The Bitter Cry of the Children John Spargo 1237 downloads.pdf

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Bitter Cry of the
Children
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Bitter Cry of the Children

Author: John Spargo

Author of introduction, etc.: Robert Hunter

Release date: May 9, 2018 [eBook #57125]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57125

Credits: Produced by Richard Tonsing, Bryan Ness and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BITTER
CRY OF THE CHILDREN ***

THE BITTER CRY OF THE CHILDREN

A TYPICAL SCENE

The matron of a Day Nursery examining a
child’s throat. The two “Little Mothers” are
typical.

THE BITTER CRY OF THE CHILDREN

BY

JOHN SPARGO
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

ROBERT HUNTER
AUTHOR OF “POVERTY”

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1906

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1906,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1906.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO MY FRIEND

MRS. WILLIAM SHARMAN

Fide et Amore

INTRODUCTION

I count myself fortunate in having had a hand in bringing this remarkable
and invaluable volume into existence. Quite incidentally in my book
Poverty I made an estimate of the number of underfed children in New York
City. If our experts or our general reading public had been at all familiar
with the subject, my estimate would probably have passed without
comment, and, in any case, it would not have been considered
unreasonable. But the public did not seem to realize that this was merely
another way of stating the volume of distress, and, consequently, for several
days the newspapers throughout the country discussed the statement and in
some instances severely criticised it. One prominent charitable organization,
thinking that my estimate referred to starving children, undertook, without
delay, to provide meals for the children. In the midst of the excitement Mr.
Spargo kindly volunteered to investigate the facts at first hand. His inquiry
was so searching and impartial and the data he gathered so interesting and
valuable that I urged him to put his material in some permanent form. The
following admirable study of this problem is the result of that suggestion.
I am safe in saying that this book is a truly powerful one, destined, I
believe, to become a mighty factor in awakening all classes of our people to
the necessity of undertaking measures to remedy the conditions which exist.
The appeal of adults in poverty is an old appeal, so old indeed that we have
become in a measure hardened to its pathos and insensitive to its tragedy.
But this book represents the cry of the child in distress, and it will touch
every human heart and even arouse to action the stolid and apathetic. The
originality of the book lies in the mass of proof which the author brings
before the reader showing that it is not alone, as most of our charitable
experts believe, the misery of the neglected or the actively maltreated child
that should receive attention. Even more important is the misery of that one

whose whole future is darkened and perhaps blasted by reason of the fact
that during his early years of helplessness he has not received those
elements of nutritious food which are necessary to a wholesome physical
life.
Few of us sufficiently realize the powerful effect upon life of adequate
nutritious food. Few of us ever think of how much it is responsible for our
physical and mental advancement or what a force it has been in forwarding
our civilized life. Mr. Spargo does not attempt in this book to make us
realize how much the more favored classes owe to the fact that they have
been able to obtain proper nutrition. His effort here is to show the fearful
devastating effect upon a certain portion of our population of an inadequate
and improper food supply. He shows the relation of the lack of food to
poverty. The child of poverty is brought before us. His weaknesses, his
mental and physical inferiority, his failure, his sickness, his death, are
shown in their relation to improper and inadequate food. He first proves to
our satisfaction that this child of misery is born into the world with
powerful potentialities, and he then shows, with tragic power, how the lack
of proper food during infancy makes it inevitable that this child become, if
he lives at all, an incompetent, physical weakling. It is perhaps unnecessary
to point out that the problem of poverty is largely summed up in the fate of
this child, and when the author deals with this subject he is in reality
treating of poverty in the germ.
There have been many books written about the children of the poor, but, in
my opinion, none of them give us so impressive a statement as is contained
here of the most important and powerful cause of poverty. Among many
reasons which may be found for the existence of distress, the author has
taken one which seems to be more fundamental than the others. But, while
this is true, there is no dogmatic treatment of the problem, for the author
realizes that the causes of poverty in this country of abundance are
numerous. Indeed, wherever one looks, one may see conditions which are
fertile in producing it. Students of the poor find some of these causes in the
conditions surrounding the poor. Students of finance and of modern
industry find causes of poverty in the methods and constitution of this
portion of our society. The causes, therefore, of poverty cannot be gone into
fully in any partial study of modern society. It is even maintained, and not
without reason, that if all men were sober, competent, and industrious, there

would be no less poverty in the world. But however that may be, one thing
is certain, and that is that as the race as a whole could not have advanced
beyond savagery without a fortuitous provision of material necessities, so it
is not possible for the children of the poor to overcome their poverty until
they are assured in their childhood of the physical necessities of life. We
should have no civilization to-day, our entire race would still be a wild
horde of brutalized savages, but for the meat and milk diet or the grain diet
assured to our earliest forefathers. And it should not be forgotten that as this
is true of the life of the race, so is it true of that portion of our community
which lives in poverty unable to procure proper food to give its children.
This is the great fundamental fact which lies at the base of the problem of
poverty and which is the theme of this book. It is a fact which should be
best known to the men and women who work in the field of our
philanthropies, and yet it must be said that it is a fact which has heretofore
been almost entirely ignored by this class of workers.
For this reason I welcome this volume. I am convinced that it will mark the
beginning of an epoch of deeper study and of sounder philanthropy. I look
to see in the near future some effort made to establish a standard of physical
well-being for the children. I expect to see the community insisting that
some provision shall be made whereby every child born into the world will
receive sufficient food to enable him to possess enough vitality to overcome
unnecessary and preventable disease and to grow into a manhood physically
capable of satisfactorily competing in industrial or intellectual pursuits. I do
not believe that this is a dream impossible of realization. About a hundred
years ago our forefathers decided that there should be a universal standard
of literacy. To bring this about the following generations of men established
a free school system which was meant to assure to every child a certain
minimum of education. If that can be done for the mind, the other thing can
be done for the body. And when it is done for the body, we shall make
another striking advance in civilization not unlike that recorded in the
history of mankind when the free people of this American continent
established a system of free and universal education.
If such a momentous thing should follow the publication of this book, and
similar studies which will without doubt subsequently be made, its
publication would indeed mark an epoch. But, of course, it must be said that
before any far-reaching result can come, the general public must be

acquainted with the conditions which exist. It is for this reason that I hope
Mr. Spargo’s book will be read by hundreds of thousands of people, and
that it will awaken in them a determination to respond wisely and justly to
the bitter cry of the children of the poor.
ROBERT HUNTER.

PREFACE

The purpose of this volume is to state the problem of poverty as it affects
childhood. Years of careful study and investigation have convinced me that
the evils inflicted upon children by poverty are responsible for many of the
worst features of that hideous phantasmagoria of hunger, disease, vice,
crime, and despair which we call the Social Problem. I have tried to
visualize some of the principal phases of the problem—the measure in
which poverty is responsible for the excessive infantile disease and
mortality; the tragedy and folly of attempting to educate the hungry, ill-fed
school child; the terrible burdens borne by the working child in our modern
industrial system.
In the main the book is frankly based upon personal experience and
observation. It is essentially a record of what I have myself felt and seen.
But I have freely availed myself of the experience and writings of others, as
reference to the book itself will show. I have tried to be impartial and
unbiassed in my researches, and have not “winnowed the facts till only the
pleasing ones remained.” At times, indeed, I have found it necessary, while
writing this book, to abandon ideas which I had held and promulgated for
years. That is an experience not uncommon to those who submit opinions
formed as a result of general observation to strict scientific scrutiny. I had
long believed and had promulgated the opinion that the great mass of the
children of the poor were blighted before they were born. The evidence
given before the British Interdepartmental Committee, by recognized
leaders of the medical profession in England, pointed to a fundamentally
different view. According to that evidence, the number of children born
healthy and strong is not greater among the well-to-do classes than among
the very poorest. The testimony seemed so conclusive, and the
corroboration received from many obstetrical experts in this country was so

general, that I was forced to abandon as untenable the theory of antenatal
degeneration.
In view of the foregoing, I need hardly say that I do not claim any
originality for the view that Nature starts all her children, rich and poor,
physically equal, and that each generation gets practically a fresh start,
unhampered by the diseased and degenerate past.[A] The tremendous
sociological significance of this truth—if truth it be—will, I think, be
generally recognized. Readers of Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera will remember
the story of the dressmaker with a broken thigh, who was told by the
doctors in St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, that her bones were in all
probability brittle because her mother’s grandfather had been employed in
the manufacture of sulphur. If this theory of antenatal degeneration is
wrong, and we have not to reckon with grandfathers and great-grandfathers,
the solution of the problem of arresting and repairing the deterioration of
the race is made so much easier. It may be thought by some readers that I
have accepted the brighter, more hopeful view too readily, and with too
much confidence. I can only say that I have read all the available evidence
upon the other side, and found myself at last obliged to accept the brighter
view. I cannot but feel that the actual experience of obstetricians dealing
with thousands of natural human births every year is far more valuable and
conclusive than any number of artificial experiments upon guinea pigs,
mice, or other animals.
The part of the book devoted to the discussion of remedial measures will
probably attract more criticism than any other. I expect, and am prepared
for, criticism from those, on the one hand, who will accuse me of being too
radical and revolutionary, and, on the other hand, those who will say I have
ignored almost all radical measures. I have purposely refrained from
considering any of the far-reaching speculations of the “schools,” and
confined myself entirely to those measures which have been tried in various
places with sufficient success to warrant their general adoption, and which
do not involve any revolutionary change in our social system. I have tried,
in other words, to formulate a programme of practical measures, all of
which have been subjected to the test of experience.
A word of personal explanation may not be out of place here. I have been
privileged to know something of the leisure and luxury of wealth, and more
of the toil and hardship of poverty. When I write of hunger I write of what I

have experienced—not the enviable hunger of health, but the sickening
hunger of destitution. So, too, when I write of child labor. I know that
nothing I have written of the toil of little boys and girls, terrible as it may
seem to some readers, approaches the real truth in its horror. I have not tried
to write a sensational book, but to present a careful and candid statement of
facts which seem to me to be of vital social significance.
As far as possible, I have freely acknowledged my indebtedness to other
writers, either in the text or in the list of authorities at the end of the book. It
was, however, impossible thus to acknowledge all the help received from so
many willing friends in this and other countries. Hundreds of school
principals and teachers, physicians, nurses, settlement workers, public
officials, and others, in this country and in Europe, have aided me. It is
impossible to name them all, and I can only hope that they will find
themselves rewarded, in a measure, by the work to which they have
contributed so much.
I take this opportunity, however, of expressing my sincere thanks to Mr.
Robert Hunter; to Mr. Owen R. Lovejoy, of the National Child Labor
Committee; to Dr. George W. Goler, of Rochester, N.Y.; to Dr. S. E. Getty,
of St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Yonkers, N.Y.; to Dr. Louis Lichtschein, of
New York City; to Dr. George W. Galvin, of Boston, Mass.; and to
Professor G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, for many valuable
suggestions and criticisms. To Mr. Fernando Linderberg, of Copenhagen; to
his Excellency, Baron Mayor des Planches, the Italian Ambassador at
Washington; and to Professor Emile Vinck, of Brussels, I am indebted for
assistance in securing valuable reports which would otherwise have been
inaccessible. I am also indebted to my colleague, Miss C. E. A. Carman, of
Prospect House; and especially to Mr. W. J. Ghent for his expert assistance
in preparing the book for the press. Finally, I am indebted to my wife,
whose practical knowledge of factory conditions, especially as they relate to
women and children, has been of immense service to me.
J. S.
Prospect House, Yonkers, N.Y.
December, 1905.

A. For the necessary qualifications of this broad generalization see the
illustrative material in Appendix C, I.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction vii

Preface xiii

I. The Blighting of the Babies 1

II. The School Child 57

III. The Working Child 125

IV. Remedial Measures 218

V. Blossoms and Babies 263

Appendices:

A. How Foreign Municipalities Feed
their School Children 271

B. Report on the Vercelli System of
School Meals 288

C. Miscellaneous 291

Notes and Authorities 307

Index 325

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. A Typical Scene Frontispiece

FACING
PAGE

2. Three “Little Mothers” and their
Charges 1

3. Group of “Lung Block” Children 5

4. Rachitic Types 12

5. Babies whose Mothers Work 16

6. Police Station used as a “Clean Milk”
Depot 35

7. Babies of a New York Day Nursery 39

8. Group of Children whose Mothers are
employed away from their Homes 42

9. A Sample Report (facsimile letter) 46

10. Babies whose Mothers work cared for
in a Crèche 53

11. A “Lung Block” Child in a Tragically
Suggestive Position 60

12. A Typical “Little Mother” 72

13. A Cosmopolitan Group of “Fresh Air
Fund” Children 94

14. “Fresh Air Fund” Children enjoying
Life in the Country 117

15. Communal School Kitchen,
Christiania, Norway 124

16. New York Cellar Prisoners 133

17. Little Tenement Toilers 140

18. Juvenile Textile Workers on Strike 147

19. Night Shift in a Glass Factory 158

20. Breaker Boys at Work 165

21. Home “Finishers”: A Consumptive
Mother and her Two Children at
Work 172

22. Silk Mill Girls after Two Years of
Factory Life 184

23. A “Kindergarten” Tobacco Factory in
Philadelphia 197

24. A Glass Factory by Night 204

25. A Free Infants’ Milk Depot
(Municipal), Brussels 225

26. A Group of Working Mothers 231

27. A “Clean Milk” Distribution Centre in
a Baker’s Shop 234

28. Packing Bottles of “Clean Milk” in Ice 240

29. “A Makeshift”: Hammocks swung
between the Cots in an
Overcrowded Day Nursery 245

30. Interior of the Communal School
Kitchen, Christiania 252

31. Weighing Babies at the Gota de Leche,
Madrid 257

32. Five o’Clock Tea in the Country 261

33. A Little Fisherman 268
Note.—I am indebted to Miss Marjory Hall of New York for the pictures of
day nurseries and crèches; to Dr. G. W. Goler of Rochester, N.Y., for
permission to use several illustrations of his work; to the Rev. Peter Roberts
for the excellent illustration, “Breaker Boys at Work”; and to the

Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee for several other illustrations of
working children.—J. S.

LIST OF STATISTICAL TABLES AND
DIAGRAMS

PAGES

1. Diagram showing Relative Death-rates
per 100,000 Persons in Different
Classes 6

2. Table showing Number of Deaths in
United States and England and
Wales, at Different Ages 12

3. Table showing Infantile Mortality from
Eleven Given Causes and the
Estimated Influence of Poverty
thereon 21

4. Diagram showing the Infantile Death-
rate of Rochester, N.Y., and the
Influence thereon of a Pure Milk
Supply 22

5. Schedule relating to Five Families in
which the Mothers are employed
away from their Homes 40–41

6. Schedule showing Dietary of Children
in Six Families 93

7. Table showing Comparative Height,
Weight, and Chest Girth of English
Boys according to Social Class 97

8. Occupations of Juvenile Delinquents in
Six Large Cities 188

9. Occupations of Juvenile Delinquents in
Six Towns of less than 100,000
Inhabitants 189

10. Table showing Reasons for the
Employment of 213 Children 212, 213

THREE “LITTLE MOTHERS” AND THEIR
CHARGES

THE BITTER CRY OF THE CHILDREN

I
THE BLIGHTING OF THE BABIES

“Oh, room for the lamb in the meadow,
And room for the bird on the tree!
But here, in stern poverty’s shadow,
No room, hapless baby! for thee.”
—E. M. Milne.

I

The burden and blight of poverty fall most heavily upon the child. No more
responsible for its poverty than for its birth, the helplessness and innocence
of the victim add infinite horror to its suffering, for the centuries have not
made tolerable the idea that the weakness or wrongdoing of its parents or
others should be expiated by the suffering of the child. Poverty, the poverty
of civilized man, which is everywhere coexistent with unbounded wealth
and luxury, is always ugly, repellent, and terrible either to see or to
experience; but when it assails the cradle it assumes its most hideous form.
Underfed, or badly fed, neglected, badly housed, and improperly clad, the
child of poverty is terribly handicapped at the very start; it has not an even
chance to begin life with. While still in its cradle a yoke is laid upon its
after years, and it is doomed either to die in infancy, or, worse still, to live
and grow up puny, weak, both in body and in mind, inefficient and unfitted
for the battle of life. And it is the consciousness of this, the knowledge that
poverty in childhood blights the whole of life, which makes it the most
appalling of all the phases of the poverty problem.
Biologically, the first years of life are supremely important. They are the
foundation years; and just as the stability of a building must depend largely
upon the skill and care with which its foundations are laid, so life and
character depend in large measure upon the years of childhood and the care
bestowed upon them. For millions of children the whole of life is
conditioned by the first few years. The period of infancy is a time of
extreme plasticity. Proper care and nutrition at this period of life are of vital
importance, for the evils arising from neglect, insufficient food, or food that
is unsuitable, can never be wholly remedied. “The problem of the child is
the problem of the race,”[1] and more and more emphatically science
declares that almost all the problems of physical, mental, and moral
degeneracy originate with the child. The physician traces the weakness and
disease of the adult to defective nutrition in early childhood; the penologist
traces moral perversion to the same cause; the pedagogue finds the same
explanation for his failures. Thanks to the many notable investigations
made in recent years, especially in European countries, sociological science
is being revolutionized. Hitherto we have not studied the great and pressing

problems of pauperism and criminology from the child-end; we have
concerned ourselves almost entirely with results while ignoring causes. The
new spirit aims at prevention.
To the child as to the adult the principal evils of poverty are material ones,
—lack of nourishing food, of suitable clothing, and of healthy home
surroundings. These are the fundamental evils from which all others arise.
The younger children are spared the anxiety, shame, and despair felt by
their parents and by their older brothers and sisters, but they suffer terribly
from neglect when, as so often happens, their mothers are forced to
abandon the most important functions of motherhood to become wage-
earners. The cry of a child for food which its mother is powerless to give it
is the most awful cry the ages have known. Even the sound of battle, the
mingled shrieks of wounded man and beast, and the roar of guns, cannot vie
with it in horror. Yet that cry goes up incessantly: in the world’s richest
cities the child’s hunger-cry rises above the din of the mart. Fortunate
indeed is the child whose lips have never uttered that cry, who has never
gone breakfastless to play or supperless to bed. For periods of destitution
come sooner or later to a majority of the proletarian class. Practically all the
unskilled laborers and hundreds of thousands engaged in the skilled trades
are so entirely dependent upon their weekly wages, that a month’s sickness
or unemployment brings them to hunger and temporary dependence. Not
long ago, in the course of an address before the members of a labor union, I
asked all those present who had ever had to go hungry, or to see their
children hungry, as a result of sickness, accident, or unemployment to raise
their hands. No less than one hundred and eighty-four hands were raised out
of a total attendance of two hundred and nineteen present, yet these were all
skilled workers protected in a measure by their organization.

A GROUP OF “LUNG BLOCK”
CHILDREN

The white symbol of a child’s death hangs on
a door in the background.

It is not, however, the occasional hunger, the loss of a few meals now and
then in such periods of distress, that is of most importance; it is the chronic
underfeeding day after day, month after month, year after year. Even where
lack of all food is rarely or never experienced, there is often chronic
underfeeding. There may be food sufficient as to quantity, but qualitatively
poor and almost wholly lacking in nutritive value, and such is the tragic fate
of those dependent upon it that they do not even know that they are
underfed in the most literal sense of the word. They live and struggle and go
down to their graves without realizing the fact of their disinheritance. A
plant uprooted and left lying upon the ground withers quickly and dies;
planted in dry, lifeless, arid soil it would wither and die, too, less quickly
perhaps but as surely. It dies when there is no soil about its roots and it dies
when there is soil in abundance, but no nourishing qualities in the soil. As
the plant is, so is the life of a child; where there is no food, starvation is
swift, mercifully swift, and complete; when there is only poor food lacking
in nutritive qualities starvation is partial, slower, and less merciful. The
thousands of rickety infants to be seen in all our large cities and towns, the
anæmic, languid-looking children one sees everywhere in working-class
districts, and the striking contrast presented by the appearance of the

children of the well-to-do bear eloquent witness to the widespread
prevalence of underfeeding.
Poverty and Death are grim companions. Wherever there is much poverty
the death-rate is high and rises higher with every rise of the tide of want and
misery. In London, Bethnal Green’s death-rate is nearly double that of
Belgravia;[2] in Paris, the poverty-stricken district of Ménilmontant has a
death-rate twice as high as that of the Elysée;[3] in Chicago, the death-rate
varies from about twelve per thousand in the wards where the well-to-do
reside to thirty-seven per thousand in the tenement wards.[4] The ill-
developed bodies of the poor, underfed and overburdened with toil, have
not the powers of resistance to disease possessed by the bodies of the more
fortunate. As fire rages most fiercely and with greatest devastation among
the ill-built, crowded tenements, so do the fierce flames of disease consume
most readily the ill-built, fragile bodies which the tenements shelter. As we
ascend the social scale the span of life lengthens and the death-rate
gradually diminishes, the death-rate of the poorest class of workers being
three and a half times as great as that of the well-to-do. It is estimated that
among 10,000,000 persons of the latter class the annual deaths do not
number more than 100,000, among the best paid of the working-class the
number is not less than 150,000, while among the poorest workers the
number is at least 350,000.[5] The following diagram illustrates these figures
clearly and needs no further comment:—

DIAGRAM

Showing Relative Death-rates per 100,000
Persons in Different Classes.

