expects to find labour-saving methods, but undoubtedly whenever there is a fairly abundant supply of young, cheap labour, there is less anxiety to introduce these, and carrying, pushing or pulling heavy weights is one of the duties of the apprentice in almost every trade. In a cotton weaving factory in Lancashire I found children and young persons[35] carrying cloth from the shed to the warehouse in an upper floor. One bundle was proved to weigh 44 lbs. and another 40 lbs. In a similar factory, also in Lancashire, I was not able to have weighed any of the tins of weft which children were found carrying to the looms, but from the evident effort it was to raise the tin to the shoulder, it was clear that the weight was too great. In both cases the entire weight was on one shoulder, and it was pitiful to see the twisted little figures of the children doing their best to accomplish more than they were physically fit for.”[36]

On the same page Miss Martindale speaks of a boy whom she saw in 1903 carrying a piece of clay “weighing 69 lbs., his own weight being 77 lbs. During the two years which has elapsed he has hardly grown, and he informed me that he weighs at the present time 81 lbs., showing an increase of only four lbs.”

While it is reported that in Scotland “the half time system has almost ceased to exist,” there has recently been in some districts of England, a marked increase in the number of half timers, owing to the unexampled prosperity of the cotton trade, and the difficulty of satisfying the demand for labour in that industry. In a good many districts, a half timer may be as young as twelve years old.

What the conditions of children’s employment would be, if there were no Factory Acts, may be guessed by the nature of the first Act of Parliament passed in their interests. In 1784 certain Manchester physicians investigated an outbreak of fever. They failed to discover its primary cause, but reported that “we are decided in our opinion that the disorder has been supported, diffused and aggravated by the ready communication of contagion ... and by the injury done to young persons through confinement and too long continued labour, to which several evils the cotton mills have given occasion.” They went on to say that they regarded a longer recess at noon and a shorter working day as “essential to the present health and future capacity for labour of those who are under the age of fourteen; for the active recreations of childhood and youth are necessary to the right growth and conformation of the human body.” The Manchester magistrates, who had asked for this report, resolved not to allow in future “indentures of Parish Apprentices whereby they shall be bound to owners of cotton mills and other works in which children are obliged to work in the night or more than ten hours in the day.”

The condition of these unfortunate pauper children was wretched in the extreme. They were “sent down from the workhouses of London and other great towns to any manufacturer who would take them, a small premium being usually paid as an inducement. There was no system of control or inspection from outside; the factories were frequently set up in some remote glen or lonely valley where a waterfall or stream provided cheap power for the machinery and where the restraint of public opinion and observation was almost entirely absent. There can be no reasonable doubt that these unhappy children were often worked almost or entirely to death by their masters or by their overseers whose interest it was to work the apprentices to the utmost, their pay being in proportion to the labour they could extract. Sir Samuel Romilly says in his diary that he had known cases where the apprentices had been actually murdered by their masters in order to get fresh premiums with new apprentices.”[37]

The Act of 1802, the first on this subject, dealt only with apprentices and only with the textile trades. It limited the hours of work to twelve a day, forbade night work, and required a modicum of elementary instruction; moreover it provided for inspection.

By and by, it became apparent that the evils at which this measure had been aimed were not confined to any one group of child workers. As late as 1844, Sir Robert Peel told the House of Commons that in the potteries, “children worked in a temperature of from 100 to 130, carrying pieces weighing 3 lbs, and each child carrying two pieces at a time. The calculation is that the child will carry per day some thousands of pounds weight. In manufactures other than cotton, work might sometimes be continued thirteen, fifteen, even seventeen or eighteen hours consecutively.”[38]

Nor was there any limit as to the earliness of the age at which a child might be set to work. About five or six seems to have been a common age for beginning. I have, myself, been acquainted with a woman of about eighty years old who told me that as a child of five, when she was too little to reach the work table and had to stand upon a stool, she was employed all day long in “running blonde net.” Evidence was brought forward—exactly as similar evidence is brought forward to-day in America—to show that it was not really injurious to children of nine years old and under to be kept working for 14 or 15 hours daily; and, no doubt, there were persons not in the least inhumane who really thought so. The best of us are liable to social blindness, and able to see but a small part of contemporary evils that become plainly visible and unendurable to succeeding generations. An instance of such blindness, in the case of the disinterested and open minded Maria Edgeworth, may be found in the pages of her _Rosamond_—that delightful children’s book too little known to the modern child. In reading the passage it should be remembered that the whole Edgeworth family were persons of unusual enlightenment and benevolence, and that the view presented probably typifies the bettermost stratum of contemporary sentiment.

