Library Collections: Document: Full Text

I spoke of the labor done in tenement homes. Like nearly every other question that has a bearing on the condition of the poor and of the wage-earners, this one of the child home-workers has recently been up for discussion. The first official contribution to it was a surprise, and not least to the health officers who furnished it. According to the tenement-house census, in the entire mass of nearly a million and a quarter of tenants, only two hundred and forty-nine children under fourteen years of age were found at work in living rooms by the Sanitary Police. To anyone acquainted with the ordinary aspect of tenement life the statement seemed preposterous, and there are some valid reasons for believing that the policemen missed rather more than they found. They were seeking that which, when found, would furnish proof of law-breaking against the parent or employer, a fact of which these were fully aware. Hence their coming, uniformed and in search of children, into a tenement where such were at work, could scarcely fail to give those a holiday who were not big enough to be palmed off as fifteen at least. Nevertheless, I suspect the policemen were much nearer right than may be readily believed. Their census took no account of the tenement factory in the back-yard, but only of the living-rooms, and it was made chiefly during school hours. Most of the little slaves, as of those older in years, were found in the East Side tenements just spoken of, where the work often only fairly begins after the factory has shut down for the day and the stores have released their army of child-laborers. Had the policemen gone their rounds after dark, they would have found a different state of affairs. The record of school-attendance in the district shows that forty-seven attended day-school for every one who went to night-school.

The same holds good with the Bohemians, who are, if anything, more desperately poor than the Russian Jews, and have proportionally greater need of their children's labor to help eke out the family income. The testimony of the principal of the Industrial School in East Seventy-third Street, for instance, where there are some three hundred and odd Bohemian children in daily attendance, is to the effect that the mothers "do not want them to stay a minute after three o'clock," and if they do, very soon come to claim them, so that they may take up their places at the bench, rolling cigars or stripping tobacco-leaves for the father, while the evening meal is being got ready. The Bohemian has his own cause for the reserve that keeps him a stranger in a strange land after living half his life among us; his reception has not been altogether hospitable, and it is not only his hard language and his sullen moods that are to blame. Yet, even he will "drive his children to school with sticks," and the teacher has only to threaten the intractable ones with being sent home to bring them 'round. And yet, it is not that they are often cruelly treated there. The Bohemian simply proposes that his child shall enjoy the advantages that are denied him -- denied partly perhaps because of his refusal to accept them, but still from his point of view denied. And he takes a short cut to that goal by sending the child to school. The result is that the old Bohemian disappears in the first generation born upon our soil. His temper remains to some extent, it is true. He still has his surly streaks, refuses to sing or recite in school when the teacher or something else does not suit him, and can never be driven where yet he is easily led; but as he graduates into the public school and is thrown there into contact with the children of more light-hearted nationalities, he grows into that which his father would have long since become, had he not got a wrong start, a loyal American, proud of his country, and a useful citizen.

But when the State has done its best by keeping the child at school, at least a part of the day -- and it has not done that until New York has been provided with a Truant Home to give effect to its present laws -- the real kernel of this question of child labor remains untouched yet. The trouble is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more and therefore less than when they began, and with the years that should have prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery. How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor in denying to our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting in foreign workmen in shoals to crowd our market, a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.

The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of improving the condition of the poor, who said to me: "They are down on the scrub-level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to another generation that is so much worse off to start with." She spoke of the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the children.