This difference in the death-rates of the various social classes is even more
strongly marked in the case of infants. Mortality in the first year of life
differs enormously according to the circumstances of the parents and the
amount of intelligent care bestowed upon the infants. In Boston’s “Back
Bay” district the death-rate at all ages last year was 13.45 per thousand as
compared with 18.45 in the Thirteenth Ward, which is a typical working-
class district, and of the total number of deaths the percentage under one
year was 9.44 in the former as against 25.21 in the latter. Wolf, in his classic
studies based upon the vital statistics of Erfurt for a period of twenty years,
found that for every 1000 children born in working-class families 505 died
in the first year; among the middle classes 173, and among the higher
classes only 89. Of every 1000 illegitimate children registered—almost
entirely of the poorer classes—352 died before the end of the first year.[6]
Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, Senior Physician of the Metropolitan Free
Hospital, London, declared some years ago that the death-rate of infants
among the rich was not more than 8 per cent, while among the very poor it
was often as high as 40 per cent.[7] Dr. Playfair says that 18 per cent of the
children of the upper classes, 36 per cent of the tradesman class, and 55 per
cent of those of the working-class die under the age of five years.[8]
And yet the experts say that the baby of the tenement is born physically
equal to the baby of the mansion.[9] For countless years men have sung of
the Democracy of Death, but it is only recently that science has brought us
the more inspiring message of the Democracy of Birth. It is not only in the
tomb that we are equal, where there is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free,
but also in the womb of our mothers. At birth class distinctions are
unknown. For long the hope-crushing thought of prenatal hunger, the
thought that the mother’s hunger was shared by the unborn child, and that
poverty began its blighting work on the child even before its birth, held us
in its thrall. The thought that past generations have innocently conspired
against the well-being of the child of to-day, and that this generation in its
turn conspires against the child of the future, is surcharged with the
pessimism which mocks every ideal and stifles every hope born in the soul.
Nothing more horrible ever cast its shadow over the hearts of those who
would labor for the world’s redemption from poverty than this spectre of
prenatal privation and inherited debility. But science comes to dispel the
gloom and bid us hope. Over and over again it was stated before the
Interdepartmental Committee by the leading obstetrical authorities of the

English medical profession that the proportion of children born healthy and
strong is not greater among the rich than among the poor.[10] The differences
appear after birth. Wise, patient Mother Nature provides with each
succeeding generation opportunity to overcome the evils of ages of
ignorance and wrong, with each generation the world starts afresh and
unhampered, physically, at least, by the dead past.
“The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return.”

And herein lies the greatest hope of the race; we are not handicapped from
the start; we can begin with the child of to-day to make certain a brighter
and nobler to-morrow as though there had never been a yesterday of woe
and wrong.[B]

II

In England the high infantile mortality has occasioned much alarm and
called forth much agitation. There is a world of pathos and rebuke in the
grim truth that the knowledge that it is becoming increasingly difficult to
get suitable recruits for the army and navy has stirred the nation in a way
that the fate of the children themselves and their inability to become good
and useful citizens could not do.[11] Alarmed by the decline of its industrial
and commercial supremacy, and the physical inferiority of its soldiers so
manifest in the South African war, a most rigorous investigation of the
causes of physical deterioration has been made, with the result that on all
sides it is agreed that poverty in childhood is the main cause. Greater
attention than ever before has been directed to the excessive mortality of
infants and young children. Of a total of 587,830 deaths in England and
Wales in 1900 no less than 142,912, or more than 24 per cent of the whole,
were infants under one year, and 35.76 per cent were under five years of
age. That this death-rate is excessive and that the excess is due to essentially
preventable causes is admitted, many of the leading medical authorities
contending that under proper social conditions it might be reduced by at
least one-half. If that be true, and there is no good reason for doubting it,
the present death-rate means that more than 70,000 little baby lives are
needlessly sacrificed each year.
No figures can adequately represent the meaning of this phase of the
problem which has been so picturesquely named “race suicide.” Only by
gathering them all into one vast throng would it be possible to conceive
vividly the immensity of this annual slaughter of the babies of a Christian
land. If some awful great child plague came and swept away every child
under a year old in the states of Massachusetts, Idaho, and New Mexico, not
a babe escaping, the loss would be less than those that are believed to be
needlessly lost each year in England and Wales. Or, to put it in another
form, the total number of these infants believed to have died from causes
essentially preventable in the year 1900 was greater than the total number
of infants of the same age living in the following six states,—Connecticut,
Maine, Delaware, Florida, Colorado, and Idaho. Even if the estimate of the

sacrifice be regarded as being excessive, and we reduce it by half, it still
remains an awful sum.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to suppose that the infantile death-rate in
the United States is nearly so far below that of England as is generally
supposed. The general death-rate is given in the census returns as 16.3 per
thousand, or about two per thousand less than in England. But owing to a
variety of causes, chief of which is the defective system of registration in
several states, these figures are not very reliable, and it is generally agreed
that the mortality for the whole country cannot be less than for the
“Registration Area,” 17.8 per thousand. Similarly, the difference in the
infantile death-rate of the two countries is much less than the following
crude figures contained in the census reports appear at first to indicate:—
United States England and Wales
Deaths at all ages, 1,039,094 Deaths at all ages, 587,830
Deaths under 1 year, 199,325 Deaths under 1 year, 142,912
Deaths under 5 years, 317,532 Deaths under 5 years, 209,960
In the English returns the death of every child having had a separate
existence is counted, even though it lived only a few seconds, but in this
country there is no uniform rule in this respect. In Chicago, for instance,
“no account is taken of deaths occurring within twenty-four hours after
birth,”[12] and in Philadelphia a similar custom prevailed until 1904.[13] Such
facts seriously vitiate comparisons of the infantile death-rates of the two
countries which are based upon the crude statistics of census returns.
But while the difference is much less than the figures given would indicate,
it is still safe to assume that the infantile death-rate is lower in this country
than in England. Such a condition might reasonably be expected for
numerous reasons. We have a larger rural population with a higher
economic status; new virile blood is being constantly infused by the
immigration of the strongest and most aggressive elements of the
population of other lands; our people, especially our women, are more
temperate. All these factors would tend naturally to a lower death-rate at all
ages, but especially of infants.

Danny’s Best Smile

Rickety, Ill fed, and
Neglected

RACHITIC TYPES

That with all these favorable conditions our infantile mortality should so
nearly approximate that of England, that of every thousand deaths 307.8
should be of children under five years of age—according to the crude
figures of the census, more if a correct registration upon the same basis as
the English figures could be had—is a matter of grave national concern. If
we make an arbitrary allowance of 20 per cent, to account for the slight

improvement shown by the death-rates and for other differences, and regard
30 per cent of the infantile death-rate as being due to socially preventable
causes, instead of 50 per cent, as in the case of England, we have an
appalling total of more than 95,000 unnecessary deaths in a single year.
And of these “socially preventable” causes there can be no doubt that the
various phases of poverty represent fully 85 per cent, giving an annual
sacrifice to poverty of practically 80,000 baby lives. If some modern Herod
had caused the death of every male child under twelve months of age in the
state of New York in the year 1900, not a single child escaping, the number
thus brutally slaughtered would have been practically identical with this
sacrifice. Poverty is the Herod of modern civilization, and Justice the
warning angel calling upon society to “arise and take the young child” out
of the reach of the monster’s wrath.

III
If our vital statistics were specially designed to that end, they could not hide
the relation of poverty to disease and death more effectually than they do
now. It is impossible to tell from any of the elaborate tables compiled by the
census authorities what proportion of the total number of infant deaths were
due to defective nutrition or other conditions primarily associated with
poverty. No one who has studied the question doubts that the proportion is
very great, but it is impossible to present the matter statistically, except in
the form of a crude estimate. There is much of value in our great collections
of statistics, but the most vital facts of all are rarely included in them.
In the great dispensary a little girl of tender years stands holding up a baby
not yet able to walk. She is a “little mother,” that most pathetic of all
poverty’s victims, her childhood taken away and the burden of womanly
cares thrust upon her. “Please, doctor, do somethin’ fer baby!” she pleads.
Baby is sick unto death, but she does not realize it. Its breath comes in
short, wheezy gasps; its skin burns, and its little eyes glow with the
brightness that doctors and nurses dread. One glance is all the doctor needs;
in that brief glance he sees the ill-shaped head and the bent and twisted legs
that tell of rickets. Helpless, with the pathetically perfunctory manner long
grown familiar to him he gives the child some soothing medicine for her
tiny charge’s bronchial trouble and enters another case of “bronchitis” upon
the register. “And if it wasn’t bronchitis, ’twould be something else, and
death soon, anyhow,” he says. Death does come soon, the white symbol of
its presence hangs upon the street door of the crowded tenement, and to the
long death-roll of the nation another victim of bronchitis is added—one of
the eleven thousand so registered under five years of age. The record gives
no hint that back of the bronchitis was rickets and back of the rickets
poverty and hunger. But the doctor knows—he knows that little Tad’s case
is typical of thousands who are statistically recorded as dying from
bronchitis or some other specific disease when the real cause, the inducing
cause of the disease, is malnutrition. Even as the Great White Plague
recruits its victims from the haunts of poverty, so bronchitis preys there and
gathers most of its victims from the ranks of the children whose lives are
spent either in the foul and stuffy atmosphere of overcrowded and ill-

ventilated homes, or on the streets, underfed, imperfectly clad, and exposed
to all sorts of weather.
For nearly half a century rachitis, or “rickets,” has been known as the
disease of the children of the poor. It has been so called ever since Sir
William Jenner noticed that after the first two births, the children of the
poor began to get rickety, and careful investigation showed that the cause
was poverty, the mothers being generally too poor to get proper
nourishment while nursing them.[14] It is perhaps the commonest disease
from which children of the working-classes suffer. A large proportion of the
children in the public schools and on the streets of the poorest quarters of
our cities, and a majority of those treated at the dispensaries or admitted
into the children’s hospitals, are unmistakably victims of this disease. One
sees them everywhere in the poor neighborhoods. The misshapen heads and
the legs bent and twisted awry are unmistakable signs, and the scanty
clothing covers pitiful little “pigeon-breasts.” The small chests are narrowed
and flattened from side to side, and the breast-bones are forced unnaturally
forward and outward. Tens of thousands of children suffer from this disease,
which is due almost wholly to poor and inadequate food. Here again
statistical records hide and imprison the soul of truth, failing to yield the
faintest idea of the ravages of this disease. The number of deaths credited to
it in 1900 was only 351 for the whole of the United States, whereas 10,000
would not have been too high a figure.

BABIES WHOSE MOTHERS WORK—
THEY ARE CARED FOR IN A DAY
NURSERY

Seldom, if ever, fatal by itself, rickets is indirectly responsible for a
tremendous quota of the infantile death-rate.[15] In epidemics of such
infectious diseases as measles, whooping-cough, and others, the rickety
child falls an easy victim. In these diseases, as well as in bronchitis,
pneumonia, convulsions, diarrhœa, and many other disorders, the mortality
is far higher among rickety children than among others. Nor do the evils of
rachitis cease with childhood, but in later life they are unquestionably
important and severe. There is no escape for the victim even though the
storms of childhood be successfully weathered, but like some cruel,
relentless Nemesis the consequences pursue the adult. The weakening of the
constitution in infancy through poverty and underfeeding cannot be
remedied, and epilepsy and tuberculosis find easy prey among those whose
childhood had laid upon it the curse of poverty in the form of rickets.
An epidemic of measles spreads over the great city. Silently and
mysteriously it enters and, unseen, touches a single child in the street or the
school, and the result is as the touch of the blazing torch to dry stubble and
straw; only it is not stubble but the nation’s heart, its future citizenry, that is
attacked. From child to child, home to home, street to street, the epidemic
spreads; mansion and tenement are alike stricken, and the city is engaged in
a fierce battle against the foe which assails its children. In the tenement
districts doctors and nurses hurry through the sun-scorched streets and
wearily climb the long flights of stairs hour after hour, day after day; in the
districts where the rich live, doctors drive in their carriages to the mansions,
and nurses tread noiselessly in and out of the sick rooms. Rich and poor
alike struggle against the foe, but it is only in the homes of the poor that
there is no hope in the struggle; only there that the doctors can say no
comforting words of assurance. When the battle is over and the victims are
numbered, there is rejoicing in the mansion and bitter, poignant sorrow in
the tenement. For poor children are practically the only ones ever to die
from measles. Nature starts all her children equally, rich and poor, but the
evil conditions of poverty create and foster vast inequalities of opportunity
to live and flourish.
Dr. Henry Ashby, an eminent authority upon children’s diseases, says: “In
healthy children among the well-to-do class the mortality (from measles) is
practically nil, in the tubercular and wasted children to be found in
workhouses, hospitals, and among the lower classes, the mortality is

enormous, no disease more certainly being attended with a fatal result.
William Squires places it in crowded wards at 20 to 30 per cent of those
attacked. Among dispensary patients the mortality generally amounts to 9 or
10 per cent. In our own dispensary, during the six years, 1880–1885, 1395
cases were treated with 128 deaths, making a mortality of 9 per cent. Of the
fatal cases 73 per cent were under two years of age and 9 per cent under six
months of age.”[16]
These are terrible words coming as they do from a great physician and
teacher of physicians. Upon any less authority one would scarcely dare
quote them, so terrible are they. They mean that practically the whole 8645
infant deaths recorded from measles in the United States in the year 1900
were due to poverty—to the measureless inequality of opportunity to live
and grow which human ignorance and greed have made. Moreover, the full
significance of this impressive statement will not be realized if we think
only of its relation to one disease. The same might be said of many other
diseases of childhood which blight and destroy the lives of babies as
mercilessly as the sharp frosts blight and kill the first tender blossoms of
spring. The same writer says: “It may be taken for granted that no healthy
infants suffer from convulsions; those who do are either rickety or the
children of neurotic parents.”[17] And there were no less than 14,288 infant
deaths from convulsions in the United States in the census year. It would
probably be a considerable underestimate to regard 10,000 of these deaths,
or 70 per cent of the whole, as due to poverty.
It is not my intention to attempt the impossible task of sifting the death
returns so as to measure the sum of infantile mortality due to poverty. These
figures and the table which follows are not introduced for that purpose; I
have taken only a few of the diseases more conspicuously associated with
defective nutrition and other conditions comprehended by the term poverty,
and, supported by a strong body of medical testimony, made certain more or
less arbitrary allowances for poverty’s influence upon the sum of mortality
from each cause. Some of the estimates may perhaps be criticised as being
too high,—no man knows,—but I am convinced that upon the whole the
table is a conservative one. No competent judge will dispute the statement
that some of the estimates are very low, and when it is remembered that
only a few of the many causes of infantile mortality are included and that
there are many others not enumerated in which poverty plays an important

part, I think it can safely be said that in this country, the richest and greatest
country in the world’s history, poverty is responsible for at least 80,000
infant lives every year—more than two hundred every day in the year, more
than eight lives each hour, day by day, night by night throughout the year. It
is impossible for us to realize fully the immensity of this annual sacrifice of
baby lives. Think what it means in five years—in a decade—in a quarter of
a century.
Table showing Infantile Mortality from Eleven Given Causes and
the Estimated Influence of Poverty thereon

Disease No. of Est. Per Cent Est. No. of Deaths
Deaths Due to Bad Due to Bad
under Five Conditions Conditions—
Years Poverty
Measles 8,465 85 7,195
Inanition 10,687 90 9,618
Convulsions 14,288 70 10,000
Consumption 4,454 60 2,648
Pneumonia 37,206 45 14,340
Bronchitis 10,900 50 5,450
Croup 10,897 45 4,900
Debility and 12,130 75 9,397
Atrophy
Cholera 25,563 45 11,502
Infantum
Diarrhœa 3,962 45 1,782
Cholera 3,180 45 1,431
Morbus
151,732 51.57 78,263

IV

There are doubtless many persons, lay and medical, who will think that the
foregoing figures exaggerate the evil. But I would remind them that I have
only ascribed 30 per cent of the infantile death-rate to “socially preventable
causes,” and only 85 per cent of that number to poverty in the broadest
sense of that word.[C] I have purposely set my estimate much lower than I
am convinced it should be. All the facts point irresistibly to the conclusion
that even 50 per cent would be a conservative estimate.
In connection with the New York Foundling Asylum on Randall’s Island, it
was decided some few years ago to introduce the Straus system of
Pasteurizing the milk given to the babies. The year before the system was
introduced there were 1181 babies in the asylum, of which number 524, or
44.36 per cent, died. In the year following, during which the system was in
operation, the number of children was 1284 and the number of deaths only
255, or 19.80 per cent. In other words, there were 8.03 per cent more
children and 48.66 per cent fewer deaths.[18]
Even more important is the testimony furnished by the Municipal “Clean
Milk” depots of Rochester, New York. Some years ago the Health Officer,
Dr. George W. Goler, called the attention of the city authorities to the high
infantile mortality occurring over a period of several years during the
months of July and August. After thorough investigation it was fairly
established that impure milk was one very important reason for this high
death-rate among children under five years of age. Accordingly the
Pasteurization system was introduced. Depots were opened in the poorest
parts of the city and placed in charge of trained nurses. After three years it
was decided that instead of Pasteurizing the milk obtained from all sorts of
places, with all its contained bacteria and dirt, a central depot on a farm
should be established and all energies should be devoted to the insuring of a
pure, clean, and wholesome supply by keeping dirt and germs out of the
milk and sterilizing all bottles and utensils. Strict control is also exercised in
this way over the farmer with whom the contract for supplying the milk is
made.

CITY OF ROCHESTER, N.Y.
Deaths in Children Under 5 Years of Age
1892 Began Efficient Milk Inspection.
1897 Municipal Milk Stations Established.
1900 Established A Municipal Standard of 100000 Bacteria per c.c.

Some idea of the important effects of this scientific attention by the Board
of Health to the staple diet of the vast majority of children may be gathered
from the following figures, which do not, however, tell the whole story. In
the months of July and August during the eight years, 1889–1896, prior to
the establishment of the Municipal Milk Stations, there were 1744 deaths
under five years of age from all causes; in the same months during eight
following years, 1897–1904, there were only 864 deaths under five years of
age from all causes, a decrease of 50.46 per cent, despite a progressive
increase of population.[19] It can hardly be questioned, I think, that these
figures suggest that my estimate is altogether conservative.
The yearly loss of these priceless baby lives does not, however, represent
the full measure of the awful cost of the poverty which surrounds the
cradle. It is not only that 75,000 or 80,000 die, but that as many more of
those who survive are irreparably weakened and injured. Not graves alone
but hospitals and prisons are filled with the victims of childhood poverty.
They who survive go to school, but are weak, nervous, dull, and backward
in their studies. Discouraged, they become morose and defiant, and soon
find their way into the “reformatories,” for truancy or other juvenile
delinquencies. Later they fill the prisons, for the ranks of the vagrant and
the criminal are recruited from the truant and juvenile offender. Or if
happily they do not become vicious, they fail in the struggle for existence,
the relentless competition of the crowded labor mart, and sink into the

abysmal depths of pauperism. Weakened and impaired by the privations of
their early years, they cannot resist the attacks of disease, and constant
sickness brings them to the lowest level of that condition which the French
call la misère.

V

However interesting and sociologically valuable such an analysis might be,
the separation of the different features of poverty so as to determine their
relative influence upon the sum of mortality and sickness is manifestly
impossible. We cannot say that bad housing accounts for so many deaths,
poor clothing for so many, and hunger for so many more. These and other
evils are regularly associated in cases of poverty, the underfed being almost
invariably poorly clad, and housed in the least healthy homes. We cannot
regard them as distinct problems; they are only different phases of the same
problem of poverty,—a problem which does not lend itself to dissection at
the hands of the investigator. Still, notwithstanding that for many years all
efforts to reduce the rate of mortality among infants have dealt only with
questions of bad housing and of unhygienic conditions in general,—on the
assumption that these are the most important factors making for a high rate
of infant mortality,—it is now generally admitted that, important as they are
in themselves, these are relatively unimportant factors in the infant death-
rate. “Sanitary conditions do not make any real difference at all,” and “It is
food and food alone,” was the testimony of Dr. Vincent before the British
Interdepartmental Committee,[20] and he was supported by some of the most
eminent of his colleagues in that position. That the evils of underfeeding are
intensified when there is an unhygienic environment is true, but it is equally
true that defect in the diet is the prime and essential cause of an excessive
prevalence of infantile diseases and of a high death-rate.
Perhaps no part of the population of our great cities suffers so much upon
the whole from overcrowding and bad housing as the poorest class of Jews,
yet the mortality of infants among them is much less than among the poor
of other nationalities, as, for instance, among the Irish and the Italians. Dr.
S. A. Knopf, one of our foremost authorities upon the subject of
tuberculosis, places underfeeding and improper feeding first, and bad
housing and insanitary conditions in general second as factors in the
causation of children’s diseases. In Birmingham, England, an elaborate
study of the vital statistics of nineteen years showed that there had been a
large decrease in the general death-rate, due, apparently, to no other cause
than the extensive sanitary improvements made in that period, but the rate

of infantile mortality remained absolutely unchanged. The average general
death-rate for the nine years, 1873–1881, was 23.5 per thousand; in the ten
years, 1882–1891, it was only 20.6. But the infantile death-rate was not
affected, and remained at 169 per thousand during both periods. There had
been a reduction of 12 per cent in the general death-rate, while that for
infants showed no reduction. Had this been decreased in like degree, the
infantile mortality would have fallen from 169 to 148 per thousand.[21]
Extensive inquiries in the various children’s hospitals and dispensaries in
New York, and among physicians of large practice in the poorer quarters of
several cities, point with striking unanimity to the same general conclusion.
The Superintendents of six large dispensaries, at which more than 25,000
children are treated annually, were asked what proportion of the cases
treated could be ascribed, on a conservative estimate, primarily to
inadequate nutrition, and the average of their replies was 45 per cent.
In one case the Registrar in a cursory examination of the register for a
single day pointed out eleven cases out of a total of seventeen, due almost
beyond question entirely to undernutrition.
The Superintendent of the New York Babies’ Hospital, Miss Marianna
Wheeler, kindly copied from the admission book particulars of sixteen
consecutive cases. The list shows malnutrition as the most prominent
feature of 75 per cent of the cases. Miss Wheeler says: “The large majority
of our cases are similar to these given; in fact, if I kept on right down the
admission book, would find the same facts in case after case.”

VI

As in all human problems, ignorance plays an important rôle in this great
problem of childhood’s suffering and misery. The tragedy of the infant’s
position is its helplessness; not only must it suffer on account of the
misfortunes of its parents, but it must suffer from their vices and from their
ignorance as well. Nurses, sick visitors, dispensary doctors, and those in
charge of babies’ hospitals tell pitiful stories of almost incredible ignorance
of which babies are the victims. A child was given cabbage by its mother
when it was three weeks old; another, seven weeks old, was fed for several
days in succession on sausage and bread with pickles! Both died of gastritis,
victims of ignorance. In another New York tenement home a baby less than
nine weeks old was fed on sardines with vinegar and bread by its mother.
Even more pathetic is the case of the baby, barely six weeks old, found by a
district nurse in Boston in the family clothes-basket which formed its
cradle, sucking a long strip of salt, greasy bacon and with a bottle
containing beer by its side. Though rescued from immediate death, this
child will probably never recover wholly from the severe intestinal disorder
induced by the ignorance of its mother. Yet, after all, it is doubtful whether
the beer and bacon were worse for it than many of the patent “infant foods”
of the cheaper kinds commonly given in good faith to the children of the
poor. If medical opinion goes for anything, many of these “foods” are little
better than slow poisons.[22] Tennyson’s awful charge is still true, that:—
“The spirit of murder works in the very means of life.”