Rosamond, with her parents, goes to visit a cotton mill conducted by “a very sensible, humane man, who did not think only of how he could get so much work done for himself, but also how he could preserve the health of those who worked for him; and how he could make them as comfortable and happy as possible.” This good employer was in all probability drawn from some member of the Strutt family. By and by, while the visitors are resting and eating “cherries, ripe cherries, strawberries and cream,” provided by “this hospitable gentleman,” Godfrey calls to his parents to “‘look out of this window.... All the people are going from work. Look what numbers of children are passing through this great yard!’

“The children passed close by the window at which Godfrey and Rosamond had stationed themselves. Among the little children came some tall girls and among these there was one, a girl about twelve years old, whose countenance particularly pleased them. Several of the younger ones were crowding round her.

“‘Laura, Laura, look at this girl! What a good countenance she has,’ said Rosamond, ‘and how fond the little children seem of her!’

“‘That is Ellen. She is an excellent girl,’ said the master of the manufactory, ‘and those little children have good reason to be fond of her.’”

He then relates how a good clergyman, who had taught the children and won their grateful affection, had been appointed to a post elsewhere.

“‘All the children in the manufactory were sorry that he was going away, and they wished to do something that should prove to him their respect and gratitude.

“‘They considered and consulted among themselves. They had no money, nothing of their own to give, but their labour; and they agreed that they would work a certain number of hours beyond their usual time, to earn money to buy a silver cup, which they might present to him the day before that appointed for his departure. They were obliged to sit up a great part of the night to work to earn their shares. Several of the little children were not able to bear the fatigue and the want of sleep. For this they were very sorry, and when Ellen saw how sorry they were, she pitied them, and she did more than pity them. After she had earned her own share of the money to be subscribed for buying the silver cup, she sat up every night a certain time to work, to earn the shares of all these little children.

“‘Ellen never said anything of her intentions, but went on working steadily, till she had accomplished her purpose. I used to see her night after night, and used to fear she would hurt her health, and often begged her not to labour so hard, but she said, “It does me good, sir.”’”

The modern reader will sigh to think of what the admirable Ellen’s health and strength would probably be at thirty, and will find it difficult to forgive the complacency of the employer in whose mill she was permitted so to squander her physical resources.

In our own country the general development of factory legislation has gone far towards stopping the overwork of children in mills and factories; though it is only of late years, and thanks to the exertions of Mrs Hogg, that the law has begun to attempt the regulation of children’s labour out of school hours either in their own homes or for outside employers.[39]

In the United States, however, where each State is free to make its own regulations, there is, at this present day, one State (Georgia) in which the work of children is absolutely unrestricted, and several in which the practical limitation is extremely small. Children of any age may be, and actually are, kept at work in the cotton mills of the Southern States, precisely as they used to be in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. “Only last year, in North Carolina, the testimony of two doctors was introduced to show that there was no need from a hygienic point of view, for a law forbidding girls under fourteen to stand at their work for twelve hours a day, or for boys or girls under fourteen to work a twelve-hour night.”[40]

Boys of twelve may still legally work in the coal mines of Kansas and in all mines in Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina; and do so work. “No colliery has been visited in which children have not been found employed at ages prohibited by the law of the State.”[41]

In some American glass bottle works, quite small boys are kept running to and fro with loads of hot glass all through the day or the night as the case may be. Mrs Kelley, reporting personal visits of inspection, says that she found it impossible to get from any boy “a consecutive statement as to his name, address or parentage. A boy would say, ‘My name is Jimmie’; and then trot to the cooling oven with his load of bottles; and returning would say, in answer to a fresh question, ‘I live in a shanty boat,’ then trot to the moulder for another load of bottles; and returning say, ‘I’m going to be eight next summer,’ and so on. Among twenty-four lads questioned during one night inspection, not one ventured to pause long enough to put together two of the foregoing statements.”[42]

“There was no restriction upon night work and pitifully little children were found at work at two o’clock in the morning.”[43]

Some of these children are directly imported—as the little serfs in English cotton mills often were—from other districts; and in these States of America, as in England once, not only ruthless employers but worthless adults of their own class, parents and others, make profits out of the toil of half grown children.

