With an issue which is so far reaching in its effect and an exponent who is so thoroughly conversant with every feature of the difficulties with which she has to deal there is no wonder that the child labor question has commanded such an attention throughout nearly every state in the union with extensive manufactures. At the instance of the Fortnightly club of Moline, Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago, last evening at the First Baptist Church lectured on the evils of the child labor and dealt successively on every phase of the question as concerns the moral and physical effects of the evil. In all those cities in this country where there are any extensive [manufactories] Miss Addams is too well known to need an introduction. She was born in Cedarville, Ill., Sept. 6, 1860. She was educated in the Rockford Female Seminary and graduated from that institution in 1881. In the year 1889 in company with Miss Ellen G. Starr, Miss Addams organized and started the Hull House in Chicago. Since that time the Hull House social settlement has been under the direct leadership of Miss Addams. Her great ability and will power and her power for doing good in the social movement in every part of the country has reflected greatly to her credit and had its origin in the social settlement of Hull House. She has absolutely no patience with the theoretically inclined social workers. Her work is practical in every instance as her success has demonstrated.
In 1895 there were in Hull House 24 members who had lived there continuously for a period of six months. Now the membership is enormous. There are about 32 clubs all formed by members of the institution, having headquarters in Hull House. Early in its career, Miss Addams bethought herself of the kindergarten scheme and following her ideas erected a kindergarten in which the women who labored through the day might leave their children free of charge and be assured of the fact that they would be well cared for. However, later on this scheme was not deemed advisable from the fact that there were no funds with which to cover the expenses, and thereafter a charge of 5 cents per day was made for each child. This has been a success from the start. Dinners were served to the workingmen at 10 cents each, another innovation which proved a success.
Of late years, however, Miss Addams has devoted a great part of her time among the factory children studying the problem of child labor. At the First Baptist Church last evening her lecture was in part as follows:
"As a great many of you know, there is now pending before the Illinois legislature a law to abolish child labor in the state of Illinois; that no child under 14 years of age who does not come up to the requirements of the provision will be allowed to work in any of the factories of the state. The state of Illinois has been rather neglectful of the child labor law for the reason that she has always had it in mind that she was an agricultural state and not a manufacturing state. However, this illusion has now been dispensed with and the people who thought that Illinois was an agricultural state are now beginning to think that it was all tradition. Massachusetts is among the states which have enacted child labor laws, but the laws of Massachusetts place the age of the children at 18, which is far above the age called for in the law before the Illinois legislature. New York state and England has had child labor laws since the year 1802. The first amendment requires that the child shall not be allowed to work at night, before or after the hours of from 6 in the evening until three o'clock in the morning. The second amendment requires that the applicant for a permit must be able to read and write the English language. This was thought at first to be a rather stringent rule, as many of the children were foreign born. However, as the language of this country is for the most part English it was thought that instead of requiring the child to be able to read or write any language he should be made to read and understand English.
"This requirement will have the effect of compulsory education, so that in the future those parents and children who have secured permits to work will find that it requires something more than the simple word of the parent to allow the child to work. Some time ago an examination was made to secure some statistics on the subject of how many children had legal permits. It was found that about 6,000 children had false affidavits and were working in violation of the labor laws. In the past all that had been required of the parent was to go to the notary and make oath to the fact that his child was of age and the affidavit was forthcoming. Foreigners, as a rule, are slow to comprehend that they are perjuring themselves every time they take oath but they are accustomed to an oath in the mother country which has a great deal of solemnity attached to it, consequently they are lax in this when all that is required of them is to go to the notary's office and pay 25 cents for their certificate, as they call it.
"The reason that the manufacturers are such strong exponents of child labor is because it is cheaper -- no other reason. Where men in the past had charge of the work which then required skill and intelligence and strength the work has now been given over entirely to machinery which does not call for either strength or skill. This being the case, it is a waste of money to employ grown up men and women to do the work which a child could as well do. The huge weaving machines which in the past were operated by men of skill are now taken in charge by children of no strength and very little intelligence and the work turned out is greater. Russia, a country which seems to be backward in nearly everything else, has a child labor law for the protection of its children. Other foreign countries have good laws, although the age limit is not very high. In the southern states of our country is seen the greatest evil of the child labor question. Alabama has had some light legislation on the subject, South Carolina has had none, and Georgia has had none, and the western states are not far in the lead of these southern states. The reason for this laxity of child labor [page 2] laws in the southern states is because of the fact that northern capital is at this time doing a great deal of building in the south. The southern people are well satisfied for the reason that the mills are being brought south to the cotton instead of the cotton being shipped north to the mills and the southern people are afraid to discourage any attempt to bring this capital into the country. As a rule, the people of the south who remove to the textile towns are people who have been farmers and who have been lured to the towns in the expectation that they would be given profitable occupations, but when they have labored in close and stifling textile mills for a period of time it begins to tell on their health and they are soon disabled. The [outdoor] life to which they have been accustomed will not permit of their working inside. Then again the men are not in the least skilled in the use of their fingers in manipulating the machines and are too old to learn. They are clumsy in the extreme and are not at all fitted for the work. One of the greatest arguments which the employers have is that the children are supporting widowed mothers and that their wages add a very comfortable sum to the support of the family. In nearly every instance where the conditions have been looked into it has been found that both parents of the children were living and that they had retired at the age of 34 years to live from the wages earned by their children. In some of the factories it is not a matter of strength with the children. They are paid, as in the instance of the soap manufacturers, $3 per thousand for wrapping the bars of soap in paper. If the child is very fast he or she may earn about $6 per week but the child is wearing himself out, and it will not be long before he is too [old] to secure employment and is too far gone physically to admit of recuperation. I can recall the instance of a visit to a factory in Georgia where I saw a little girl at work taking care of 110 spindles and working from 6 o'clock in the evening until 9 o'clock in the morning. The spindles were so high that in order for her to reach them it was necessary for her to push a box about with her to stand on. Her ankles and hands were badly swollen and in every way she showed the evil effects of factory labor.
"Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright has compiled some statistics which are of importance in determining the percentage of men who support their families by their own labor. In the textile mills it was found that only 33 [percent] of the men were able to support their families and 66 [percent] were obliged to have their wives and children at work in order to live. Among the bricklayers it was found that 97 [percent] of the men were able to support their families although they worked but certain seasons. The answer to this is easy, for the reason that the bricklayer receives his compensation according to the law of natural wage earners. The textile worker is far below this.
"Then again the product of the factories is far below that of factories in which skilled workmen are employed. England was the first country to discover this and she was not slow in following in the footsteps of France and Germany, the products of whose mills is known the world over for its excellence. The cotton of the south, that is, woven in the factories of the south, has only one-fourth of the value of the same product of the New England mills and has only one-twentieth of the value of the same product in France. After a child has grown into young manhood he has no longer the desire to work as a child and he wishes to learn a trade, but he is fitted to learn no trade because of the fact that he has gone from factory to factory as the different seasons of work opened and has no occupation which he can follow after he has become of age, to work at a trade. The usual routine of the average factory boy or girl is to work in the candy factories in the fall and winter, in the sweat shops in the winter and the canning factory in the summer. None of these occupations require any particular skill and the [employees] are as ignorant in the end as they were in the beginning."
At the close of her lecture, Miss Addams answered a number of questions bearing on the subject: "Who Will Enforce the Law?" A state factory inspector will be required to assume control. "How do the Large Store Schools Rank as an Educator?" Store schools are merely a subterfuge to get the child.
Comments