Nor is the work of this spirit of murder confined to the concoction of
“patent foods” which are in reality patent poisons. The adulteration of milk
with formaldehyde and other base adulterants is responsible for a great deal
of infant mortality, and its ravages are chiefly confined to the poor. It is
little short of alarming that in New York City, out of 3970 samples of milk
taken from dealers for analysis during 1902, no less than 2095, or 52.77 per
cent, should have been found to be adulterated.[23] Mr. Nathan Straus, the
philanthropist whose Pasteurized milk depots have saved many thousands
of baby lives during the past twelve years, has not hesitated to call this
adulteration by its proper name, child-murder. He says:—

“If I should hire Madison Square Garden and announce that at eight o’clock
on a certain evening I would publicly strangle a child, what excitement
there would be!
“If I walked out into the ring to carry out my threat, a thousand men would
stop me and kill me—and everybody would applaud them for doing so.
“But every day children are actually murdered by neglect or by poisonous
milk. The murders are as real as the murder would be if I should choke a
child to death before the eyes of a crowd.
“It is hard to interest the people in what they don’t see.”[24]
Ignorance is indeed a grave and important phase of the problem, and the
most difficult of all to deal with. Education is the remedy, of course, but
how shall we accomplish it? It is not easy to educate after the natural days
of education are passed. Mrs. Havelock Ellis has advocated “a noviciate for
marriage,” a period of probation and of preparation and equipment for
marriage and maternity.[25] But such a proposal is too far removed from the
sphere of practicality to have more than an academic interest at present.
Simply worded letters to mothers upon the care and feeding of their infants,
supplemented by personal visits from well-trained women visitors, would
help, as similar methods have helped, in the campaign against tuberculosis.
Many foreign municipalities have adopted this plan, notably Huddersfield,
England, and several American cities have followed their example with
marked success. There should be no great difficulty about its adoption
generally. One great obstacle to be overcome is the resentment of the
mothers whom it is most necessary to reach, as many of those engaged in
philanthropic work know all too well. One poor woman, whose little child
was ailing, became very irate when a lady visitor ventured to offer her some
advice concerning the child’s clothing and food, and soundly berated her
would-be adviser. “You talk to me about how to look after my baby!” she
cried. “Why, I guess I know more about it than you do. I’ve buried nine
already!” It is not the naïve humor of the poor woman’s wrath that is most
significant, but the grim, tragic pathos back of it. Those four words, “I’ve
buried nine already!” tell more eloquently than could a hundred learned
essays or polished orations the vastness of civilization’s failure. For, surely,
we may not regard it as anything but failure so long as women who have

borne eleven children into the world, as had this one, can say, “I’ve buried
nine already!”
But circular letters and lady visitors will not solve the problem of maternal
ignorance; such methods can only skim the surface of the evil. This
ignorance on the part of mothers, of which the babies are victims, is deeply
rooted in the soil of those economic conditions which constitute poverty in
the broadest sense of the term, though there may be no destitution or
absolute want. It is not poverty in the narrow sense of a lack of the material
necessities of life, but rather a condition in which these are obtainable only
by the concentrated effort of all members of the family able to contribute
anything and to the exclusion of all else in life. Young girls who go to work
in shops and factories as soon as they are old enough to obtain employment
frequently continue working up to within a few days of marriage, and not
infrequently return to work for some time after marriage. Especially is this
true of girls employed in mills and factories; their male acquaintances are
for the most part fellow-workers, and marriages between them are
numerous. Where many women are employed men’s wages are, as a
consequence, almost invariably low, with the result that after marriage it is
as necessary that the woman should work as it was before.
When the years which under more favored conditions would have been
spent at home in preparation for the duties of wifehood and motherhood are
spent behind the counter, at the bench, or amid the whirl of machinery in
the factory, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the knowledge of domestic
economy is scant among them, and that so many utterly fail as wives and
mothers. Deprived of the opportunities of helping their mothers with the
housework and cooking and the care of the younger children, marriage
finds them ill-equipped; too often they are slaves to the frying-pan, or to the
stores where cooked food may be bought in small quantities. Bad cooking,
extravagance, and mismanagement are incidental to our modern industrial
conditions.

VII

But there is a great deal of improper feeding of infants which, apparently
due to ignorance, is in reality due to other causes, and the same is true of
what appears to be neglect. In every large city there are hundreds of married
women and mothers who must work to keep the family income up to the
level of sufficiency for the maintenance of its members. According to the
census of 1900 there were 769,477 married women “gainfully employed” in
the United States, but there is every reason to believe that the actual number
was much greater, for it is a well-known fact that married women,
especially in factories, often represent themselves as being single, for the
reason, possibly, that it is considered more or less of a disgrace to have to
continue working after marriage. Moreover, it is certain that many
thousands of women who work irregularly, a day or two a week, or, as in
many cases, only at intervals during the sickness or unemployment of their
husbands, were omitted. A million would probably be well within the mark
as an estimate of the number of married women workers, the census figures
notwithstanding. These working mothers may be conveniently divided into
two classes, the home workers, such as dressmakers, “finishers” employed
in the clothing trades, and many others; and the many thousands who are
employed away from their homes in cigar-making, cap-making, the textile
industries, laundry work, and a score of other occupations including
domestic service.
The proportion of married women having small children is probably larger
among those employed in the home industries than in those which are
carried on outside of the homes. Out of 748 female home “finishers” in
New York, for instance, 658 were married and 557 had from one to seven
children each.[26] The percentage could hardly equal that in the outside
industries. While there are exceptional cases, as a rule no married woman,
especially if she has young children, will go out to work unless forced to do
so by sheer necessity. Dr. Annie S. Daniel, in a most interesting study of the
conditions in 515 families where the wives worked as finishers, found that
no less than 448, or 86.78 per cent of the whole, were obliged to work by
reason of poverty arising from low wages, frequent unemployment, or
sickness of their husbands. Of the other 67 cases, 45 of the women were

widows, 15 had been deserted, and 7 had husbands who were intemperate
and shiftless. Of all causes low wages was the most common, the average
weekly income of the men being only $3.81. The average of the combined
weekly earnings of man and wife was $4.85, and rent, which averaged
$8.99 per month, absorbed almost one-half of this. In addition to the
earnings of the men and women, there were other smaller sources of
income, such as children’s wages and money received from lodgers, which
brought the average income per family of 4½ persons up to $5.69 per week.
[27]

POLICE STATION USED AS A “CLEAN
MILK” DEPOT, ROCHESTER, N.Y.

Nothing could be further from the truth than the comfortable delusion under
which so many excellent people live, that so long as the work is done at
home the children will not be neglected nor suffer. While it is doubtless true
that home employment of the mother is somewhat less disadvantageous to
the child than if she were employed away from home,—though more
injurious from the point of view of the mother herself,—the fact is that such
employment is in every way prejudicial to the child. Even if the joint
income of both parents raises the family above want, the conditions under
which that income is earned must involve serious neglect of the child. The
mother is taken away from her household duties and the care of her
children; her time is given an economic value which makes it too precious
to be spent upon anything but the most important thing of all,—provision

for their material needs. She has no time for cooking and little for eating;
the children must shift for themselves.
Thus the employment of the mother is responsible for numerous evils of
underfeeding, improper feeding, and neglect. She works from early morn
till night, pausing only twice or thrice a day to snatch a hasty meal of bread
and coffee with the children. Her pay varies with the kind of work she does,
from one-and-a-half to ten cents an hour. Ordinarily she will work from
twelve to fourteen hours daily, but sometimes, when the work has to be
finished and delivered by a fixed time, she may work sixteen, eighteen, or
even twenty hours at a stretch. And then there are the “waiting days” when
work is slack, and hunger, or the fear of hunger, weighs heavily upon her
and crushes her down. Hard is her lot, for when she works there is food, but
little time for eating and none for cooking or the care of her children; when
there is no work there is time enough, but little food.
In Brooklyn, in a rear tenement in the heart of that huge labyrinth of bricks
and mortar near the Great Bridge, such a mother lives and struggles against
poverty and the Great White Plague. She is an American, born of American
parents, and her husband is also native-born but of Scotch parentage. He is
a laborer and when at work earns $1.75 per day, but partly owing to
frequently recurring sickness and partly also to the difficulty of obtaining
employment, it is doubtful whether his wages average $6 a week the year
through. Of six children born only two are living, their ages being seven
years and two-and-a-half years respectively. Both are rickety and weak and
stunted in appearance. As she sat upon her bed sewing, only pausing to
cough when the plague seemed to choke her, she told her story: “It’s awful,”
she said, “but I must work else we shall get nothing to eat and be turned
into the street besides. I have no time for anything but work. I must work,
work, work, and work. Often we go to our beds as we left them when I
haven’t time or strength to shake them up, and Joe, my husband, is too tired
or sick to do it. Cooking? Oh, I cook nothing, for I haven’t time; I must
work. I send the little girl out to the store across the way and she gets what
she can,—crackers, cake, cheese, anything she can get—and I’m thankful if
I can only make some fresh tea.” Neither of this woman’s two little children
has ever known the experience of being decently fed, and their weak,
rickety bodies tell the results. From a bare account of their diet it might be
inferred that the mother must be ignorant or neglectful, but she is, on the

contrary, a most intelligent woman and devoted to her children. Under
better conditions she would perhaps have been a model housewife and
mother, but it is not within the possibilities of her toil-worn, hunger-wasted
body to be these and at the same time a wage-earner. So, without attempting
to minimize the part which ignorance plays, it is well to emphasize the fact,
so often lost sight of and forgotten, that what appears to be ignorance or
neglect is very frequently only poverty in one of its many disguises.

VIII

As a contributory cause of excessive mortality and sickness among young
children, the employment of mothers away from their homes is even more
important. There is no longer any serious dispute upon that point, though
twenty-five years ago it was the subject of a good deal of vigorous
controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.[28] Professor Jevons thoroughly
established his claim that the employment of mothers and the ensuing
neglect of their infants is a serious cause of infantile mortality and disease.
So important did he consider the question to be that he strenuously
advocated the enactment of legislation forbidding the employment of
mothers until their youngest children were at least three years old.[29] When
one who is familiar with the facts considers all that the employment of
mothers involves, it is difficult to imagine how its evil effects upon the
children could ever have been questioned. In too many cases the toil
continues through the most critical periods of pregnancy; the infants are
weaned early in order that the mother may return to her employment, and
placed in charge of some other person—often a mere child, inexperienced
and ignorant. These “little mothers” have been much praised and idealized
until we have become prone to forget that their very existence is a great
social menace and crime. It is true that many of them show a wonderful
amount of courage and precocity in dealing with the babies intrusted to
their care. But in praising these qualities we must not forget that they are
still children, necessarily unfitted for the responsibilities thus placed upon
them. Moreover, they themselves are the victims of a great social crime
when their childhood is taken away and the cares of life which belong to
grown men and women are thrust upon them.

BABIES OF A NEW YORK DAY
NURSERY

The mothers of all these babies work away
from their homes.

In a personal letter to the writer, Mr. Roscoe Doble, Clerk to the Health
Board of Lawrence, Massachusetts, says: “Relative to the high infantile
mortality, I can only say that ignorance in the preparation of food, illy
ventilated tenements, and, in many cases, unavoidable neglect occasioned
by the mothers being obliged to work away from the homes, often leaving
their babies in the care of other children, seem to be the prime factors in the
high mortality among children.” Similar testimony has been given by
physicians and nurses wherever I have made inquiries, indicating a general
consensus of opinion among experts upon the subject. A striking instance of
the ignorance of these little girls to whom infants are intrusted was
observed in Hamilton Fish Park when one of them gave a baby, apparently
not more than four or five months old, soda water, banana, ice cream, and
chewed cracker—all inside of twenty minutes.
In several factory towns I made careful investigations of the home
conditions of a number of families where the mothers were employed away
from their homes, noting particularly the rates of infantile mortality among
them. The following typical schedule relates to five cases noted in the
course of a single day in one of the small towns of New York:—

Schedule

Total
No. of No. o
Average Husband’s number
Children Childr
Name Age Weekly Work, of
having now
Earnings Wages, etc. Children
Died Alive
Born

Mill laborer.
Wages $9.00
Mrs. week but is
43 $7.00 5 5
M. often sick.
Drinks
heavily.

Mrs. 38 $6.50 Laborer. 7 5 2
K. Often
unemployed.
Average
wage the
year round
not more
than $7.00 a
week.

Mrs. Deserted
34 $7.00 6 4 2
C. wife.

Sick two
years and
Mrs. unable to
29 $6.00 6 3 3
S. work. Was a
laborer
formerly.

Dead 6
months. Was
a laborer,
often sick
and
Mrs.
41 $6.00 unemployed. 8 5 3
H.
Widow does
not think he
earned $6.00
a week the
year round.

It will be observed that out of a total of 32 children born only 10 were alive
at the time of the inquiry, and that of the number dead no less than 18 were
under one year of age, the cause of death in most cases being associated
with neglect and defective diet. Of the ten children surviving, six were
decidedly weak, and the mothers said that they were “generally sick” and
that somehow it seemed as if they “took” every sort of disease, a well-
known condition of the undernourished child.
In the same town the case of a poor Hungarian mother was brought to my
attention by one perfectly familiar with all the details, a witness of
unassailable veracity. This poor Hungarian child-wife and mother was
barely fifteen when her baby was born, but she had been working fully
three years in the mill. When the child was born the father disappeared. “He
was afraid he could never pay the cost,” the wife said in his defence. On the
ninth day after her confinement she returned to her work, leaving the baby
in charge of a girl nine years old.

A GROUP OF CHILDREN WHOSE
MOTHERS ARE EMPLOYED AWAY
FROM THEIR HOMES

Upon the day the baby was two weeks old, word came to the mother while
at work that it had been taken suddenly ill and imploring her to return to it
at once. Terrified, she sought the foreman of her department and begged to
be allowed to go home. “Ma chil seek! Ma chil die!” she cried. But the
foreman needed her and scowled; they were “rushed” in the winding-room.
And so he refused to grant her the permission she sought—refused with
foul objurgations. Heartbroken, she went to another, superior, foreman and
in broken English begged to be allowed to go to her sick babe. “Ma chil
seek! Ma chil die!” she cried incessantly. This foreman also refused at first
to let her go. Perhaps it was because he thought of his own daughter that he
relented at last and gave her permission to go home—permission to give a
mother’s care to the child born of her travail! Eye-witnesses say that she
sank down upon her knees and, with hysterical gratitude, kissed the
foreman’s rough, dirty hands. “You good man! You good man!” she
shrieked, then fled from the mill with frenzied haste.
But when she reached her little tenement home in “Hunk’s town” the baby
was already dead, and there was only a lifeless form for her to clasp in her
arms. The life of an infant child is too frail a thing, and too uncertain, to
permit us to say that a mother’s care would have sufficed to save that babe.
But the doctor said neglect was the cause of death, and the poor mother has

moaned daily these many months, “If I no work, ma chil die not. I work an’
kill ma chil!”
Thirty-five years ago Paris was besieged by Germany’s vast army. For
months the war raged with terrible cost to invader and invaded; industry
was paralyzed and factories were closed down, with the result that there
was the most frightful poverty due to unemployment. But, because the
mothers were forced to stay at home, and were thus enabled to give their
children their personal care and attention instead of trusting them to the
“little mothers,” the mortality of infants decreased by 40 per cent. No other
explanation of that striking fact, so far as I am aware, has ever been
attempted.[30] Very similar was the effect upon the infantile death-rate during
the great cotton famine in Lancashire as a result of the prolonged
unemployment of so many hundreds of mothers. Notwithstanding the
immense increase in poverty, the fact that the mothers could personally care
for their infants more than compensated for it and lowered the rate of
mortality in a most striking manner.[31] These examples of a profound social
fact are sufficient for our present purpose, though, were it necessary, they
might be indefinitely multiplied.

IX

Perhaps the employment of mothers too close to the time of childbirth, both
before and after, is almost as important as the subsequent neglect and
intrusting of children to the tender mercies of ignorant and irresponsible
caretakers. Élie Reclus tells us that among savages it is the universal custom
to exempt their women from toil during stated periods prior to and
following childbirth,[32] and in most countries legislation has been enacted
forbidding the employment of women within a certain given period from
the birth of a child. In Switzerland the employment of mothers is prohibited
for two months before confinement and the same period afterwards.[33] At
present the English law forbids the employment of a mother within four
weeks after she has given birth to a child, and the trend of public opinion
seems to be in favor of the extension of the period of exemption to the
standard set by the Swiss law.[34] So far as I am aware there exists no
legislation of this kind in the United States, in which respect we stand alone
among the great nations, and behind the savage of all lands and ages.
Wherever women are employed in large numbers, as, for example, in the
textile industries and in cigar-making, the need for such legislation has
presented itself, and it is impossible, unfortunately, to think that the absence
of it in this country indicates a like absence of need for it. Cases in which
women endure the agony of parturition amid the roar and whirl of
machinery, and the bed of childbirth is the factory floor, are by no means
uncommon. From a large mill, less than twenty miles from New York City,
four such cases were reported to me in less than three months. Careful
personal investigation in each case revealed the fact that the unfortunate
women had begged in vain that they might be allowed to go home. One
such case occurred on the morning of June 27 of this year, and was reported
to me that same evening by letter. The writer of the letter is well known to
me and his testimony unimpeachable.
A poor Slav woman, little more than a child in years, begged for permission
to go home because she felt ill and unable to stand. Notwithstanding that
her condition was perfectly evident, her appeal was denied with most brutal
oaths. Cowering with fear she shrank away back to her loom with tears of

shame and physical agony. Soon afterward her shrieks were heard above the
din of the mill and there, in the presence of scores of workers of both sexes,
—many of whom were girls of fourteen years of age,—her child was born.
Perhaps it is fortunate that the child did not live to be a constant reminder to
the poor woman of that hour of unspeakable shame and suffering! The
young daughter of my correspondent was one of the witnesses of this
shameful, inhuman thing. Subsequently I secured ample corroboration of
the story from the local Slav priest who knew the poor woman and visited
her soon after the occurrence. When I showed the letter of my informant to
a local physician, he acknowledged that he had heard of other similar cases
occurring and begged me to see one of the principal owners of the mill and
secure the discharge of the foreman whose name was given. As if that could
do any good! What good would be accomplished by securing the discharge
of the man, and possibly bringing him and his family to poverty? That it
would salve the conscience of the mill owner is probable. That it would be a
well-deserved rebuke of the foreman’s inhumanity is likewise true. But it
would not contribute in any way to the solution of the problem of which the
case in question was but one of many examples.

A SAMPLE REPORT

Careful investigation showed this report to be

absolutely correct except for the fact that the
birth was normal and not “premature.”

Not long ago, in one of the largest cigar factories in New York, a woman
left her bench with a cry of agony and sank down in a corner of the factory,
where, in the presence of scores of workers of both sexes, whose gay
laughter and chatter her shrieks had stilled, she became a mother. The poor
woman afterwards confessed that she had feared that it might happen so,
but said she “wanted to get in another day so as to have a full week’s pay
and money for the doctor.” Within two weeks she was back again at her
trade, but in another shop, her baby being left in the care of an old woman
of seventy who supports herself by caring for little children at a charge of
five cents per day. In another factory a woman returned to work on the
seventh day after her confinement, but was sent back by the foreman. This
woman, a Bohemian, explained that she did not feel well enough to work
but feared that she might lose her place if she remained longer away. The
dread prospect of unemployment and hunger had forced her from her bed to
face the awful perils attendant upon premature exertion and exposure. Had
she been a “savage heathen” in the kraal of some Kaffir tribe in Africa she
would have been shielded, protected, and spared this peril, but she was in a
civilized country, in the richest city of the world, and therefore unprotected!
In many factories, probably a majority, women in whom the signs of
approaching motherhood are conspicuous are discharged. “It don’t take two
people to run this loom,” or “Two can’t work at one job,” are typically
brutal examples of the language employed by bosses of a certain type upon
such occasions. The fear of being discharged causes many a poor woman to
adopt the most pitiful means to hide her condition from the boss. “It
wouldn’t be so bad if we were only laid off for a few weeks, but it’s getting
fired and the trouble of finding a new job that hurts,” they say. But the
consequences are too serious alike to mother and child, to justify legislative
neglect or the dependence upon the wisdom or humanity of employers or
foremen. In many cases, doubtless, sympathy for the women themselves
and the knowledge that discharge, or even suspension for a few weeks,
would mean increased poverty and hardship, induces foremen to allow them
to remain at work as long as they can stand. But in many other instances the
condition of business and the needs of the employer at the moment

determine the question. If the mill or factory is busy and in need of hands,
the pregnant woman is rarely discharged; if there is difficulty in obtaining
workers in certain unpopular departments, like the winding-room of a
textile mill, for instance, such a woman will frequently be given the option
of ceasing work or going into the less popular department, generally at less
wages.
The evil is apparent, but the remedy is not so obvious. That no woman
should be permitted to work during a period of six or eight weeks
immediately before and after childbirth may be agreed, but then the
necessity arises for some adequate means of securing her proper
maintenance during her necessary and enforced idleness. To forbid her
employment without making provision for her needs would possibly be an
even greater evil than now cries for remedy. The question really resolves
itself into this: Is civilized man equal to the task which the savage
everywhere fulfils? Private philanthropy has occasionally grappled with this
problem and the results have been highly significant of what might be
accomplished if what has been done as a matter of charity in a few cases
could be done generally as a matter of justice and right. Of these private
experiments perhaps the most famous of all are those of the celebrated
Alsatian manufacturer, M. Jean Dolphus, and the Messrs. Fox Brothers, of
Wellington, Somerset, England.
M. Dolphus found that in his factory at Mülhausen, where a large number
of married women were employed, the mothers lost over 40 per cent of
their babies in the first year, though the average at that age for the whole
district was only 18 per cent. He noticed, moreover, that the mortality was
greatest in the first three months of life, and that set him thinking of a
remedy. He decided therefore to require all mothers to remain away from
their work for a period of six weeks after childbirth, during which time he
undertook to pay them their wages in full. The results were astonishing, the
decrease in infantile mortality in the first year being from more than 40 to
less than 18 per cent.[35] Other employers followed with similarly beneficent
results, among these being the firm of Fox Brothers, who employed
considerably over one thousand persons, more than half of whom were
women. They paid wages for three weeks only, but provided excellent
crèches with competent matrons in charge for the care of the infants whose
mothers were at work. There, also, the infantile death-rate was very

materially reduced, though, owing to the fact that no statistics showing the
rate among children whose mothers were employed by the firm prior to the
introduction of the plan exist, it cannot be statistically represented. Mr.
Charles H. Fox, head of the firm, is authority for the statement that the
reduction was extensive.[36] The importance of these experiments, especially
in conjunction with the experiences of Paris in the great siege and
Lancashire in the cotton famine, cannot easily be overestimated. They
clearly show that not only hunger, but that other aspect of poverty hardly
less important, the neglect of infants through industrial conditions which
force the mothers to neglect them, are responsible for an alarming sacrifice
of life year by year, and that it is possible to reduce materially the rate of
infant mortality by improving the economic circumstances of the parents.