“A worn out and dissolute glass blower, who had a pension of $8 a month and five children under the age of fourteen years had recently married a widow with six children under fifteen years. Father, mother and the eleven children were living in a tent between the river and the works where several of the children were employed, some by night and some by day, so that the beds in the tent were used by different children, one set rising to go to work when the others returned to sleep.”[44]

Upon the future of these poor children the effect of this early toil is most injurious. Physically, mentally and morally, the children—the citizens of the next generation—are damaged.

Significant is the remark of a mother quoted in one of the articles in _Child Labor_: “‘When Charley works on the night shift, he hasn’t any appetite.’” (p. 303.)

Doubtless the half timers in a good English mill are examples of children working under the best of existing conditions; and manufacturers are fond of assuring us how good these conditions are. Yet I shall never forget the painful impression made upon myself by the peculiar mixture of pallor and eagerness on the faces of the little half timers, the first time that I went over a weaving mill. The working place was light and airy, and the situation, just outside a healthy Northern town, was admirable; the work was not physically hard, and the management, as I was assured by a trustworthy witness, who was himself at work there, considerate. He, for his part, seemed unaware that the children looked ill. Incidentally, however, he mentioned that a large proportion of his fellow workers drank; and I felt that it would be interesting to know how many of them had been half timers, and whether early exhaustion might not lie at the root of their intemperance. As to the children, I am quite sure that any London doctor, or any woman accustomed to the care of children, would have thought their appearance unhealthy and their expression of face abnormal.

Evidence more valuable than any untrained observer’s impression is on record in regard to London school children. Dr Thomas, assistant Medical Officer of Health to the London County Council, in investigating the physical condition of 2000 school children, in 14 different schools, gave special attention to 384 wage earners among the boys. “Of this number 233 showed signs of fatigue, 140 were proved to be anæmic, 131 had severe nerve signs, 64 were suffering from deformities resulting from the carrying of heavy weights, and 51 had severe heart signs. Barbers’ boys were found to suffer most in physique, 72 per cent being anæmic, 63 per cent showing severe nerve strain, and 27 per cent severe heart affection.”[45]

Before the Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment of school children, appointed in 1901, evidence was given by Alderman Watts, of Manchester, of the abnormal death-rate among children in industrial schools, many of whom had drifted thither from the streets; and in 1904 Sir Lambert Ormsby, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, of Dublin, gave to the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, particulars of the miserable physique of the little street sellers and of the many cases of pneumonia among them which had been brought to his notice in the children’s hospitals.[46]

In July 1905, when an inquiry was held by the Home Office into the Bye-laws for the Employment of Children proposed by the London County Council, Mr Marshall Jackman, of the Michael Faraday School, Walworth, gave evidence that, out of 227 boys in that school, 27 were at work of whom 13 were employed more than eight hours a day, and 13 after nine o’clock at night. All except six were in poor health. One had broken down altogether; one had a weak circulation; one had fainted in school during the previous week; yet another had a defective circulation. In one single week, nine boys who worked out of school hours were taken ill in school, were obliged to leave the class and suspend lessons for the rest of the afternoon.[47]

Very similar evidence may be found in the pages of Mrs Kelley’s volume, in those of _Child Labor_, and in the Report of the American Consumers’ League. On p. 297 of _Child Labor_ appears the following paragraph which should make every British reader thankful for the comparative stringency of our own Factory Acts: “A recent study of the reports of factory inspectors in several of our industrial States shows a remarkable uniformity in the percentage of accidents. We find in the textile mills, foundries and iron mills, glass houses and machine shops employing children that, in proportion to the number of children employed, accidents to children under sixteen years of age are from 250 to 300% more frequent than to adults.”

Educationally, the results of early industrial labour are naturally disastrous. “In none of the great Southern States,” writes Mrs Kelley, “in which young children are employed in manufacture are 80% of the children between 10 and 14 years of age able to read and write.”[48]

At the Home Office enquiry, Mr Marshall Jackman stated that although the boys who worked out of school hours were of more than average mental capacity, they were more than twelve months behind the average of the whole school in educational standing, and moreover were low down even in their lower classes. Of the 27 boys in his school who were employed, eleven were one standard below the average, two, two standards below; four, three standards below; and one, four standards below the general average.