X

No study of this problem can be regarded as satisfactory which ignores the
question of poverty and its relation to the number of still-births, yet we can
only touch briefly upon it. No brutal Malthusian cynicism, but a calm view
of such facts as those cited, leaves the impression that, however it might be
under other and more humane social conditions, still-birth means very often
a child’s escape from a life of suffering and misery. It is surely better that a
babe should be strangled in the process of delivery from its mother’s womb,
never to utter a cry, than that it should live to cry of hunger which its
mother cannot appease, or from the torture of food unsuited to its little
stomach! When a mother suffers all the pain and anxiety caused by the
struggling life within her, and in her travail goes down to the brink of the
grave, only to be mocked at last by a lifeless thing, she suffers the supreme
anguish of her kind. Last year there were more than 6000 such tragedies in
the city of New York alone, and the number in the whole country was
probably not less than 80,000.
Some of the best authorities upon the subject of vital statistics insist that
still-births should be included in the death-rates, and in many foreign cities,
notably Berlin,[37] they are so included. If such a method were adopted in
this country, it is easy to see how important the effects would be upon the
tables of mortality. Whatever opinions they may hold upon the moot
question of regarding still-births as deaths in all enumerations, all
authorities appear to agree that the circumstances of the mothers influence
the numbers of the still-born as surely as they do the actual infantile death-
rates. Six physicians of large obstetrical experience were asked to estimate
what percentage of the still-born should be ascribed to the influence of
poverty, and the average of their replies was 60 per cent.

BABIES WHOSE MOTHERS WORK
CARED FOR IN A CRÈCHE

That may be an overestimate, or it may be, and probably is, an
underestimate. If we assume it to be fairly correct, it means that in one city
something like 3700 mothers needlessly endured the supreme agony, and as
many lives were sacrificed to poverty. It means that to the 80,000 babies
annually devoured by the wolf of poverty must be added another 45,000
killed by the same cruel foe in the passage of the race from the womb of
dependence to a separate existence. Whatever the number may be, it is
certain that many are still-born because of the fatigue and overexertion of
the mothers in the critical periods of pregnancy and that many more are
suffocated in the passage from the womb because of the employment of
untrained and unskilled midwives—especially, as often is the case, when
the “midwife” is only a kindly neighbor called in because of the poverty of
the family to which the child comes. And it may be added, incidentally, that
still-birth is not by any means the only danger from this source, nor the
most lamentable. Many accidents of a non-fatal character occur at birth
which seriously affect the whole of life. Carelessness, inexperience, and
ignorance may cause the suffocation of the child, or by pressure upon some
delicate nerve centre irreparable injury may be caused to it, such as
paralysis for life or hopeless imbecility.[38]

XI

It is a strange fact of social psychology that people in the mass, whether
nations or smaller communities, or crowds, have much less feeling and
conscience than the same people have as individuals. People whose souls
would cry out against such conditions as we have described coming under
their notice in a specific case, en masse are unmoved. As individuals we
fully recognize that charity can never take the place of justice, but
collectively, as citizens, we are prone to solace ourselves with the thought
that charity, organized and unorganized, somehow meets the problem, and
we blind ourselves to the contrary evidences which everywhere confront us.
But it is only too true that charity—“that damnably cold thing called
charity”—fails utterly to meet the problem of poverty in general and
childhood’s poverty in particular. Nothing could be more pathetic than the
method employed by so many charitable persons and societies of
attempting to solve the latter problem by finding employment for the
mother, as if that were not the worst phase of all from any sane view of the
child’s interest. Charity degrades and demoralizes, and there is little or no
compensating effective help. In the vast majority of cases it fails to reach
the suffering in time to save them from becoming chronic dependents. More
and more the heart and brain of the world are coming to a recognition of the
fact that charity, however well organized, cannot solve the problems which
the gigantic and blind forces inhering in the laws of social development
have called into being.
While the causes of poverty remain active in the forces which govern their
lives, it is impossible to reclaim the victims. Were nothing but charity
possible, consideration of this and other phases of our growing social
misery might well plunge us into the deepest and blackest pessimism. But
surely we may see in those experiments in the work of social
reconstruction, which wise and enlightened municipalities have undertaken,
a widening sense of social responsibility and the rays of the hope-light for
which men have waited through the years. Such social efforts as the
municipal milk depots of Europe and this country, based upon the Gouttes
de Lait of France;[39] the provision of free, well-regulated crèches[40] and the
extension of free medical service at the public cost, have been attended with

important beneficial results and point the way to further efforts in the same
direction. Experience points clearly to the need of some provision to enable
the mother to remain with her infant child instead of leaving it to the care of
others while she joins the great machine, and becomes part of it, in the
interests of that world-supremacy in commerce and industry which is our
boast and dream, and for which we are paying too terrible a price.
It is, of course, true that even these measures will not banish poverty from
the world. They can only palliate the evils, not eradicate them. Eradication
can only be accomplished by greater, foundational changes which will make
it possible for every child to flourish as befits the inheritors of the ages of
strife and suffering which the world is slowly coming to regard as so many
experiences and lessons in the art of life. Between the present wrong and
that ideal there must come golden years of opportunity for enlightened
social statesmanship consecrated to the rescue of the nation’s children from
the curse and thrall of cruel and relentless poverty, which otherwise must be
bequeathed again to the generations yet unborn to damn their lives. In the
child’s cry of to-day wisdom will hear the nation of to-morrow pleading
that it may be saved from the blight and decay of a poverty which our vast
resources and treasuries of wealth declare to be as needless as it is shameful
and wrong.

B. For a contrary view of this question, see Dr. Paton’s article on “The
Influence of Diet in Pregnancy on the Weight of the Offspring,”
Lancet, July 4, 1903; and Dr. Ballantyne’s “Antenatal Pathology and
Hygiene.”

C. Drs. Baillestre and Gillette have estimated that three-fourths of the
infantile death-rate of France are due to avoidable causes. Five years
of ignorance, they say, has cost France 220,000 lives—equal to the
loss of an army corps of 45,000 men annually.—Lancet, February 2,
1901.

II
THE SCHOOL CHILD

“‘It is good when it happens,’ say the children,
‘That we die before our time.’”
—Mrs. Browning.

I

In a New York kindergarten one winter’s morning a frail, dark-eyed girl
stood by the radiator warming her tiny blue and benumbed hands. She was
poorly and scantily clad, and her wan, pinched face was unutterably sad
with the sadness that shadows the children of poverty and comes from cares
which only maturer years should know. When she had warmed her little
hands back to life again, the child looked wistfully up into the teacher’s face
and asked:—
“Teacher, do you love God?”
“Why, yes, dearie, of course I love God,” answered the wondering teacher.
“Well, I don’t—I hate Him!” was the fierce rejoinder. “He makes the wind
blow, and I haven’t any warm clothes—He makes it snow, and my shoes
have holes in them—He makes it cold, and we haven’t any fire at home—
He makes us hungry, and mamma hadn’t any bread for our breakfast—Oh, I
hate Him!”[41]
This story, widely published in the newspapers two or three years ago and
vouched for by the teacher, is remarkable no less for its graphic description
of the thing called poverty than for the child’s passionate revolt against the
supposed author of her misery. Poor, scanty clothing, cheerless homes,
hunger day by day,—these are the main characteristics of that heritage of
poverty to which so many thousands of children are born. Tens of thousands
of baby lives are extinguished by its blasts every year as though they were
so many candles swept by angry winds. But their fate is far more merciful
and enviable than the fate of those who survive.
For the children who survive the struggle with poverty in their infant years,
and those who do not encounter that struggle until they have reached school
age, not only feel the anguish and shame which comes with developed
consciousness, but society imposes upon them the added burden of mental
effort. Regarding education as the only safe anchorage for a Democracy, we
make it compulsory and boast that it is one of the fundamental principles of
our economy that every child shall be given a certain amount of elementary
instruction. This is our safeguard against those evils which other

generations regarded as being inherent in popular, representative
government. The modern public school, with its splendid equipment
devised to promote the mental and physical development of our future
citizens, is based upon motives and instincts of self-preservation as distinct
and clearly defined as those underlying our systems of naval and military
defences against armed invasion, or the systems of public sanitation and
hygiene through which we seek to protect ourselves from devastating
plagues within.
The past fifty or sixty years have been attended with a wonderful
development of the science of education, as remarkable and important in its
way as anything of which we may boast. We are proud, and justly so, of the
admirable machinery of instruction which we have created, the fine
buildings, laboratories, curricula, highly trained teachers, and so on, but
there is a growing conviction that all this represents only so much
mechanical, rather than human, progress. We have created a vast network of
means, there is no lack of equipment, but we have largely neglected the
human and most important factor, the child.[42] The futility of expecting
efficient education when the teacher is handicapped by poor and inadequate
means is generally recognized, but not so as yet the futility of expecting it
when the teacher has poor material to work upon in the form of chronically
underfed children, too weak in mind and body to do the work required of
them. We are forever seeking the explanation of the large percentage of
educational failures in the machinery of instruction rather than in the human
material, the children themselves.
The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in such large numbers in
our public schools represent poor material. They are largely drawn from the
homes of poverty, and constitute an overwhelming majority of those
children for whom we have found it necessary to make special provision,—
the backward, dull pupils found year after year in the same grades with
much younger children. In a measure the relation of a child’s educability to
its physical health and comfort has been recognized by the correlation of
physical and mental exercises in most up-to-date schools, but its larger
social and economic significance has been almost wholly ignored. And yet
it is quite certain that poverty exercises the same retarding influences upon
the physical training as upon mental education. There are certain conditions
precedent to successful education, whether physical or mental. Chief of

these are a reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy home.
Deprived of these, physical or mental development must necessarily be
hindered. And poverty means just that to the child. It denies its victim these
very necessities with the inevitable result, physical and mental weakness
and inefficiency.

A “LUNG BLOCK”
CHILD IN A
TRAGICALLY
SUGGESTIVE
POSITION

II
In a careful analysis of the principal data available, Mr. Robert Hunter has
attempted the difficult task of estimating the measure of privation, and his
conclusion is that in normal times there are at least 10,000,000 persons in
the United States in poverty.[43] That is to say, there are so many persons
underfed, poorly housed, underclad, and having no security in the means of
life. As an incidental condition he has observed that poverty’s misery falls
most heavily upon the children, and that there are probably not less than
from 60,000 to 70,000 children in New York city alone “who often arrive at
school hungry and unfitted to do well the work required.”[44] By a section of
the press that statement was garbled into something very different, that
70,000 children in New York city go “breakfastless” to school every day. In
that form the statement was naturally and very justly criticised, for, of
course, nothing like that number of children go absolutely without
breakfast. It is not, however, a question of children going without breakfast,
but of children who are underfed, and the latter word would have been
better fitted to express the real meaning of the original statement than the
word “hungry.” Many thousands of little children go breakfastless to school
at times, but the real problem is much more extensive than that and
embraces that much more numerous class of children who are chronically
underfed, either because their food is insufficient in quantity, or, what is the
same thing in the end, poor in quality and lacking in nutriment.
It is noteworthy that no serious criticism of the estimate that there are
10,000,000 in poverty has been attempted. Some of the most experienced
philanthropic workers in the country have indeed urged that it is altogether
too low. I am myself convinced that the estimate is a most conservative one.
It would be warranted alone by the figures of unemployment, which show
that in 1900, a year of fairly normal industrial conditions, 2,000,000 male
wage-earners were unemployed for from four to six months. But to these
figures Mr. Hunter adds a mass of corroborative facts which suggest that the
only just criticism which can be made of his estimate is that it is an
understatement. And, if there are 10,000,000 persons in poverty in the
United States, there must be at least 3,300,000 of that number under
fourteen years of age.

To test the accuracy of the statistics of unemployment, low wages, sickness,
charitable relief, etc., by detailed investigation would be an impossible task
for any private investigator. No such test could be effectively carried out in
a single great city by private agencies. But, while they are open to the
criticisms which all such statistics are subject to, those given by Mr. Hunter
represent the most reliable data available. They justify, I believe, the
conclusion that in normal times there are not less than 3,300,000 children
under fourteen years of age in poverty, and a considerably greater number
in periods of unusual depression. If we divide this number into two age
groups, those under five and those from five to fourteen, we shall find that
there are 1,455,000 in the former group and 1,845,000 in the latter. It is a
well-known fact, however, that poverty is far more prevalent among
children over five years of age than among younger children, and it is safe
to assume that of the total number of children estimated to be in poverty,
there are fully 2,000,000 between the ages of five and fourteen years, nearly
12 per cent of the total number of children living in that age period. The
importance of this from an educational point of view is apparent when it is
remembered that from five to fourteen years is the principal period of
school attendance.

III

This problem of poverty in its relation to childhood and education is, to us
in America, quite new. We have not studied it as it has been studied in
England and other European countries where, for many years, it has been
the subject of much investigation and experiment. When it was suggested
that 60,000 or 70,000 children go to school in our greatest city in an
underfed condition, and when Dr. W. H. Maxwell, superintendent of the
Board of Education of New York City, declared in a public address that
there are hundreds of thousands of children in the public schools of the
nation unable to study or learn because of their hunger,[45] something of a
sensation was caused from one end of the land to the other. But in England,
where for more than twenty years investigators have been studying the
problem and experimenting, and have built up a considerable literature
upon the subject, which has become one of the most pressing political
problems of the time, they have become so conversant with the facts that no
fresh recital, however eloquent, can create anything like a sensation. And
what is true of England is true of almost every other country in Europe.
Only we in the United States have ignored this terrible problem of child
hunger. We have so long been used to express our commiseration with the
Old World on account of the heavy burden of pauperism beneath which it
groans, and to boast of our greater prosperity and happiness, that we have
hardly observed the ominous signs that similar causes at work among us are
fast producing similar results. Now we have awakened to the fact that here,
too, are two nations within the nation,—the nation of the rich and the nation
of the poor,—and that Fourier’s terrible prophecy of “poverty through
plethora,” has found fulfilment in the land where he fondly dreamed that his
Utopia might be realized. The poverty problem is to-day the supreme
challenge to our national conscience and instincts of self-preservation, and
its saddest and most alarming feature is the suffering and doom it imposes
upon the children.
Such investigations as have been made by Mr. Hunter, myself, and others in
New York and other large cities, meagre as they have been, tend to the
conclusion that the extent of the evil of underfeeding has not been
exaggerated. It is true that the Board of Education of New York City

appointed a special committee to investigate the subject and that their
report, based upon the testimony of a number of school principals and
teachers, would indicate that only a very small number of children in our
public schools suffer from underfeeding. Many persons who regarded that
report as the conclusive answer of the expert were at once satisfied. In order
that the reader may better understand the investigations herein summarized
and view them without prejudice, it may be well to digress somewhat to
discuss that very optimistic report.
At a very early period of the agitation upon the subject, and before the
Board of Education had discussed it, I undertook a series of investigations
with a view to testing as far as possible Mr. Hunter’s estimate. My
investigations included personal observation and inquiry in a number of
public schools in various parts of the city having a total attendance of
something more than 28,000 children. When the Board of Education took
action upon the matter and appointed its special committee, I was already
far advanced in that work. Realizing that the value of such an inquiry as the
Board of Education had decided upon must depend entirely upon the
methods adopted, I turned my attention to the task of watching carefully the
“investigation.” It was a case of investigating an investigation. When the
special committee met I laid before the members certain evidence of the
utter worthlessness of the reports they had received from the schools, as
well as some of the information I had gathered concerning the extent of the
evil of underfeeding, in the hope that the committee might be induced to
undertake a careful and extensive investigation of the whole subject by a
body of experts.
In the first place, the official inquiry had been confined to the number of
“breakfastless” children, and, secondly, the principals had no instructions as
to the manner in which their inquiries should be conducted. The various
District Superintendents merely requested the principals to “carefully
investigate” and report the number of children attending school without
breakfast, in some cases forty-eight hours being allowed and in many others
only twenty-four hours. The result of this lack of method and system was
most deplorable, many of the principals adopting methods of investigation
which not only proved quite futile, but, what is more important, effectually
destroyed all chances of proper investigation for the time being. From the

statements submitted to the committee, I quote two examples as showing
the character of the “evidence” upon which its report was based.

IV

The principal of a large school on the West Side reported that “after careful
inquiries” he had found only one little girl who came to school without
breakfast, and she did so from choice, saying, “Because I never used to
have any breakfast in Germany, sir, and didn’t want any.” There were also
two boys, Syrians, who said that they had three meals each day but could
never get enough to eat. The little girl insisted that she “always had a good
lunch.” Here, then, was a big school with over two thousand pupils,
representing twenty different nationalities, in which there were only three
possible cases of underfeeding, the element of doubt being strong in each
case! Every one who has had the least experience of work amongst the poor
knows perfectly well that it would be absolutely impossible to gather
together 2000 children from the tenements of any city without including
many more cases of undoubted hardship and suffering. And the
neighborhood of this school is a particularly poor one. Close to the school
are some of the foulest tenements to be found in the whole city. The
crowding of two families in one room is common, and poverty and squalor
are abundantly evidenced on every hand.
After the principal had told me of his report I went over the district with the
Captain of the neighboring Slum Post of the Salvation Army. The Captain
knew personally several children attending the school who were literally
half starved. Out of 26 children, boys and girls, at the free breakfast one
morning there were 22 from the school, and their hunger and misery were
beyond question. One little boy was barely seven years old, and a more
woful appearance than he presented cannot well be imagined. He had come
to the breakfast station two days before the date of our visit, the Captain
said, literally famishing, filthy, and covered with sores. The good woman
had fed and cleaned the poor little waif and bandaged his feet and legs. “It
was an awful job,” she said, “for he was so dirty. It took four changes of
water to get him well cleaned. Then I bandaged him and got some old but
clean clothes for him.” Even so, after two days of such feeding and care as
he had never known before, the poor child looked forlorn, weak, and
inexpressibly miserable. Little Mike’s case was doubtless exceptionally
bad, but it is not too much to say that the whole district is a wen of terrible

poverty. Yet from the principal’s report it would seem that the children bear
no share of its hardships and privations. And this is impossible. It is the
children who suffer most of all.
To account for the principal’s roseate and obviously misleading report, it is
only necessary to understand how the inquiry was made upon which the
report was based. Asked to explain how he had made his investigation, the
principal said, “I went to every class and asked all those children who had
had no breakfast to stand up.” When it is remembered that children are
naturally very sensitive about their poverty, regarding it as being something
in the nature of a personal degradation, nothing need be said to show the
futility of such a method of inquiry. I have frequently known children on
the verge of exhaustion to deny that they were hungry, so keenly do they
feel that poverty is a disgrace. I saw the little girl and the two Syrian boys in
the presence of the principal upon the occasion of my second visit to the
school and questioned them. The two boys said, through an interpreter, that
they had bread and coffee for every meal and vigorously denied having had
butter, jam, milk, eggs, or meat of any kind. They certainly looked anæmic,
weak, and underfed. The little girl’s story, which I could get only by dint of
careful and sympathetic questioning, epitomizes the whole problem of
underfeeding as it affects thousands of children. She gave at first practically
the same answer as she had given the principal, saying that she did not have
breakfast because she was not accustomed to it and didn’t need it, and that
she always had a good lunch.
But her full story revealed a very different condition from what these
innocent replies would indicate. Both her parents go out to work, leaving
home soon after five o’clock in the morning. The father is a laborer
employed at the docks, and the mother works in the kitchen of a cheap
restaurant. They go away leaving the little girl in bed, and when she rises
there is generally some cold coffee and bread for her. But there is no clock,
and she does not know the time and is afraid of being late to school and
does not stay to eat. “Sometimes, when papa has no work, there is no food
left for me to eat,” she said. Then she told of her “good lunch.” Generally
there is five cents left upon the table for her to buy lunch with. “Only when
papa is not working is there no money left.” On the day of my interview
with her she had spent her five cents for a cup of coffee with nothing at all
to eat, as she had done for two or three successive days. Asked why she had

not bought something to eat, or a glass of milk, instead of coffee, she
answered, “Because coffee is hot, sir, and I was so cold.” Her father returns
home at six o’clock in the evening and sends her to the delicatessen store to
buy something—generally bologna sausage—for their evening meal. The
mother, who eats at the restaurant, does not return until about two hours
later. From this fuller story of the little girl’s life it is seen that her “good
lunch” day after day consists of a cup of coffee without a morsel of food,
and that she fasts frequently, almost constantly, from the evening of one day
to the evening of the next.
Such tactlessness on the part of the principal of a great public school seems
almost incredible. But it is a fact that most teachers seem to have no other
method of finding out anything from their children than by calling upon
them to “show hands,” notwithstanding that experience proves it to be a
most unreliable one. Children not only shrink from confessing their poverty
and hunger, but they are also quick to give the answers desired by the
teacher, even though the teacher’s feelings are only manifested by a slight
inflection of voice. Public examination of the children is a useless as well as
most cruel method to adopt. But it was generally adopted, and I could cite
case after case from my notes. One other case, however, must suffice. The
principal of one of the smallest schools in the city, situated on the East Side
in a poor Italian district, assured me that there were practically no hungry or
underfed children in the school. Asked to estimate the number of such
children, she said that they were “less than 1 per cent of the attendance.”
She had found 9 cases of destitution just previously as a result of an inquiry
made through the teachers, which, as was pointed out to her, meant fully 2
per cent of the attendance. For the total enrolment in this school is less than
500 and the average attendance not more than 450. Asked how the 9 cases
had been discovered, the principal replied, “Why, I simply went to each
class and asked, ‘What little boy or girl did not have breakfast to-day, or not
enough breakfast? Please show hands.’” There was, she said, no doubt
whatever that the 9 children were the victims of great poverty. That as many
as 2 per cent of the children should, under the circumstances, confess their
poverty is undoubtedly a most serious fact and indicates a much larger
number of actual victims.
How such a method of examination intimidates the children and fails to
elicit the truth, the following incident, related as nearly as possible in the

principal’s own words, will show. It relates to a little boy whom we will call
Tony:—
“I went to a classroom and asked: ‘How many children had no breakfast to-
day? Show hands!’ Not a single hand went up. Then the teacher said, ‘Why,
I am sure that boy, Tony, looks as if he were half starved.’ And he really did,
so I told him to stand up and questioned him. ‘Did you have any breakfast
this morning, Tony?’ I asked. He hung his head for a minute and then said,
‘No, mum.’

A TYPICAL
“LITTLE MOTHER”

“‘Now, Tony, wouldn’t you like to have a good breakfast every morning,—
some hot coffee and nice rolls?’
“‘Yes, mum.’
“‘Well, do you know the Salvation Army where they give breakfasts to little
boys who need them?’
“‘Yes, mum.’
“‘Well, if I get you a ticket, won’t you go there to-morrow and get your
breakfast?’

“The little fellow’s eyes flashed and he looked straight at me and said, ‘No,
mum, I don’t want it.’ Really, I admired his spirit. Poor as he was, he did
not want charity.”
Better than any argument the principal’s own words show the cruel,
inquisitorial method and its effectiveness in suppressing the truth. I repeat,
that was the method of inquiry generally adopted, and it was upon reports
based upon the results of such examinations that the special committee of
the Board of Education based its report.

V

Of course, not all teachers are so tactless. A very large number are merely
unobservant, possibly because they have become inured to the pitiful
appearance of the children and their painfully low physical development. It
is common to hear teachers in poor districts say: “When I first came to this
school my heart used to ache with pity on account of the poverty-stricken
appearance of many of the children and the sad tales they sometimes tell.
But now I have grown used to it all.” That, in many cases, tells the whole
secret—they have grown accustomed to the sight of stunted bodies and
wan, pinched faces. There are teachers, earnest men and women devoted to
their profession, and consecrating it by an almost religious passion, who
study the home life and social environment of the children intrusted to their
care; but they are, unhappily, exceptions. The number of teachers having no
idea of how a healthy child should look is astonishingly large. The hectic
flush of disease is often mistaken by teachers and principals for the bloom
of health.
In one large school the principal, in the course of a personally conducted
visit to the different classrooms, singled out a little Italian girl, and asked
with a note of pride in his voice: “Wouldn’t you call this a healthy child? I
do. Look at her round, full face.” There were a great many signs of ill health
in that little girl’s appearance which the good principal did not recognize. I
pointed out some of the signs of grave nervous disorder, due, as I afterward
learned, almost beyond question, to malnutrition. Her cheeks were well
rounded, but her pitifully thin arms indicated a very ill-developed body. I
pointed out her nervous hand, the baggy fulness under her eyes, and the
abrasions at the corners of her twitching mouth,[46] and asked that the
teacher might be consulted as to the girl’s school record. “She is not a very
bright child,” said the teacher, “and what to do with her is a problem. She is
very nervous, irritable, and excitable. She seems to get exhausted very soon,
and it is impossible for her to apply herself properly to her work. I think
very likely that she is underfed, for she comes from a very poor home.”
Subsequent investigation at her home, on Mott Street, showed that her
father, who is a consumptive, earns from sixty cents to a dollar a day
peddling laces, needles, and other small articles, the rest of the income

supporting the family of seven persons being derived from the mother’s
labor. They occupy one small room, and the only means of cooking they
have is a small gas “ring” such as is sold for ten cents in the cheap stores.
Where principals and teachers declined to assist, it was impossible to make
inquiries in the schools, and it was useless to make them in schools where
the children had already been openly questioned. Wherever it was possible
to secure the coöperation of principals or teachers, I got them to question
the children privately and sympathetically. In 16 schools, 12,800 children
were thus privately examined, and of that number 987, or 7.71 per cent,
were reported as having had no breakfast upon the day of the inquiry, and
1963, or 15.32 per cent, as having had altogether too little. Teachers were
asked to exclude as far as possible all cases of an obviously accidental
nature from the returns, as, for instance, when a child known to be in fairly
comfortable circumstances had come to school without breakfast merely
because of lack of appetite. They were also requested to regard as having
had inadequate breakfasts only children who had had bread only (with or
without tea or coffee), or such things as crackers or crullers in place of
bread, but without milk, cereals, cake, butter, jam, eggs, fruit, fish, or meat
of any kind. That this standard was altogether too low will probably be
admitted without question, but there was no way of examining the actual
meals of the children, and some sort of arbitrary rule was necessary. The
figures given are therefore based on a very low standard, and most certainly
do not include all cases either of the unfed or underfed. It is more than
probable that some children who had gone without breakfasts refused to
admit the fact, and there were several instances in which children known to
be desperately poor, and who, the teachers felt, were certainly underfed,
gave the most surprising accounts—which must have been drawn from their
imaginations[47]—of elaborate breakfasts. Out of 12,800 children, then,
2950, or more than 23 per cent, were found either wholly breakfastless or
having had such miserably poor breakfasts as described. And that is
certainly an understatement of the evil of underfeeding in those schools.
One of the most notable of these school investigations was undertaken by
the principal of a large school to “prove conclusively that really there is no
such thing as a serious problem of underfeeding among our school
children.” The principal is a devoted believer in the theory of the survival of
the fittest, and in the elimination of the weak by competition and struggle.

“If you attempt to take hardship and suffering out of their lives by
smoothing the pathway of life for these children, you weaken their
character, and, by so doing, you sin against the children themselves and,
through them, against society,” he said. With the view of Huxley and others
that the real interest and duty of society is to make as many as possible fit to
survive, he expressed himself as having no sympathy, on the ground that it
conflicts with nature’s immutable law of struggle. But, as often happens, his
deeds frequently run counter to his merciless creed, and he is one of the
most generous and compassionate of men. The children trust him, and the
sense of an intimate friendship between him and them is the most delightful
impression the visitor receives. There is no absence of real, effective
discipline, but it is discipline based upon sympathy, friendship, and trust.
The principal declared that he did not believe that 5 children could be found
in the whole school of 1500 who could be described as badly underfed, or
who came to school breakfastless.
The district in which this school is situated is one of the poorest in the city,
the population consisting almost exclusively of Italians. Most of the men
are unskilled laborers working for very low wages and irregularly
employed. Many of them are recent immigrants and subject to the vicious
padrone system. Every fresh batch of immigrants intensifies the already
keen and brutal competition, and to maintain even the low standard of
living to which they are accustomed, the wives frequently work as wage-
earners. The people are housed in vile tenements, and the crowding of two
families into one small room is by no means uncommon. “Little mothers”
and their rickety infant charges crowd the pavements. In the early morning,
even during the winter months, groups of shivering children gather outside
the school waiting for admission hours before the time of opening, and at
lunch time instead of going to their homes they hasten away with their
pennies and nickels to buy ice cream, pickles, peppers, or cream puffs for
their midday meal. Knowing these to be the conditions existing in the
neighborhood, it was impossible to accept the optimistic views of the
principal without serious questioning, and it was to convince me that he was
right that he undertook to have the investigation made while we went over
the school.
The teachers were requested to examine every child privately, and to report
the number of children having had no breakfast that morning and the

number having had inadequate breakfasts. Some of the teachers absolutely
refused to ask the children “such questions,” and two or three sent in
obstinately stupid reports such as “nobody underfed but the teacher.”
Reports were received from 19 classes with an actual attendance of 865
children, of which number 104 were reported as having had no breakfast
and 54 as having had too little. Not all the reports were of equal value, I
afterward found, some of the teachers having ignored the rule and regarded
coffee and bread as sufficient. In one case there were three children who
declared that they had only cold coffee without any food. They should have
been reported as breakfastless, but in fact they were not reported in either
column. So that it is probable that in this case also the figures given are an
understatement of actual conditions. In one class of 43 children 13 were
reported as having had no breakfast and 12 as having had insufficient, and
when the report was sent back with instructions that the teacher try to find
out why the 13 children had no breakfast, it was returned with the postscript
in the teacher’s handwriting, “There was no food for them to eat.” In
another class out of 65 children no less than 30 were reported as having had
no breakfast, but of these 12 had had either tea or coffee. As they did not
have food of any kind other than the tea or coffee, the teacher reported them
as breakfastless. Making all allowances for discrepancies and differences of
value in the teachers’ reports, it is surely most serious that no less than
17.81 per cent of the children examined should be reported as either
breakfastless or very inadequately fed that day. It should be said that this
inquiry took place in the winter, the season when there is most
unemployment among unskilled laborers, and it is not probable that the
same amount of poverty would be found all the year round.
One incident in connection with the investigation in this school is worthy of
record. A lad of about 13 or 14 years of age in one of the highest grades,
who had been reported as having had no breakfast, was seen in the
principal’s office at noon. He seemed to be quite rugged and healthy, and
the principal said that he was “the brightest boy in the school, and a good
lad, too.” He showed us his lunch—a roll of bread and two small pieces of
almost transparent cheese. “Isn’t that enough for a boy?” asked the
principal, laughingly. The boy responded: “Yes, but I had no breakfast, and
this has to do me all day. I don’t have any breakfast most times, and
sometimes no lunch or supper. You know that Mr. B—— used to give me
some very often.” And the principal confirmed this part of the lad’s story

with a tender, “Yes, I know, sonny.” The boy told us a saddening story of a
mother cowed down by a brutal husband, and of the latter’s vice. He is a
cook and has often beaten his wife, who works in an embroidery factory. A
year or so ago he went to Italy, leaving his wife here. Soon afterward he
wrote to her for money to pay his passage back. She was penniless, but, the
lad quaintly said, “she made a debt of a hundred dollars” to send to him.
“Then she had to pay every week, and there wasn’t much food.” The rest of
his tale of shame—shame of a father’s sin—need not be told. It is too
horrible. “Why doesn’t your mother leave him and just take you with her?
You are the only child, aren’t you?” asked the principal. “Yes, I’m the only
one, but there are ten dead,” was the boy’s startling reply. It was,
unconsciously, a significant comment upon the good principal’s theory of
the survival of the fittest.
In another school the principal told me that she had reported to the District
Superintendent that of 1000 children on the register at least 100 were badly
underfed. She told of children fainting in school or in the yard from lack of
food, and of others suffering from disorders of the bowels due to the same
cause. Many of these children were pointed out in the course of several
visits to the school. “Ignorance plays a large part in the problem,” said the
principal, “but I think it is mostly poverty. When work is hard to get, or
there is sickness in the family, or when there is a strike, then the children
suffer most, and that shows that it is poverty in most cases.” Upon one of
my visits to this school, I encountered one of those pathetic incidents of
which I have gathered so many in the course of these investigations. Little
Patsey, the American-born child of Irish parents, had for some days been
ailing and unable to attend properly to his lessons. The teacher suspected
that improper food was the cause, and Patsey’s account of his diet
confirmed her in that opinion. So she advised Patsey to tell his mother that
oatmeal would be better for him. “Get oatmeal, Patsey, it’s better—and very
cheap, too.” There were tears in the principal’s eyes as she told how, that
very morning, the teacher had found what she supposed to be powdered
chalk upon the floor and was about to scold the culprit, when she
discovered that it was Patsey’s oatmeal! Poor little Patsey had for three
days been spending his daily lunch allowance of three cents upon oatmeal
and eating it dry. Teacher had said that it was better! Only the thought of
the teacher’s influence, and the hope that through the medium of such
influence as hers it may be possible to dispel much of the ignorance of

which so many children are the victims, relieves the pathos of the incident
and brightens it.

VI

Soon after the foregoing investigations were made, Dr. H. M. Lechstrecker,
of the New York State Board of Charities, conducted an examination of
10,707 children in the Industrial Schools of New York City. He found that
439, or 4.10 per cent, had had no breakfast on the date of the inquiry, while
998, or 9.32 per cent, exhibited anæmic conditions apparently due to lack of
proper nourishment. Upon investigation the teachers found that the
breakfasts of each of the 998 consisted either of coffee only, or of coffee
with bread only. Only 1855, or 17.32 per cent, started the day with what Dr.
Lechstrecker considered to be an adequate meal.[48] Other independent
inquiries in several cities show that the problem is by no means peculiar to
New York.
In Buffalo the principal of one large school, Mr. Charles L. Ryan, is
reported as saying that of the 1500 children in his school at least one-tenth
come to school in the morning without breakfast. In 8 schools in Buffalo,
having a total average attendance of 7500 pupils, the principals estimated
that 350, or 4.46 per cent, have no breakfasts at all, and that 800 more have
too little to insure effective work. No less than 5105 of the 7500 children
were reported as having tea or coffee with bread only.[49] It is rather difficult
to analyze these figures satisfactorily, but it would appear that no less than
17.33 per cent of the total number of children in these 8 schools are
believed by the principals and teachers to be appreciably handicapped by
defective nutrition, and that only 16.80 per cent are adequately and
satisfactorily fed.
In Chicago several independent investigations have been made. Mr. William
Hornbaker, principal of the Oliver Goldsmith school, says: “We have here
1100 children in a district which is so crowded that all our pupils come
from an area comprising only about twenty acres. When I began work here,
I discovered that many of the pupils remained all day without food. A great
majority of the parents in this district, as well as the older children, are at
work from dawn to dusk, and have no time to care for the little ones. Such
children have no place to go when dismissed at noon.”[50] At this school a
lunch room has been established, and two meals a day are provided for

about 50 of the most necessitous children. At first these meals were sold at a
penny per meal, but it was found that even pennies were too hard to obtain.
Mr. Hornbaker points out that the pride of the larger children restrains them,
and it is most difficult to get them to admit their hunger, but the younger
children are not so sensitive. He says that “unquestionably a majority of the
children are improperly fed, especially in the lower grades.” Out of a total
attendance of 5150 children in 5 Chicago schools 122 were reported as
breakfastless, 1464 as having only bread with coffee or tea, a total of 30.79
per cent.[51]
In Philadelphia several inquiries were made, with the result that of 4589
children 189 were reported as going generally or often without breakfast of
any kind, while 2504 began the day on coffee or tea and bread, a total of
58.52 per cent.[52] In Cleveland, Boston, and Los Angeles, among many
other cities, teachers and others declare that the evil is quite as extensive.
Massing the figures given from New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and
Chicago, we get a total of 40,746 children examined, of which number
14,121, or 34.65 per cent, either went breakfastless to school or got
miserably poor breakfasts of bread and tea or coffee. At least bread and tea
must prove to be a poor diet, wholly insufficient to meet the demands of a
growing human body, and the difficulty of obtaining good, wholesome
bread in our cities intensifies the evil. The wholesale adulteration of food is
indeed a most serious menace to life and health to which the poor are
constantly subjected.
These figures are not put forward as being in any sense a statistical measure
of the problem. The investigations described, and others of a like nature,
afford no adequate basis for scientific estimates. They are all confined to the
one morning meal, and the standard adopted for judging of the
adequateness of the meals given to the children is necessarily crude and
lacking in scientific precision. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is
not a question of whether so many children go without breakfast
occasionally, but whether they are underfed, either through missing meals
more or less frequently or through feeding day by day and week by week
upon food that is poor in quality, unsuitable, and of small nutritive value,
and whether in consequence the children suffer physically or mentally, or
both. Only a comprehensive examination by experts of a large number of
children in different parts of the country, a careful inquiry into their diet and

their physical and mental development, would afford a satisfactory basis for
any statistical measure of the problem which could be accepted as even
approximately correct. Yet such inquiries as those described cannot be
ignored; in the absence of more comprehensive and scientific investigations
they are of great value, on account of the mass of observed facts which they
give; and the results certainly tend to show that the estimate that fully
2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are badly underfed is
not exaggerated.

VII
As stated, all the investigations described were confined to the breakfast
meal. There has been practically no effort made, so far as I am aware, to
determine how many children there are who go without lunches back to
their lessons, or, what is quite as important, how many there are to whom
are given small sums of money to procure lunches for themselves; and what
kind of lunches they buy. Even in Europe most of the investigations made
have been confined to the morning meal. Yet this lunch question is probably
even more important than the other. There are doubtless many more
children who go without lunch than without breakfast. Thousands of
children who get some sort of breakfast, even if it is only coffee and bread,
get nothing at all for lunch, and a still larger number—in some schools I
have found as many as 20 per cent—get small sums of money, ranging from
one to five cents, to buy lunches for themselves. And in most cases the
condition of these is just as deplorable as if they had nothing at all, if not
much worse. Their tragedy lies in the fact that in most cases the money they
spend would be quite sufficient to provide decent, nourishing meals if it
were wisely spent, instead of which they get what is positively injurious.
When a child of eight or nine years of age whose breakfast consists of tea
and bread lunches day after day upon pickles, its digestive system must of
necessity be impaired. Wise discrimination cannot be expected from young
children, and the temptation of the candy stores and of the push carts laden
with ice cream or fruit is great. Often the fact that children in the very
poorest districts spend so many pence is urged as evidence that no serious
problem of poverty exists, but that is a wholly unwarranted assumption.
There may not be absolute destitution; the family income may be sufficient
to keep its members above the line of primary poverty, but the conditions
under which it is earned, necessitating the employment of the mother,
involve the suffering of the children. The mother is taken away from her
legitimate work, the care of her home and children, and they are left to their
own resources. In the course of these investigations I have found hundreds
of children going back to their lessons without having had any lunch, and
hundreds more of the class just described. In one class of 40 in an East Side
school I found 11 with pennies to buy their own lunches. These children

were all between the ages of eight and ten years. In another school the
principal said that there were 50 such children known to her out of a total of
less than 500. In 4 other schools, with an attendance of 4500, the principals’
estimates of the number of such children aggregated 521, or 11.51 per cent.
This phase of the problem of child hunger is not peculiar to New York. The
reports of teachers in many cities and towns and my own observations show
that this evil is invariably associated with poverty; and European
investigations all support that view.[53] It is probable that in some of the
smaller manufacturing towns it prevails to a larger proportional extent than
in cities like New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis, but of
that matter there are no data. The answers of teachers and others to inquiries
as to what such children buy have been monotonously alike. They buy
candy, cream puffs, ice cream, fruit (very often damaged, decayed, or
unripe), pickles, and other unwholesome things. One cold day last winter I
visited the neighborhood of a large school with an idea that it might be
possible to ascertain just exactly what a number of children would buy for
lunch. Any one who has ever watched the outpouring of children from a
large school will realize how utterly impossible it is to keep any
considerable number of them under observation. Like a great river that has
broken its banks the human torrent rushes through the streets and crowds
them awhile, then spreads far and wide. I found 14 children in a
delicatessen store, 8 boys and 6 girls. Seven of them bought pickles and
bread; 4 bought pickles only; 2 bought bologna sausage and rye bread, and
1 bought pickled fish and bread. In a neighboring street I made similar
observations one day during the summer. Out of 19 children 8 bought
pickles, 2 of them with bread, the others without; 6 bought ice cream, 2
bought bananas, and 3 others bought candy. For the children of the poor
there seems to be some strange fascination about pickles. One lad of ten
said that he always bought pickles with his three cents. “I must have
pickles,” he said. It would seem that the chronic underfeeding creates a
nervous craving for some kind of a stimulant which the child finds in
pickles. The adult resorts to whiskey very often for much the same reason.
There is every reason to believe that this malnutrition lays the foundation
for inebriety in later years. The custom of giving the children money instead
of prepared lunches is also responsible for a good deal of gambling,
especially among the boys. Little Tony plays “craps” and loses his lunch,

and the boy who wins gets a particularly big unwholesome “blow out,” or
adds a packet of cigarettes to his meal of pickles or cream puffs.
In one large school on the West Side the principal confidently declared that
10 per cent would be altogether too low an estimate of the number of badly
underfed children in that school. “If you mean only the breakfastless ones,”
she said, “why, it is too high, but if you include those whose breakfasts are
totally inadequate, and those who have no lunches, those whose lunches at
home are as inadequate as their breakfasts, and those who get only the bad
things they buy for lunch—in a word, if you include all who suffer on
account of defective, low nutrition, the estimate of 10 per cent is too low for
this school. There are whole blocks in this district from which we scarcely
get a child who is not, at some time or other in the course of a year, in want
of food. The worst cases are in the primary grades, for many of the older
children drop out. The boys find odd jobs to do, and the girls are needed at
home to care for the smaller children.” The population of this district is
largely Irish and most of the men belong to that class of unskilled laborers
which, more than any other industrial class, suffers from irregularity of
employment. Many are longshoremen, others are truck-men, builders’
laborers, and so on. No other class of workers suffers so much from what
may be called accidental causes as this. A war in some far-away land may
for a while seriously divert the stream of commerce, and the longshoreman
of New York suffers unemployment and its attendant poverty; a strike of
bricklayers or carpenters will throw the laborers and their families into the
maws of all-devouring misery, or a week of bad weather may cause
inexpressible hardship. When employment is steady the wages they receive
are in most cases only sufficient to keep their families just above the line of
poverty; when there is sickness or unemployment, even for a couple of
weeks, there is privation and the growth of a burden of debt which remains
to crush them downward when wages begin to come in again. Want actually
continues in such cases through what, judged by the wage standard, appears
to be a time of normal prosperity. It is hardly to be wondered at that there is
a good deal of intemperance and improvidence. These conditions are the
economic soil in which intemperance, thriftlessness, and irresponsibility
flourish.
In this district, with the coöperation of a well-trained and experienced
woman investigator, a careful investigation of the condition of 50 families

represented in the school was made. The number of children attending
school from the 50 families was 79. Of that number there were 24 who had
no breakfast of any kind on the days they were visited, while of the 55 more
fortunate ones no less than 30 had only bread with tea or coffee. Only 35 of
the children had any lunch, or money with which to procure any, 44 missing
that meal entirely. Terrible as they are, these figures do not tell the whole
story. It is impossible to appreciate what going without lunch means to
these children unless we take into account the fact that those who go
without lunch, and those who eat only the deleterious things they buy, are in
most cases the same children who either go breakfastless or have only bread
and coffee day after day. And their evening meal is very often a repetition
of the morning meal, bread and coffee or tea. From the schedule showing
the actual dietary of the children in question contained in the report of my
co-investigator I give, in the following table, the particulars relating to 6
families. They are perfectly typical cases and demonstrate very clearly the
woful inadequacy of diet common to children of the poor.
Family No. of Breakfast Lunch Supper
School
Children
1 2 Bread and tea None. Bread and
only. tea.
2 1 None. Soup from Coffee and
charity. bread.
3 1 Coffee and rolls Coffee and Tea and
(no butter or bread. bread.
jam).
4 3 Bread and tea None. Bread and
only. tea only.
5 2 None. Soup with Piece of
the soup- bread.
meat.
6 1 Bread and jam None. Tea and
with coffee. bread
with jam.