A report prepared in 1901 for the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades gives the opinions of 14 head masters, who are practically unanimous as to the detrimental effect upon the children’s progress of long hours of work out of school. No. 3 says: “I consider this exploiting of children is one of the greatest crimes against the children themselves, and the greatest possible hindrance to their education.” No. 6 thinks “there can be no doubt that children who have such long spells of employment are heavily handicapped”; and No. 7 says: “There is no doubt whatever that these long hours stand very much in the way of educational progress.” “Message running,” says No. 14, “certainly tends to sharpen intelligence of a superficial kind but weakens the power of sustained attention and vigorous mental work in school.”[49]

When we remember that the Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment of school children—a cautious official body—estimated the _minimum_ number of school children employed in the United Kingdom at 200,000, and that there is no reason to suppose that number materially lessened, we perceive that the deterioration of national education from this cause alone must be by no means trifling.

Of moral injury, especially from street selling, there is abundant evidence, both in our own country and in the United States. The committee of 1901 received a statement from the Town Clerk of Newcastle on Tyne that children had been found in the streets afraid to go home, lest they should be punished for not bringing in enough money. The children often, in consequence, slept out, gambled or stole, the girls sinking lower yet in order to procure sufficient money to take home. The number of such children he reported to have increased greatly of late years, and many of them were, he feared, on the threshold of a life of vice and crime. The Chief Constable of Manchester presented a list of 16 women known as degraded characters, who had formerly been street sellers. The Chief Constable of Birmingham produced tables showing that of 713 children engaged in street trading during July 1901, 458 had been prosecuted for various offences during the previous six months. 163 of the number were girls.[50]

Boys in American glass works are almost proverbially ill conducted. One manufacturer, in Ohio, said, in answer to an appeal for the education of the boys: “You can’t do anything for them. The little devils are vicious from their birth.” Statements of the same kind used to be made about the poor little victims in the English mills but it is not observed that the modern half timer, whose hours and health are protected by law, is any more vicious than other children. The principal of a Pennsylvanian school sets the corruption of the boys at a much later date than infancy. He says: “‘My observation is that when a boy leaves school and goes into the factory at twelve or thirteen, by the time he is fifteen or sixteen he is too foul-mouthed to associate with decent people.’”[51]

Street occupations on the farther as on the hither side of the Atlantic are shown to form an easy avenue to worse things. “Although the street trades in Washington engage only one-fourth of the total number of children engaged in all occupations, yet of the number of children under 15 who have gone to the reform school, or who have been turned over by the courts to the care of the probation officers, over two-thirds have come from the ranks of the children engaged in the street trades.”[52]

“A judge told the writer that one-third of all the delinquent boys brought before him had at one time or another served the public as messenger boys.”[53]

Nor are those children of school age who go to work often found to be acquiring any sort of technical training or industrial skill. On the contrary, indeed; their employment is almost always of a kind that rather unfits them than prepares them to become industrially efficient. Sadly true are the words written by Mrs Kelley out of prolonged and wide experience. “The State which accepts the plea of poverty and permits the children of the poorest citizens to labour prematurely, accepts the heritage of new poverty flowing from two sources; namely, on the one hand, the relaxed efforts of fathers of families to provide for them, and on the other hand the corruption of weak children by inappropriate occupations which involve temptations beyond the child’s power of resistance and the exhaustion of strong children by overwork. It is exactly the most conscientious and promising children who are worked into the grave or into nervous prostration, or into that saddest state of all, the moral fatigue which enables a man to sit idly about for years while his wife or his sister or his children support him.”[54]

Thus the employment of the young which is generally regarded as a result of poverty is really one of the causes of poverty, and that for several reasons. It tends to lower the wages of the adult worker and tends to make the family, instead of the father, the industrial unit; it diminishes the adult working power of the child itself,[55] and it also retards the progress of every trade in which it occurs, for as Mr Schoenhof says: “The cheapness of human labour where it prevails is the greatest incentive for the perpetuation of obsolete methods.”[56]

Thus, in every respect, the industrial employment of children is an injury to the community; and it is more than possible (I am not recommending the course as a practicable one) that, in the long run, the nation would save money by undertaking the whole support and education up to the age of sixteen of every child who now works for wages. Short of this extreme measure, however, there is little doubt that, except for the fear lest hardships might be intensified, public opinion is ready for far more stringent limitation of child labour. If it were known that the wages of parents were, even approximately, adequate (as they would be under a Minimum Wage Law) most of the objections now made to the restriction of child labour would die away. That fact alone is no inconsiderable argument in favour of a Minimum Wage Law.