It is a horrible fact that many of these children whose diet is so
unwholesome cannot eat decent food, even when they are most hungry. It is
not merely a question of appetite, but of stomachs too weak by reason of
chronic hunger and malnutrition to stand good and nutritious food. This has
been frequently observed in connection with Fresh Air Outings for poor
children in the tenement districts. I have known scores of instances. Very
often these children have to be patiently taught to eat. Sometimes it takes
several days to induce them to take milk and eggs. They crave for their
accustomed food—coffee and bread, or pickles. The same fact has been
observed in connection with adults in the hospitals. When the Salvation
Army started its free breakfast stations in New York, the newspapers made
a good deal of the fact that the children refused to eat the good soup and
milk porridge at first provided. That was regarded as conclusive evidence
that they were not hungry, for a hungry child is supposed to eat almost
anything. That is true in a measure of children who are merely hungry, but
these children are more than hungry. They are weak and unhealthy as the
result of chronic underfeeding. I myself saw many children at the Salvation
Army free breakfast depots whose hunger was only too apparent try bravely
to eat the soup until they actually vomited. They would beg for a piece of
bread, and when it was given them eat it ravenously. In an uptown school a
little English boy fainted one morning while at his lessons. He had fainted
the day before in the school yard, but the teacher thought that it was due to
overexertion while at play. When he fainted the second time she took him to
the principal’s office, and they discovered that he had not eaten anything
that day, and only a piece of bread the day before. The principal sent for
some milk, and when it was warmed in the school kitchen she gave it to the
lad with a couple of dainty chicken sandwiches from her own lunch,
expecting him to enjoy a rare treat. But he didn’t. He took only a bite or two
and a sup of milk, then began to vomit. He could not be induced to eat any
more nor even to drink the milk. Presently, however, he said to the teacher,
“I think I could eat some bread, teacher,” and when they sent out for some
rolls and coffee he ate as though he had seen no food for a week. Very few
people, it may be added, incidentally, realize how much the teachers and
principals of schools in the poorest districts give out of their slender
incomes to provide children with food, clothing, and shoes. But how little it
all amounts to in the way of solving the problem is best expressed in the
words of one principal, “What I can give in that way to the worst cases only

lessens the evil in just the same degree as a handful of sands taken from the
seashore lessens the number of grains.”

A COSMOPOLITAN GROUP OF “FRESH
AIR FUND” CHILDREN

VIII
The physical effects of such underfeeding cannot be easily overestimated.
No fact has been more thoroughly established than the physical superiority
of the children of the well-to-do classes over their less fortunate fellows. In
Moscow, N.V. Zark, a famous Russian authority, found that at all ages the
boys attending the Real schools and the Classical Gymnasium are superior
in height and weight to peasant boys.[54] In Leipzic, children paying 18
marks school fees are superior in height and weight to those paying only 9,
and gymnasium boys are superior to those of the lower Real and Burger
schools.[55] Studies in Stockholm and Turin show the same general results,
the poorer children being invariably shorter, lighter, and smaller of chest.
The British Anthropometric Committee found that English boys at ten in the
Industrial Schools were 3.31 inches shorter and 10.64 pounds lighter than
children of the well-to-do classes, while at fourteen years the differences in
height and weight were 6.65 inches and 21.85 pounds, respectively.[56] Dr.
Charles W. Roberts gives some striking results of the examination of 19,846
English boys and men.[57] Of these, 5915 belong to the non-laboring classes
of the English population, namely, public school boys, naval and military
cadets, medical and university students. The remaining 13,931 belong to the
artisan class. The difference in height, weight, and chest girth, from thirteen
to sixteen years of age, is as follows:—
Average Height in Inches

Age 13 14 15 16
Non-laboring class 58.79 61.11 63.47 66.40
Artisan class 55.93 57.76 60.58 62.93
Difference 2.66 3.35 2.89 3.47

Average Weight in Pounds

Age 13 14 15 16
Non-laboring class 88.60 99.21 110.42 128.34

Artisan class 78.27 84.61 96.79 108.70
Difference 10.33 14.60 13.63 19.64

Average Chest Girth in Inches

Age 13 14 15 16
Non-laboring class 28.41 29.65 30.72 33.08
Artisan class 25.24 26.28 27.51 28.97
Difference 3.17 3.37 3.21 4.11
It will be seen, therefore, that the children of the non-laboring class at
thirteen years of age exceed those of the artisan class in height almost three
inches, in weight almost ten and a half pounds, and in chest girth almost
three and a quarter inches. And these figures by no means represent fully
the contrast in physique which exists between the very poorest and well-to-
do children. The difference between the children of the best-paid artisans
and the poorest-paid of the same class is nearly as great. Mr. Rowntree
found that in York, England, the boys of the poorest section of the working-
class were on an average three and one-half inches shorter than the boys of
the better-paid section of the working-class. As regards weight Mr.
Rowntree found the difference to be eleven pounds in favor of the child of
the best-paid artisan.[58]
Dr. W.W. Keen quotes the figures of Roberts with approval as applying
almost equally to this country,[59] and all the studies yet made by American
investigators seem to justify that opinion. There exists a somewhat
voluminous, but scattered, American literature tending to the same general
conclusions as the European. The classic studies of Dr. Bowditch,[60] in
Boston, and Dr. Porter,[61] in St. Louis, showed very distinctly that the
children of the poorer classes in those cities were decidedly behind those of
the well-to-do classes in both height and weight. The more recent
investigations of Dr. Hrdlicka[62] fully bear out the results of these earlier
studies.
The Report on Physical Training (Scotland) calls attention once more to the
fact that children in the pauper, reformatory, and industrial schools are
superior in physique to the children in the ordinary elementary schools.

Says the report: “The contrast between the condition of such children as are
seen in the poor day schools and the children of parents who have
altogether failed in their duty is both marked and painful.”[63] Commenting
upon which an English Socialist writer says: “The obvious deduction is that
if you are doing your duty ... and your children are brought up in the way
they should go, they will not be half as well off as if they were truants or
thieves. Therefore, ... the best thing you can do for them ... is to turn your
children into little criminals.”[64] Without accepting these cynical
deductions, the fact remains that in a great many instances those children
who, by reason of the criminality of their parents or their complete failure
to provide for their offspring, find their way into such institutions, are far
better off, physically, than their fellows in the ordinary schools whose
parents are careful and industrious. But for the taint of institutional life, and
the crushing out of individuality which almost invariably accompanies it,
they would be far better equipped for the battle of life.
The real significance of this physical superiority is not so obvious as the
writer quoted appears to assume. The fact is that these children are
generally below the average even of their own class when they are admitted
to these institutions. Their superior physique shows the regeneration which
proper food and hygienic conditions produce in the worst cases.

IX
More than two thousand years ago Aristotle pointed out that physical health
was the basis of mental health, and the importance of a sound physical
development as an essential condition of successful education. “First the
body must be trained and then the understanding,” declared the great
Stagirite. The “new spirit” of modern education is admirably expressed in
the Aristotelian maxim. This new spirit is a protest against the practice,
futile from the standpoint of society, and brutal from the standpoint of the
child, of attempting to educate hungry, physically weak, and ill-developed
children who are unfitted to bear the strain and effort involved in the
educational process. No one who has studied the matter at all can doubt that
the physical deterioration which accompanies the impoverishment of the
workers is of tremendous significance educationally. All the evidence
gathered upon the subject in Europe and this country tends to the
conclusion that physical weakness and underdevelopment account for a
very large percentage of our educational failures. The studies of Porter, in
St. Louis, Smedley and Christopher, in Chicago, and of Professor Beyer,
who is perhaps our greatest authority, all tend to confirm the results of
European investigations, that children of superior physique make the best
pupils. Dull, backward pupils are generally inferior in physical
development.[65]
The number of dull and backward children in our public schools is so great
that a study from this physiological point of view would seem to be quite as
desirable and important as the many exhaustive and valuable psychological
studies with which the literature of Child Study abounds. For many years
special tutorial methods and institutions have existed for idiot and feeble-
minded children and such other classes of distinctly defective children as
epileptics, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb. But it is only in recent years
that any effort has been made to deal with that far larger class of children
distinguished equally from these distinctly defective classes and from
normal, typical children. These pseudo-atypical children, as Dr. Groszmann
terms them, are much more numerous than is generally supposed. Professor
Monroe, of Stanford University, gathered particulars relating to 10,000
children in the public schools of California and found that 3 per cent of the

children were feeble-minded and not less than 10 per cent backward and
mentally dull, needing special care and attention.[66] These children who
“skirt the borderland of abnormity” cannot properly be dealt with in the
ordinary classes, and it has been found necessary in most cities to establish
special classes for their benefit. While some of these classes have children
whose backwardness is more apparent than real, the children of foreign
immigrants, for example, whose difficulties with the language cause them
to be placed in grades with much younger children, the problem is still
serious when all possible allowance has been made for these. In districts
where the number of foreign-born children is very small the percentage of
backward children is very great. The percentage found in the schools of
California by Professor Monroe is probably not too high for the country as a
whole. In a general way it corroborates the findings of European
investigators, and a number of educators to whom I submitted the question
have given estimates based upon their personal observations ranging from
10 to 15 per cent.
If we accept the California figures and apply them to the whole country, we
get a total of about 1,500,000 such children enrolled in the public schools,
for not more than one-fourth of whom has any special provision been made
or attempted. The seriousness of this aspect of the problem will be apparent
to teachers and others familiar with school work who know how seriously 1
or 2 such children in a class of 40 or 50 will impair the efficiency of the
teacher’s efforts. By reason of their dulness and slow mental action such
children absorb too much of the teacher’s time, which might more
profitably be spent upon other children, and thus act as a drag upon all the
members of the class.
Moreover, they become discouraged by their failures, and, hardened by
constant rebuke and the taunts of their brighter companions, finally
careless, defiant, and altogether incorrigible. In many cases they leave
school before they are of the legal age, their leaving welcomed, and often
suggested, by the teachers, who not unnaturally tire of the hindrance to their
work. Yet they are the very children who can least of all afford to miss
whatever education they are capable of. They, more than any others, need
the training and development of their minds to fit them for the battle of life.
How can they otherwise be expected to earn their daily bread in the
competitive labor market, where dulness of brain must inevitably prove a

serious handicap? And unless they can stand the test of that competition,
they must become paupers. Many of these children are taken away from
school and sent to work, because, their parents say, “they can’t learn and are
better helping to pay the rent than wasting their time in school.” In
connection with the movement for the prevention of child labor, we have
come across hundreds of instances of this kind. Factory inspectors and
physicians in industrial centres where child labor is prevalent have
frequently pointed out that a very large number of child workers are quite
unfit for work. They were sick and backward in school, and instead of that
special care being given them which their condition demanded in order that
they might be equipped for the struggle for existence, they were removed
altogether from the school’s influences and subjected to conditions which
tend to further deterioration, physical, mental, and moral.[67]
So that the problem is not merely one of economic waste represented by a
fruitless and vain expenditure for the education of children who are not
capable of benefiting by it. It is not merely a question of economic waste
added to educational failure and the peril to society which that failure must
involve in the crime which ignorance breeds and fosters. All these things
are involved, and, in addition to them, is involved the terrible fact that we
turn them adrift in the world, unfit for its service and unable to adjust
themselves to its needs. In the very nature of things, because they are ill
developed of body and mind, they must become industrially inefficient.
They sink from depth to depth in the industrial abyss,
“To endure wrongs darker than death or night.”

Where giant machines, inventors’ brains, and ambitious immigrants in
countless numbers all conspire to narrow the labor market, they are
ruthlessly thrust aside. They are not only unemployed but unemployable.
They become paupers, driven into the morass of pauperism by forces that
are practically, for them, irresistible. Thus is the problem of pauperism
perpetuating itself. And to the economic waste represented by the
expenditure upon them in the schools must be added the further cost of their
support as dependants and paupers. It is a vicious circle.

X

That these same conditions are a fruitful source of criminality is
unquestionable. All our studies of juvenile delinquency point to the fact that
a very large proportion of the children who become truants, moral perverts,
and criminals are drawn from this same class of physically degenerate
children. It is commonplace nowadays to say that many of our criminals are
not really criminals at all, but the victims of physical or mental
abnormalities, often directly traceable to low nutrition. In observing a
number of juvenile delinquents the proportion of ill-developed children is
generally noticeable. Professor G. Stanley Hall says, “Juvenile criminals, as
a class, are inferior in body and mind to normal children, and ... their social
environment is no less inferior.”[68] Professor Dawson found among boys
and girls in reformatory institutions a tendency to lighter weight, shorter
stature, and less strength of grip; 16 per cent of them being “clearly
sufferers from low nutrition.”[69] Professor Kline has shown the same
general condition in a striking study, and concludes that “low nutrition
breeds discontent and a tendency to run away.”[70] A mass of very similar
testimony might be cited from the records of the most competent
investigators in this and other countries. It is the universal experience that a
low standard of physical development is almost invariably associated with
low mental and moral standards.
It is no mere coincidence that inferiority of physique should be thus
universally and inseparably associated with inferiority of economic
condition. It is not a mere coincidence that superiority of physique should
be generally associated with mental superiority. Nor will the suggestion of
coincidence suffice to explain the universal association of low physical and
mental development with criminal propensities. These facts possess a very
definite, and very obvious, relation as cause and effect. The three main
divisions of degeneracy, physical, mental, and moral, are inseparable and
spring from the same causes. From the investigations which have been
made in this country and from the voluminous literature upon the subject
which similar investigations in European countries have produced, I am
satisfied that poor, defective nutrition lies at the root of the physical
degeneration of the poor; and a priori reasoning would justify the

conclusion that the mental degeneracy evidenced by the enormous number
of backward children, educational failures, and the moral degeneracy
evidenced by increasing juvenile delinquency and crime, are due to the
same fundamental cause. From those data alone we might, with ample
justification, adopt the words of a famous authority and say, “Defective
nutrition lies at the base of all forms of degeneracy.”[71] We need not,
however, rely upon this method, for there is no lack of direct testimony to
show that low nutrition is the prime and most fruitful cause of mental
dulness and its attendant evils.
I do not wish to be understood as contending that physical, mental, or moral
defects never exist except as a result of defective nutrition, or that
malnutrition never exists except as a result of poverty. I know, for instance,
that a great many children are backward in their studies because they are
handicapped by defects of vision or hearing, adenoid growths, and the like.
These are often easily curable, and the fitting of proper glasses, or the
removal of adenoid growths by slight surgical operations, suffice to bring
such children up to the standard of normality. In an examination of over
7000 children in New York public schools one-third were found to have
“defects of vision, interfering with the proper pursuit of their studies.”[72] In
such cases malnutrition may or may not be the initial cause. That defective
vision is often attributable to low and improper nutrition is beyond
question. My contention is that the vast majority of dull and backward
children, whose number makes a serious pedagogical problem, and a still
more serious social problem in that so many of them become either
inefficient and dependent, or criminal, are dull and backward as a result of
physical inferiority directly traceable to poor and inadequate feeding.
A striking evidence of the association of underfeeding and mental dulness is
afforded by the coincidence of numbers in the two classes wherever careful,
expert investigations have been made. More than twenty years ago, as a
result of some discussion upon the subject in the House of Commons, Dr.
Crichton-Browne, the famous English authority upon mental diseases,
prepared, at the request of the then vice-president of the Committee of
Council on Education, Mr. Mundella, a report upon the physical and mental
condition of the children in the elementary schools of London.[73] In that
report Dr. Crichton-Browne pointed out that dulness, “sudden failure of
intellect and languor of manner,” so prevalent among poorer children, were

generally associated with hunger and semi-starvation. Later, the British
Medical Association appointed a committee consisting of Drs. Hack Tuke,
D. E. Shuttleworth, Fletcher Beach, and Francis Warner. They visited 14
schools scattered over a wide area and having a total enrolment of about
5000 children. For the purposes of examination 809 children were selected,
of which number 231 were classed in the report as being mentally dull, and
184 as showing evident signs of defective nutrition. The report adds, “We
do not suppose that we noted defective nutrition in all cases in which it may
have been present.” Very often the conditions noted are coexistent, so a
careful analysis of the figures was made, with the result that of the cases of
mental dulness 28.50 per cent were found to be among those reported as
suffering from defective nutrition, and the same proportion of mentally dull
included in the cases of defective nutrition.[74] In the examination of the
7000 New York public school children already referred to, Dr. Cronin found
650 cases of “bad mentality” and 632 cases of “bad nutrition.” Similar
investigations in several European cities, notably Turin, Christiania, and
Paris, show very similar results.
More conclusive still is the testimony of experience in cases where school
meals have been introduced. In 1883 Mr. Mundella, M.P., introducing the
education estimates in the House of Commons, described an experiment
which was being carried on in the elementary schools at Rousden by Sir
Henry Peek in the way of providing a cheap, wholesome, and nutritious
midday meal for the children. The cost of the meals was, according to Mr.
Mundella, who spoke from a statement furnished by Sir Henry Peek
himself, less than two and a half cents per meal, five meals costing twelve
cents. The school inspectors testified that the results had been eminently
satisfactory “both from a physical and educational point of view.” The
meals proved to be an incentive to more regular attendance and, by
providing the children with the requisite stamina, increased their mental
efficiency, the result being an increased average of passes in the
government examination upon which the governmental grants-in-aid were
based.[75] In the following year, 1884, Mr. Jonathan Taylor, a prominent
member of the Social Democratic Federation, induced the Sheffield School
Board to introduce a system of providing cheap school dinners. It was
found that a good, substantial meal, which Mr. Taylor describes as
“sufficient in quantity and excellent in quality, and forming such a dinner as
satisfies myself, and which the teachers in the schools are in the habit of

partaking of along with the children,” could be provided at a cost of less
than two cents per capita, that sum including the cost of fuel, cook’s wages,
and other working expenses. While, as the committee in charge reported to
the school board, it was soon found that there were a large number of
children who could not afford even two cents for a meal, the results of the
experiment speedily manifested themselves in a marked physical and
mental improvement in the children. It was particularly demonstrated that
children who were formerly dull and backward showed much improvement
in their work after they had partaken regularly of the school dinners for a
short time.[76] During the twenty years which have elapsed since these initial
experiments were made, many similar schemes have been introduced in
British schools, and in every case so far as I have been able to ascertain the
facts, there has been a marked improvement in the physical and mental
condition of the children affected.
Mrs. Humphry Ward has given a most interesting account of an experiment
in a “Special School for Defectives” at Tavistock Place, London, the
pioneer school of its kind in London. That it is a special school for
physically defective children does not detract from the importance of the
results noted. For some time there had been an arrangement whereby the
children were provided with a midday meal for which their parents were
charged three cents a day, the deficit being met by the managers from the
school fund. Complaint was made by some of the visitors interested in the
experiment that the meals were not good enough, not sufficiently
nourishing for children of that class, and the managers were prevailed upon
to improve the dietary to a considerable extent. Mrs. Ward says: “The
experiment of a more liberal and varied diet was tried. More hot meat, more
eggs, milk, cream, vegetables, and fruit were given. In consequence the
children’s appetites largely increased, and the expense naturally increased
with them. The children’s pence in May amounted to £3 13s. 6d. ($17.64),
and the cost of the food was £4 7s. 2d. ($20.92); in June, after the more
liberal scale had been adopted, the children’s payments were still £3 13s.
10d. ($17.72), but the expenses had risen to £5 7s. 8d. ($25.84). Meanwhile
the physical and mental results of the increased expenditure are already
unmistakable. Partially paralyzed children have been recovering strength in
hands and limbs with greater rapidity than before.... The effect, indeed, is
startling to those who have watched the experiment. Meanwhile, the
teachers have entered in the log-book of the school their testimony to the

increased power of work that the children have been showing since the new
feeding has been adopted. Hardly any child now wants to lie down during
school time, whereas applications to lie down used to be common; and the
children both learn and remember better.”[77]
In Birmingham, England, a voluntary organization started by the chairman
of the School Board, Mr. George Dixon, provides meals during the winter
months for something like 2500 children. This committee provides a dinner,
absolutely free of cost to the child, consisting principally of lentil soup and
bread and jam. The cost to the organization, according to Dr. Airy, H.M.I.,
who gave testimony before the Inter-Departmental Committee,[78] is less
than one cent per meal inclusive, the manager’s present salary being $500
per year. Formerly it was $750, but he voluntarily accepted the reduction to
$500 when subscriptions began to fall off. Dr. Airy explained to the
committee that the 2500 children thus fed by this charity constitute about
2½ per cent of the child population of the entire city. No attempt whatever
is made to deal with any children except those who are known to be
“practically starving,” the far larger number of children who, while being
underfed and seriously so, still get some sort of food, enough to keep them
from absolute destitution, being in no way provided for. One reason for the
low standard of meals given is the desire of the committee to make them as
unattractive as possible, so that few children will eat the dinners except
absolutely forced by sheer hunger. Another reason I give in full from the
“minutes of evidence” because of its bearing upon a phase of the problem
already noted. Dr. Airy was asked concerning the lentil soup, “Is there any
animal stock in it?” and replied: “Yes, there is a certain amount, but not
very much. It has been found by incessant experiment—because this is an
experimental business year by year—that lentil soup was the best. A
starving child cannot take anything good; its stomach rejects it at once. We
gave far too good soup at first. It had to be found out by experiment what
they would stand.”[79] There is another charity in Birmingham which
provides breakfasts of bread and cocoa and milk to practically the same
class of destitute children. Several teachers and others connected with
educational work in Birmingham have, in response to my inquiries, assured
me that notwithstanding the fact that the quality of meals given is so poor,
and that only the very lowest class of children is touched by the charity,
there has been a marked improvement in the mental capacity of the
children. One of the teachers, in a personal letter, says: “Of course, I have

no means of proving it statistically for you; our facilities for child study do
not include any system of individual record books, by which method alone,
it seems to me, could statistical data be gathered. But I know personally
several children who have been in my own class in whom the mental
improvement consequent upon their improved diet has been most marked.
If observation counts for anything at all, and I suppose it does, I have no
hesitation in saying that the mental improvement in a large number of
children has been simply marvellous.”
In Norway it has been for several years the custom of the school authorities
in several municipalities to provide, free of charge, a good dinner for all
school children who care to avail themselves of it. The dinners are prepared
in a central kitchen-station and sent out in boxes to the various schools,
special appliances being used to keep the meals hot. The dinners consist
usually of soup, porridge, meat, vegetables, and bread for the ordinary
children, and a special dietary for weak, sick, or defective children.[80] This
system of free dinners was introduced as a result of a series of experiments
made in Christiania. It was found that the number of backward, dull
children who came from the poorer districts was much higher than
elsewhere, and that they were, as a rule, inferior in physical development.
So great was the progress made by the children in several classes in which
the experiment of giving them one good meal each day was tried that the
school authorities were induced to introduce the system generally into the
schools. A member of the Municipal Council of Trondhjem says, speaking
of the free school dinner system, “Norway now interprets civilization to
mean that society must conspire to save its children from the hostile forces
of unequal economic conditions, and to secure for them equal opportunities
and helpful conditions for the development of their highest and best gifts.”
As a result of a careful study of the problem of how best to deal with the
backward child, and a comparison of her own observations with those of
teachers and others in Norway and France (where the cantines scolaires
have been attended with results very similar to those attained in Norway), a
New York teacher in charge of a large class of such children decided to try
the experiment of feeding them.[81] “To build up their intellects is the task
we have to accomplish,” she said to the writer, “and I have found that that
can best be done through building up their bodies first and so securing a
decent physical basis to work upon.” The children contribute a cent each

per day to a fund administered by the teacher, who provides each child with
a cup of warm milk every morning in the middle of the session. Should any
child for any reason be unable to contribute its share, it is not deprived of
the milk on that account, the small deficit being made up out of the
teacher’s own purse. In addition to the milk the children get such of the
products of the cooking classes as are suitable for them, three days a week.
It is a small experiment, too small indeed to justify any sweeping
generalization from it, but it is nevertheless important in that it confirms
fully the experience of foreign investigators that a very large proportion of
the children who are mentally dull need only to be properly fed in order to
enable their minds to develop normally.

“FRESH AIR FUND” CHILDREN FROM
CITY TENEMENTS ENJOYING LIFE IN
THE COUNTRY

A somewhat similar method of feeding the children has been tried for three
years at Speyer School, the practice and experimental school of Teachers
College, Columbia University.[82] The children of the lower grades are
supplied with milk and crackers at ten o’clock in the morning, and “the
teachers are unanimous in the statement that the children are all happier and
more able to work” in consequence of being fed. These various experiments
demonstrate beyond question that underfeeding is responsible for much of
the mental degeneracy among school children and the resulting failure of so

many of them to profit by the education which we provide for them. More
than that, they point unerringly to the remedy.

XI

Summarizing, briefly, the results of this investigation, the problem of
poverty as it affects school children may be stated in a few lines. All the
data available tend to show that not less than 2,000,000 children of school
age in the United States are the victims of poverty which denies them
common necessities, particularly adequate nourishment. As a result of this
privation they are far inferior in physical development to their more
fortunate fellows. This inferiority of physique, in turn, is responsible for
much mental and moral degeneration. Such children are in very many cases
incapable of successful mental effort, and much of our national expenditure
for education is in consequence an absolute waste. With their enfeebled
bodies and minds we turn these children adrift unfitted for the struggle of
life, which tends to become keener with every advance in our industrial
development, and because of their lack of physical and mental training they
are found to be inefficient industrially and dangerous socially. They become
dependent, paupers, and the procreators of a pauper and dependent race.
Here, then, is a problem of awful magnitude. In the richest country on earth
hundreds of thousands of children are literally damned to lifelong, helpless,
and debasing poverty. They are plunged in the earliest and most important
years of character formation into that terrible maelstrom of poverty which
casts so many thousands, ay, millions, of physical, mental, and moral
wrecks upon the shores of our social life. For them there is little or no hope
of escape from the blight and curse of pauperism unless the nation, pursuing
a policy of enlightened self-interest and protection, decides to save them. In
the main, this vast sum of poverty is due to causes of a purely impersonal
nature which the victims cannot control, such as sickness, accident, low
wages, and unemployment. Personal causes, such as ignorance,
thriftlessness, gambling, intemperance, indolence, wife-desertion, and other
vices or weaknesses, are also responsible for a good deal of poverty, though
by no means most of it as is sometimes urged by superficial observers.
There are many thousands of temperate and industrious workers who are
miserably poor, and many of those who are thriftless or intemperate are the
victims of poverty’s degenerating influences.[83] But whether a child’s
hunger and privation is due to some fault of its parents or to causes beyond

their control, the fact of its suffering remains, and its impaired physical and
mental strength tends almost irresistibly to make it inefficient as a citizen.
Whatever the cause, therefore, of its privation, society must, as a measure
of self-protection, take upon itself the responsibility of caring for the child.
There can be no compromise upon this vital point. Those who say that
society should refuse to do anything for those children who are the victims
of their parents’ vices or weaknesses adopt a singularly indefensible
attitude. In the first place it is barbarously unjust to allow the sins of the
parents to bring punishment and suffering upon the child, to damn the
innocent and unoffending. No more vicious doctrine than this, which so
many excellent and well-intentioned persons are fond of preaching, has ever
been formulated by human perversity. Carried to its logical end, it would
destroy all legislation for the protection of children from cruel parents or
guardians. It is strange that the doctrinaire advocates of this brutal gospel
should overlook its practical consequences. If discrimination were to be
made at all, it should be in favor of, rather than against, the children of
drunken and profligate parents. For these children have a special claim
upon society for protection from wrongs in the shape of influences injurious
to their physical and moral well-being, and tending to lead them into evil
and degrading ways. The half-starved child of the inebriate is not less
entitled to the protection of society than the victim of inhuman physical
torture.
Should these children be excluded from any system of feeding adopted by
the state upon the ground that their parents have not fulfilled their parental
responsibilities, society joins in a conspiracy against their very lives. And
that conspiracy ultimately and inevitably involves retribution. In the
interests and name of a beguiling economy, fearful that if it assumes
responsibility for the care of the child of inebriate parents, it will foster and
encourage their inebriety and neglect, society leaves the children
surrounded by circumstances which practically force them to become
drunkards, physical and moral wrecks, and procreators of a like degenerate
progeny. Then it is forced to accept the responsibility of their support, either
as paupers or criminals. That is the stern Nemesis of retribution. Where an
enlightened system of child saving has been followed, this principle has
been clearly recognized. In Minnesota, for example, the state assumes the
responsibility for the care of such children as a matter of self-protection. To

quote the language of a report of the State Public School at Owatonna: “It is
for economic as well as for humane reasons that this work is done. The state
is thus protecting itself from dangers to which it would be exposed in a very
few years if these children were reared in the conditions which so
injuriously affect them.”[84] Whatever steps may be taken to punish, or make
responsible to the state, those parents who by their vice and neglect bring
suffering and want upon their children, the children themselves should be
saved.
To the contention that society, having assumed the responsibility of
insisting that every child shall be educated, and providing the means of
education, is necessarily bound to assume the responsibility of seeing that
they are made fit to receive that education, so far as possible, there does not
seem to be any convincing answer. It will be objected that for society to do
this would mean the destruction of the responsibility of the parents. That is
obviously true. But it is equally true of education itself, the responsibility
for which society has assumed. Some individualists there are who contend
that society is wrong in doing this, and their opposition to the proposal that
it should undertake to provide the children with food is far more logical
than that of those who believe that society should assume the responsibility
of educating the child, but not that of equipping it with the necessary
physical basis for that education. The fact is that society insists upon the
education of the children, not, primarily, in their interests nor in the interests
of the parents, but in its own. All legislation upon child labor, education,
child guardianship in general, is based upon a denial of proprietary rights to
children by their parents. The child belongs to society rather than to its
parents.
Further, private charity, which is the only alternative suggestion offered for
the solution of this problem, equally removes responsibility from the
parents and is open to other weightier objections. In the first place, where it
succeeds, it is far more demoralizing than such a system of public support
provided at the public cost, as the child’s birthright, could possibly be. Still
more important is the fact that private charity does not succeed in the vast
majority of instances. To their credit, it must be remembered that the poor
as a class refuse to beg or to parade their poverty. They suffer in silence and
never seek alms. Pride and the shame of begging seal their lips. Here, too,
the question of the children of inebriate, dissolute, worthless parents enters.

Every one who has had the least experience of charitable work knows that
these are the persons who are most relieved by charity. They do not hesitate
to plead for charity. “I have not strength to dig; to beg I am ashamed,” is the
motto of the self-respecting, silent, suffering poor. The failure of charity is
incontestable. As some witty Frenchman has well said, “Charity creates
one-half the misery she relieves, but cannot relieve one-half the misery she
creates.”
It is impossible to enter here into a discussion of the question of cost, but
the argument that society could not afford to undertake this further
responsibility must be briefly considered. In view of our well-nigh
boundless resources there is small reason for the belief that we cannot
provide for the needs of all our children. If it were true that we could not
provide for their necessities, then wholesale death would be merciful and
desirable. At any rate, it would be far better to feed them first, neglecting
their education altogether, than to waste our substance in the brutally
senseless endeavor to educate them while they starve and pine for bread.
There can be little doubt that the economic waste involved in fruitless
charity, and the still vaster waste involved in the maintenance of the
dependent and criminal classes whose degeneracy is mainly attributable to
underfeeding in childhood, amount to a sum far exceeding the cost of
providing adequate nutrition for every child. It is essentially a question of
the proper adjustment of our means to our needs. Otherwise we must admit
the utter failure of our civilization and confess that, in the language of
Sophocles, it is
“Happiest beyond compare
Never to taste of life;
Happiest in order next,
Being born, with quickest speed
Thither again to turn
From whence we came.”[D]

COMMUNAL SCHOOL KITCHEN,
WHERE THE SCHOOL MEALS ARE
PREPARED, CHRISTIANIA, NORWAY

D. Œdipus Coloneus.

III
THE WORKING CHILD

“In this boasted land of freedom there are bonded baby slaves,
And the busy world goes by and does not heed.
They are driven to the mill, just to glut and overfill
Bursting coffers of the mighty monarch, Greed.
When they perish we are told it is God’s will,
Oh, the roaring of the mill, of the mill!”
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

I

It is a startling and suggestive fact that the very force which Aristotle, the
profoundest thinker of antiquity, regarded as the only agency through which
the abolition of slavery might be made possible, served, when at last it was
evolved, not to destroy slavery, but to extend it; to enslave in a new form of
bondage those who hitherto had been free. Aristotle regarded slavery as a
basic institution and saw no possible means whereby it might ever be
dispensed with, “except perhaps by the aid of machines.” He said, “If every
tool ... could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Dædalus
moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephæstos went of their own
accord; if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there
would be no need of apprentices for the master workers, or slaves for the
lords.”[85] When more than two thousand years had passed, a machine, a
wonderful, complex tool, almost literally fulfilling his conditions, was
invented.
We speak of the power-loom as Cartwright’s invention, but in truth it was
the joint production of numberless inventors, most of them unknown to
history, and some of whom lived and labored long before Aristotle sat at
Plato’s feet in the great school at Athens. Looking at a modern power-loom
in one of our great factories not long ago, I asked the name of the inventor,
which was readily enough given. But as I watched the marvellous
mechanism with its many wheels, levers, and springs, I wondered how
much of it could be said to have had its origin in the brain of the inventor in
question. Who invented the wheel, the lever, the spring? Who invented the
first rude loom, reproduced, in principle, in the wonderful looms of the
twentieth century? No man knows. We do not know the name of the
inventor of the loom figured in all its details upon the tomb of the ancient
Egyptian at Beni Hassan;[86] we do not know who invented the loom which
the Greek vase of 400 B.C. depicts,—a loom which, so William Morris tells
us, is in all respects like those in use in Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the
latter half of the nineteenth century.[87] Many thousands of years ago, in the
simple tribal communism of primitive man, the great bed-rock inventions
were evolved. Thousands of years of human experience led up to the
ribbon-loom which, in the early part of the sixteenth century, brought

sentence of death upon the poor inventor of Danzig[88] whose very name has
been forgotten. This ribbon-loom was a near approach to the wonderful tool
of which Aristotle dreamed as the liberator of enslaved man.
The work of improvement went on, and the power-loom came; “weavers’
shuttles were to weave of themselves” in a well-nigh literal sense. The great
machine tool became an accomplished fact. It had been forged upon the
anvil of human necessity through countless centuries. But the revolution it
wrought, or, rather, the revolution of which it was the expression, was not a
revolution of liberation. A hundred and twenty years have elapsed since
then, and still the prophecy of freedom has not been fulfilled; there are still
“slaves for the lords.”
“Fast and faster, our iron master,
The thing we made, for ever drives,
Bids us grind treasure and fashion pleasure,
For other hopes and other lives.”

Children have always worked, but it is only since the reign of the machine
that their work has been synonymous with slavery. Under the old form of
simple, domestic industry even the very young children were assigned their
share of the work in the family. But this form of child labor was a good and
wholesome thing. There may have been abuses; children may have suffered
from the ignorance, cupidity, and brutality of fathers and mothers, but in the
main the child’s share in the work of the family was a good thing. In the
first place, the child was associated in its work with one or both of its
parents, and thus kept under all those influences which we deem of most
worth, the influences of home and parental care. Secondly, the work of the
child constituted a major part of its education. And it was no mean
education, either, which gave the world generation after generation of
glorious craftsmen. The seventeenth-century glass-blower of Venice or
Murano, for instance, learned his craft from his father in this manner, and in
turn taught it to his son. There was a bond of interest between them; a
parental pride and interest on the part of the father infinitely greater and
more potent for good than any commercial relation would have allowed. On
the part of the child, too, there was a filial pride and devotion which found
its expression in a spirit of emulation, the spirit out of which all the rich
glory of that wonderfully rich craft was born. So, too, it was with the potters
of ancient Greece, and with the tapestry weavers of fourteenth-century

France. In the golden age of the craftsman, child labor was child training in
the noblest and best sense. The training of hand and heart and brain was the
end achieved, even where it was not the sole purpose of the child’s labor.
But with the coming of the machine age all this was changed. The
craftsman was supplanted by the tireless, soulless machine. The child still
worked, but in a great factory throbbing with the vibration of swift, intricate
machines. In place of parental interest and affection there was the harsh,
pitiless authority of an employer or his agent, looking, not to the child’s
well-being and skill as an artificer, but to the supplying of a great, ever
widening market for cash gain.
It is not without its significance that the ribbon-loom which in the latter part
of the seventeenth century caused the workmen of England to riot, the same
machine which, later, was publicly burnt in Hamburg by order of the
Senate, should have been described as “enabling a totally inexperienced
boy” to set the whole loom with all its shuttles in motion, “by simply
moving a rod backwards and forwards.”[89] It was as though the new
mechanical invention had been designed with the express purpose of laying
the burden of the world’s work upon child shoulders; as though some evil
genius had deliberately contrived that the nation of progress should
“—Stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart.”

II
There is no more terrible page in history than that which records the
enslavement of mere babies by the industrial revolution of the eighteenth
century in England. Not even the crucifixion of twenty thousand slaves
along the highways by Scipio excels it in horror.
Writing in 1795, Dr. Aikin gives a vivid account of the evils which had
already been introduced in the factory districts by the new system of
manufacture.[90] He mentions the destruction of the best features of home
life, the spread of filth, thriftlessness, poverty, and disease, and says that the
demand for “children for the cotton mills” had become very great. To get
children for the cotton mills was not easy at first. Parental love and pride
were ranged against the new system, denying its demands. Accustomed to
the old domestic system, the association of all the members of the family in
manufacture as part of the domestic life, they regarded the new industrial
forms with repugnance. It was considered a degradation for a child to be
sent into the factories, especially for a girl, whose whole life would be
blasted thereby. The term “factory girl” was an insulting epithet, and the
young woman who bore it could not hope for other, better employment, nor
yet for marriage with any but the very lowest and despised of men. Not till
they were forced by sheer hunger and misery, through the reduction of
wages to the level of starvation, could the respectable workers be induced to
send their children into the factories. In the meantime they made war upon
the “iron men,” as the machines were called, but of course in vain. To such
a conflict there could be only one end,—human beings of flesh and blood
could not prevail against the iron monsters, their competitors.
But the manufacturers wanted children, and they got them from the
workhouses. It was not difficult to persuade Bumbledom to get rid of its
pauper children, especially when its conscience was salved by the specious
pretext that the children were to be taught new trades, as apprentices.
“Alfred,” the anonymous author of the History of the Factory Movement,[91]
gives a thrilling description of the horrible inhumanity and wickedness of
this practice of sending parish apprentices, “without remorse or inquiry, to
be used up as the cheapest raw material in the market.” The mill owners

would first communicate with the overseers of the poor, and the latter
would fix suitable dates for the manufacturers or their agents to examine the
children. Those chosen were then conveyed to their destination, closely
packed in wagons or canal-boats. Thenceforth they were doomed to the
most miserable slavery. A class of “traffickers” in child slaves arose. These
men made a profitable business of supplying children to the manufacturers.
They deposited their victims in dark, dank cellars, where the sales to the
manufacturers or their agents were made. “The mill owners, by the light of
lanterns being able to examine the children, their limbs and stature having
undergone the necessary scrutiny, the bargain was struck, and these poor
innocents were conveyed to the mills.” Their plight was appalling. They
received no wages, and they were so cheap, their places so easily filled, that
the mill owners did not even take the trouble to give them decent food or
clothing. “In stench, in heated rooms, amid the whirling of a thousand
wheels, little fingers and little feet were kept in ceaseless action, forced into
unnatural activity by blows from the heavy hands and feet of the merciless
overlooker, and the infliction of bodily pain by instruments of punishment
invented by the sharpened ingenuity of insatiable selfishness.”

NEW YORK CELLAR PRISONERS

These children were found by Settlement
Workers in New York City. Illegally
employed, they were never
allowed to go out of doors, their only
recreation being taken in a dark, filthy cellar.

Robert Blincoe, himself an apprentice who, at seven years of age, was sent
from a London workhouse to a cotton mill near Nottingham, gives a
harrowing but well-authenticated account of actual experience.[92] He tells
how the apprentices used to be fed upon the same coarse food as that given
to the master’s pigs, and how he and his fellow-victims used joyfully to say
when they saw the swine being fed, “The pigs are served; it will be our turn
next.” ... “When the swine were hungry,” he says, “they used to grunt so
loud, they obtained the wash first to quiet them. The apprentices could be
intimidated, and made to keep still.” Blincoe describes how, for fattening,
the pigs were often given meat balls, or dumplings, in their wash, and how
he and the other apprentices who were kept near the pigsties used to slip
away and slyly steal as many of these dumplings from the pigs as possible,
hastening away with them to a hiding-place, where they were greedily
devoured. “The pigs ... learned from experience to guard their food by
various expedients. Made wise by repeated losses, they kept a sharp
lookout, and the moment they ascertained the approach of the half-famished
apprentices, they set up so loud a chorus of snorts and grunts, it was heard
in the kitchen, when out rushed the swineherd, armed with a whip, from
which combined means of protection for the swine this accidental source of
obtaining a good dinner was soon lost. Such was the contest carried on for
some time at Litton Mill between the half-famished apprentices and the
well-fed swine.”
The children were worked sixteen hours at a stretch, by day and by night.
They slept by turns and relays in beds that were never allowed to cool, one
set being sent to bed as soon as the others had gone to their toil. Children of
both sexes and all ages, from five years upward, were indiscriminately
herded together, with the result that vice and disease flourished. Sometimes
the unfortunate victims would try to run away, and to prevent this all who
were suspected of such a tendency had irons riveted on their ankles with
long links reaching up to their hips. In these chains they were compelled to
work and sleep, young women and girls as well as boys. Many children
contrived to commit suicide, some were unquestionably beaten to death; the
death-rate became so great that it became the custom to bury the bodies at
night, secretly, lest a popular uprising be provoked.[93]
Worse still, the cupidity of British Bumbledom was aroused, and it became
the custom for overseers of the poor to insist that one imbecile child at least

should be taken by the mill owner, or the trafficker, with every batch of
twenty children. In this manner the parish got rid of the expense of
maintaining its idiot children. What became of these unhappy idiots will
probably never be known, but from the cruel fate of the children who were
sane, we may judge how awful that of the poor imbeciles must have been.
Even in the one factory of the time which was heralded as a model for the
manufacturers to copy, the mill at New Lanark, Scotland, owned by Mr.
David Dale and afterward made famous by the great and good Robert
Owen, his son-in-law, conditions were, from a twentieth-century point of
view, simply shocking, despite the fact that it was the subject of glowing
praise in the Annual Register for 1792, and that, like some of our modern
factories, it had become generally regarded as a semi-philanthropic
establishment. Robert Owen tells us in his autobiography that “children
were received as early as six years old, the pauper authorities declining to
send them at any later age.” These little children worked from six in the
morning till seven in the evening, and after that they were supposed to be
educated! “The poor children hated their slavery; many absconded; ... at
thirteen or fifteen years old, when their apprenticeship expired, they
commonly went off to Edinburgh or Glasgow, ... altogether admirably
trained for swelling the mass of vice and misery in the towns.[94] And all this
while British philanthropists were agitating the question of negro
emancipation, and raising funds for that object!”
Thanks, mainly, to the agitation of Owen, a movement was begun to
endeavor to improve the lot of these little child slaves. This movement
received a tremendous impetus from the fearful epidemic which, in 1799–
1800, spread through the factory districts of Manchester and the
surrounding country. An inquiry into the causes of this epidemic ascribed it
to overwork, scant and poor food, wretched clothing, bad ventilation, and
overcrowding, especially among the children.[95] As a result the first act for
the protection of child workers was passed through the parliamentary
exertions of Sir Robert Peel, himself a master manufacturer. It was a very
small measure of relief which this act afforded, but it is nevertheless a most
important statute to students of industrial legislation as the “first definitely
in restraint of modern factory labor and in general opposition to the laissez-
faire policy in industry.”[96] It was the first factory act ever passed by the
British Parliament. It placed no limit upon the age at which children might

be employed; it applied only to apprentices, and not to children “under the
supervision of their parents;” it reduced the hours of labor to twelve per
day, and provided for the clothing, instruction, and religious training of the
children. These provisions were clearly a survival of an industrial system
based upon paternal interest and authority.
One immediate effect of the act of 1802 was the practical break-up of the
pauper apprentice system. But it must be remembered that this system was
already outworn, and it is extremely improbable that it would have
continued to any great extent, even if the act of 1802 had not been passed. It
had served its purpose, but was no longer essential to the manufacturers.[97]
Notwithstanding that it introduced a revolutionary principle, as we have
seen, the act excited no opposition from the manufacturers. The reason for
this is not difficult to determine. Wages had been forced down to the
starvation level through the competition of the pauper apprentices with free,
adult labor, with the result that poverty abounded. Parents were ready now
to send their children into the mills. Hunger had conquered their prejudices
—the iron man had triumphed over human flesh and blood.
It is not my purpose to trace the growth of English legislation against child
labor. This brief historical sketch is introduced for quite another purpose, to
wit, to show the origin of our modern problem of child slavery and
degradation. Suffice it to say, then, that the “free” children who went into
the mills by their parents’ “consent” were almost as badly off as the pauper
apprentices had been. They were treated just as brutally. Even in 1830,
before a meeting of philanthropists and clergy in Bradford, Richard Oastler,
the “King of the Factory Children,” could hold up an overseer’s whip,
saying, “This was hard at work in this town last week.”[98] And on the 16th
of March, 1832, Michael Sadler, M.P., in moving the second reading of his
Ten Hours Bill in the House of Commons, could say: “Sir, children are
beaten with thongs prepared for the purpose. Yes, the females of this
country, no matter whether children or grown up, I hardly know which is
the more disgusting outrage, are beaten upon the arms, face, and bosom—
beaten in your ‘free market’ of labour, as you term it, like slaves.... These
are the instruments!” (Here, says the report in Hansard’s Parliamentary
Debates, the honorable member exhibited some black, heavy leathern
thongs, one of them fixed in a sort of handle, the smack of which, when
struck upon the table, resounded through the House.) “They are quite equal

to breaking an arm, but the bones of the young ... are pliant. The marks,
however, are long visible, and the poor wretch is flogged, I say, like a dog,
by the tyrant overlooker. We speak with execration of the cart-whip of the
West Indies, but let us see this night an equal feeling against the factory
thong of England.”[99] In some memorable verses this noble parliamentary
leader of the movement for factory legislation has described such a
whipping scene. The poem is too long to quote in its entirety:—
“‘Father, I’m up, but weary,
I scarce can reach the door,
And long the way and dreary—
Oh, carry me once more!’

“Her wasted form seemed nothing—
The load was at his heart,
The sufferer he kept soothing
Till at the mill they part.
The overlooker met her,
As to her frame she crept,
And with his thong he beat her
And cursed her as she wept.

“All night with tortured feeling,
He watched his speechless child,
While, close beside her kneeling,
She knew him not, nor smiled.
Again the factory’s ringing
Her last perceptions tried;
When, from her straw bed springing,
‘Tis time!’ she shrieked, and died!”[100]

A Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investigate the
grounds of Sadler’s demand for the Ten Hours Bill. From the mass of
evidence of almost unspeakable cruelty, I quote only one brief passage from
the testimony of one Jonathan Downe, himself a mill hand: “Provided a
child should be drowsy (there were plenty working at six years of age), the
overlooker walks around the room with a stick in his hand, and he touches
the child on the shoulder, and says, ‘Come here!’ In the corner of the room
is an iron cistern; it is filled with water; he takes this boy, and holding him
up by his legs, dips him overhead in the cistern, and sends him to his task
for the remainder of the day; and that boy is to stand dripping as he is at his
work—he has no chance of drying himself.”[101]

Such, then, was child labor at its worst; such the immediate effects of the
introduction of great mechanical inventions which the wisest of the ancients
believed would liberate men from all forms of bondage and destroy every
vestige of slavery,—a hope which for many of us has not been shattered,
even by a century and a quarter of disappointment. Happily, we in the
United States have been practically free from some of the worst evils of
England’s experience, yet it is only too true that we have to-day a child-
labor problem of terrible magnitude, challenging the heart and brain of the
nation to find a solution. We, too, are permitting the giant “iron men” to
enslave our babies. The machine is our modern Moloch, and we feed it with
precious child lives.

III

I am not unmindful of the fact that the presentation of the darkest side of
England’s experience may have the effect of inducing in some minds a
certain spirit of content,—a pharisaical thanksgiving that we are “not as
other men” have been in a past that is not very remote. I accept, gladly, the
issue implied in that attitude. It is no part of my purpose to discount the
social and ethical gains which have resulted from the struggle against child
labor, or to paint in unduly dark colors the problem as it presents itself to us
in the United States to-day. No good purpose is served by exaggeration;
progress is not quickened by denying the progress that has been made.

LITTLE TENEMENT TOILERS

With the exception of the infant in arms these
are all working children. They were called
away from the
photographer to go on with their work!

The inferno of child torture which the records of nineteenth-century
England picture so vividly has more than historical interest for us. It was
the result of a policy of laissez faire on the part of the government, and that
policy has its advocates in the United States to-day. In our legislative

assemblies, and through the press, able and earnest men—some of them
earnest only in their devotion to Mammon—are advocating that policy and
forever crying out, in the words of the old physiocrats, “Let alone; the
world revolves of itself.” When that cry of laissez faire is raised, despite the
fact that children of four years are found at work in the canning factories of
New York State,[102] and little girls of five and six years are found working
by night in Southern cotton mills,[103] it is not too much to assume that only
a vigilant and constantly protesting public conscience protects us from
conditions as revolting as any of those experienced in the black night of
England’s orgy of greed. Capital has neither morals nor ideals; its interests
are always and everywhere expressible in terms of cash profits. Capital in
the United States in the twentieth century calls for children as loudly as it
called in England a century ago.
Whatever advance has been made in the direction of the legislative
protection of children from the awful consequences of premature
exploitation, has been made in the face of bitter opposition from the
exploiters. In the New York Legislature, during the session of 1903, the
owners of the canning factories of the state used their utmost power to have
their industry exempted from the humane but inadequate provisions of the
Child Labor Law, notwithstanding that babies four years old were known to
be working in their factories. The Northern owners of Alabama cotton mills
secured the repeal of the law passed in that state in 1887 prohibiting the
employment of children under fourteen years of age for more than eight
hours in a day; and when, later, the Alabama Child Labor Committee sought
to secure legislative protection for children up to twelve years of age, paid
agents of the mill owners appeared before the legislature and persistently
opposed their efforts.[104] Similar testimony might be given from practically
every state where any attempt has been made to legislate against the evil of
child labor. Even such a responsible organ of capitalist opinion as the
Manufacturers’ Record editorially denounces all child-labor legislation as
wrong and immoral![105] There are, of course, honorable exceptions, but as a
class the employers of labor are persistent in their opposition to all such
legislation.
According to the census of 1900 there were, in the United States in that
year, 1,752,187 children under sixteen years of age employed in gainful
occupations. Of itself that is a terrible sum, but all authorities are agreed

that it does not fully represent the magnitude of the child-labor problem. It
is well known that many thousands of children are working under the
protection of certificates in which they are falsely represented as being of
the legal age for employment. When a child of twelve gets a certificate
declaring its age to be fifteen, it needs only to work a year, to be in reality
thirteen years old, in order to be classed as an adult over sixteen years of
age. Such certificates have been, and in many cases still are, ridiculously
easy to obtain, it being only necessary for one of the parents or guardians of
a child to swear before a notary that the child has reached the minimum age
required by law. The result has been the promotion of child slavery and
illiteracy through the wholesale perjury of parents and guardians.[106] I have
known scores of instances in which children ten or eleven years old were
employed through the possession of certificates stating that they were
thirteen or fourteen. I remember asking one little lad his age, in Pittston,
Pennsylvania, during the anthracite coal strike of 1902. He certainly did not
look more than ten years old, but he answered boldly, “I’m thirteen, sir.”
When I asked him how long he had been at work, he replied, “More’n a
year gone, sir.” Afterward I met his father at one of the strikers’ meetings,
and he told me that the lad was only a few days over eleven years of age,
and that he went to work as a “breaker boy” before he was ten. “We’m a big
fam’ly,” he said in excuse. “There’s six kids an’ th’ missis an’ me. Wi’ me
pay so small, I was glad to give a quarter to have the papers (certificate)
filled out so’s he could bring in a trifle like other boys.” Afterward I came
across several similar cases.
That is only one of many reasons for supposing that the census figures do
not adequately represent the extent to which child labor prevails. Another is
the tremendous number of children of school age, and below the age at
which they may be legally employed, who do not attend school. In New
York State, for instance, there were more than 76,000 children between the
ages of ten and fourteen years who were out of school during the whole of
the twelve months covered by the census of 1900, and nearly 16,000 more
in the same age period who attended school less than five months in the
year.[107] Careful investigation in Philadelphia showed that in one year,
“after deducting those physically unable to attend school, 16,100 children,
between the ages of eight and thirteen,” were out of school, and a similar
condition is reported to exist throughout the whole of Pennsylvania.[108] The
Child Labor Committee of Pennsylvania gives a list of nearly one hundred

different kinds of work at which children between the ages of eight and
thirteen were found to be employed in Philadelphia alone. In practically
every industrial centre this margin of children of school age and below the
legal age for employment, who do not attend school, exists. It is impossible
for any one who is at all conversant with the facts to resist the conclusion
that, after making all possible allowances for other causes, by far the larger
part of these absentees are at work. Thousands find employment in factories
and stores; others find employment in some of the many street trades,
selling newspapers, peddling, running errands for small storekeepers, and
the like. Many others are not “employed” in the strict sense of the word at
all, because they work in their homes, assisting their parents. Their
condition is generally much worse than that of the children regularly
employed in factories and workshops. In excluding them the census figures
omit a very large class of child workers who are the victims of the worst
conditions of all. I am convinced that the number of children under fifteen
years of age who work is much larger than the official figures give,
notwithstanding that these are supposed to give the number of all workers
under sixteen years of age. It would, I think, be quite within the mark to say
that the number of child workers under fifteen is at least 2,250,000.
From the point of view of the sociologist an accurate statistical measure of
the child-labor problem would be a most valuable gain, but to most people
such figures mean very little. If they could only see the human units
represented by the figures, it would be different. If they could only see in
one vast, suffering throng as many children as there are men, women, and
children in the state of New Jersey, they would be able to appreciate some
of the meaning of the census figures. Even so, they would have only a vivid
sense of the magnitude of such a number as 1,752,000; they would still
have no idea of the awful physical, mental, and moral wreckage hidden in
the lifeless and dumb figures. If it were only possible to take the
consumptive cough of one child textile worker with lint-clogged lungs, and
to multiply its volume by tens of thousands; to gather into one single
compass the fevers that burn in thousands of child toilers’ bodies, so that we
might visualize the Great White Plague’s relation to child labor, the nation
would surely rise as one man and put an end to the destruction of children
for profit. If all the people of this great republic could see little Anetta
Fachini, four years old, working with her mother making artificial flowers,
as I saw her in her squalid tenement home at eleven o’clock at night, I think

the impression upon their hearts and minds would be far deeper and more
lasting than any that whole pages of figures could make. The frail little
thing was winding green paper around wires to make stems for artificial
flowers to decorate ladies’ hats. Every few minutes her head would droop
and her weary eyelids close, but her little fingers still kept moving—
uselessly, helplessly, mechanically moving. Then the mother would shake
her gently, saying: “Non dormire, Anetta! Solamente pochi altri—solamente
pochi altri.” (“Sleep not, Anetta! Only a few more—only a few more.”)

JUVENILE TEXTILE WORKERS ON
STRIKE IN PHILADELPHIA

And the little eyes would open slowly and the tired fingers once more move
with intelligent direction and purpose.
Some years ago, in one of the mean streets of Paris, I saw, in a dingy
window, a picture that stamped itself indelibly upon my memory. It was not,
judged by artistic canons, a great picture; on the contrary, it was crude and
ill drawn and might almost have been the work of a child. Torn, I think,
from the pages of the Anarchist paper La Revolté, it was, perchance, a
protest drawn from the very soul of some indignant worker. A woman,
haggard and fierce of visage, representing France, was seated upon a heap
of child skulls and bones. In her gnarled and knotted hands she held the
writhing form of a helpless babe whose flesh she was gnawing with her
teeth. Underneath, in red ink, was written in rude characters, “The wretch!
She devours her own children!” My mind goes back to that picture: it is

literally true to-day, that this great nation in its commercial madness
devours its babes.

IV
The textile industries rank first in the enslavement of children. In the cotton
trade, for example, 13.3 per cent of all persons employed throughout the
United States are under sixteen years of age.[109] In the Southern states,
where the evil appears at its worst, so far as the textile trades are concerned,
the proportion of employees under sixteen years of age in 1900 was 25.1
per cent, in Alabama the proportion was nearly 30 per cent. A careful
estimate made in 1902 placed the number of cotton-mill operatives under
sixteen years of age in the Southern states at 50,000. At the beginning of
1903 a very conservative estimate placed the number of children under
fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the South at 30,000, no less than
20,000 of them being under twelve.[110] If this latter estimate of 20,000
children under twelve is to be relied upon, it is evident that the total number
under fourteen must have been much larger than 30,000. According to Mr.
McKelway, one of the most competent authorities in the country, there are
at the present time not less than 60,000 children under fourteen employed in
the cotton mills of the Southern states.[111] Miss Jane Addams tells of finding
a child of five years working by night in a South Carolina mill;[112] Mr.
Edward Gardner Murphy has photographed little children of six and seven
years who were at work for twelve and thirteen hours a day in Alabama
mills.[113] In Columbia, S.C., and Montgomery, Ala., I have seen hundreds of
children, who did not appear to be more than nine or ten years of age, at
work in the mills, by night as well as by day.
The industrial revival in the South from the stagnation consequent upon the
Civil War has been attended by the growth of a system of child slavery
almost as bad as that which attended the industrial revolution in England a
century ago. From 1880 to 1900 the value of the products of Southern
manufactures increased from less than $458,000,000 to $1,463,000,000—
an increase of 220 per cent. Many factors contributed to that immense
industrial development of the South, but, according to a well-known expert,
[114]
it is due “chiefly to her supplies of tractable and cheap labor.” During
the same period of twenty years in the cotton mills outside of the South, the
proportion of workers under sixteen years of age decreased from 15.6 per
cent to 7.7 per cent, but in the South it remained at approximately 25 per

cent. It is true that the terrible pauper apprentice system which forms such a
tragic chapter in the history of the English factory movement has not been
introduced; yet the fate of the children of the poor families from the hill
districts who have been drawn into the vortex of this industrial development
is almost as bad as that of the English pauper children. These “poor whites,”
as they are expressively called, even by their negro neighbors, have for
many years eked out a scanty living upon their farms, all the members of
the family uniting in the struggle against niggardly nature. Drawn into the
current of the new industrial order, they do not realize that, even though the
children worked harder upon the farms than they do in the mills, there is an
immense difference between the dust-laden air of a factory and the pure air
of a farm; between the varied tasks of farm life with the endless
opportunities for change and individual initiative, and the strained attention
and monotonous tasks of mill life. The lot of the pauper children driven into
the mills by the ignorance and avarice of British Bumbledom was little
worse than that of these poor children, who work while their fathers loaf.
During the long, weary nights many children have to be kept awake by
having cold water dashed on their faces, and when morning comes they
throw themselves upon their beds—often still warm from the bodies of their
brothers and sisters—without taking off their clothing. “When I works
nights, I’se too tired to undress when I gits home, an’ so I goes to bed wif
me clo’s on me,” lisped one little girl in Augusta, Ga.
There are more than 80,000 children employed in the textile industries of
the United States, according to the very incomplete census returns, most of
them being little girls. In these industries conditions are undoubtedly worse
in the Southern states than elsewhere, though I have witnessed many
pitiable cases of child slavery in Northern mills which equalled almost
anything I have ever seen in the South. During the Philadelphia textile
workers’ strike in 1903, I saw at least a score of children ranging from eight
to ten years of age who had been working in the mills prior to the strike.
One little girl of nine I saw in the Kensington Labor Lyceum. She had been
working for almost a year before the strike began, she said, and careful
inquiry proved her story to be true. When “Mother” Mary Jones started with
her little “army” of child toilers to march to Oyster Bay, in order that the
President of the United States might see for himself some of the little ones
who had actually been employed in the mills of Philadelphia, I happened to
be engaged in assisting the strikers. For two days I accompanied the little

“army” on its march, and thus had an excellent opportunity of studying the
children. Amongst them were several from eight to eleven years of age, and
I remember one little girl who was not quite eleven telling me with pride
that she had “worked two years and never missed a day.”
One evening, not long ago, I stood outside of a large flax mill in Paterson,
N.J., while it disgorged its crowd of men, women, and children employees.
All the afternoon, as I lingered in the tenement district near the mills, the
comparative silence of the streets oppressed me. There were many babies
and very small children, but the older children, whose boisterous play one
expects in such streets, were wanting. “If thow’lt bide till th’ mills shut for
th’ day, thow’lt see plenty on ’em—big kids as plenty as small taties,” said
one old woman to whom I spoke about it. She was right. At six o’clock the
whistles shrieked, and the streets were suddenly filled with people, many of
them mere children. Of all the crowd of tired, pallid, and languid-looking
children I could only get speech with one, a little girl who claimed thirteen
years, though she was smaller than many a child of ten. Indeed, as I think of
her now, I doubt whether she would have come up to the standard of normal
physical development either in weight or stature for a child of ten. One
learns, however, not to judge the ages of working children by their physical
appearance, for they are usually behind other children in height, weight, and
girth of chest,—often as much as two or three years. If my little Paterson
friend was thirteen, perhaps the nature of her employment will explain her
puny, stunted body. She works in the “steaming room” of the flax mill. All
day long, in a room filled with clouds of steam, she has to stand barefooted
in pools of water twisting coils of wet hemp. When I saw her she was
dripping wet, though she said that she had worn a rubber apron all day. In
the coldest evenings of winter little Marie, and hundreds of other little girls,
must go out from the super-heated steaming rooms into the bitter cold in
just that condition. No wonder that such children are stunted and
underdeveloped!
In textile mill towns like Biddeford, Me., Manchester, N.H., Fall River and
Lawrence, Mass., I have seen many such children, who, if they were twelve
or fourteen according to their certificates and the companies’ registers, were
not more than ten or twelve in reality. I have watched them hurrying into
and away from the mills, “those receptacles, in too many instances, for
living human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect,” as Robert Owen’s

burning phrase describes them.[115] I do not doubt that, upon the whole,
conditions in the textile industries are better in the North than in the South,
but they are nevertheless too bad to permit of self-righteous boasting and
complacency. And in several other departments of industry conditions are
no whit better in the North than in the South. The child-labor problem is not
sectional, but national.

V
Of the fifteen divisions of the manufacturing industries, the glass factories
rank next to the textile factories in the number of children they employ. In
the year 1900, according to the census returns, the average number of
workers employed in glass manufacture was 52,818, of which number
3529, or 6.88 per cent, were women, and 7116, or 13.45 per cent, were
children under sixteen years of age. It will be noticed that the percentage of
children employed is about the same as in the textile trades. There are glass
factories in many states, but the bulk of the industry is centred in
Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Jersey, and Ohio. The total value of the
products of the glass industry in the United States in 1900 was $56,539,712,
of which amount the four states named contributed $46,209,918, or 82.91
per cent of the entire value.[116] After careful investigation in a majority of
the places where glass is manufactured in these four states, I am confident
that the number of children employed is much larger than the census figures
indicate.
Perhaps in none of the great industries is the failure to enforce the child-
labor laws more general or complete than in the glass trade. There are
several reasons for this, the most important, perhaps, being the distribution
of the factories in small towns and rural districts, and the shifting nature of
the industry itself. Fuel is the most important item in the cost of materials in
the manufacture of glass, and the aim of the manufacturers is always to
locate in districts where fuel is cheap and abundant. For this reason
Pennsylvania has always ranked first in the list of glass-manufacturing
states. Owing, mainly, to the discoveries of new supplies of natural gas in
Indiana, the glass products of that state increased fourfold in value from
1890 to 1900.[117] When the supply of gas in a certain locality becomes
exhausted, it is customary to remove the factories to more favorable places.
A few rough wooden sheds are hastily built in the neighborhood of some
good gas supplies, only to be torn down again as soon as these fail. Hence it
happens that glass factories bring new industrial life into small towns and
villages, which soon become to a very large extent dependent upon them.
Almost unconsciously a feeling is developed that, “for the good of the
town,” it will scarcely do to antagonize the glass manufacturers. I have

heard this sentiment voiced by business men and others in several places.
On the other hand, the manufacturers feel the strength of their position and
constantly threaten to remove their plants if they are interfered with and
prevented from getting boys.
I shall never forget my first visit to a glass factory at night. It was a big
wooden structure, so loosely built that it afforded little protection from
draughts, surrounded by a high fence with several rows of barbed wire
stretched across the top. I went with the foreman of the factory and he
explained to me the reason for the stockade-like fence. “It keeps the young
imps inside once we’ve got ’em for the night shift,” he said. The “young
imps” were, of course, the boys employed, about forty in number, at least
ten of whom were less than twelve years of age. It was a cheap bottle
factory, and the proportion of boys to men was larger than is usual in the
higher grades of manufacture. Cheapness and child labor go together,—the
cheaper the grade of manufacture, as a rule, the cheaper the labor employed.
The hours of labor for the “night shift” were from 5.30 P.M. to 3.30 A.M. I
stayed and watched the boys at their work for several hours, and when their
tasks were done saw them disappear into the darkness and storm of the
night. That night, for the first time, I realized the tragic significance of
cheap bottles. One might well paraphrase Hood’s lines and say:—
“They are not bottles you idly break,
But human creatures’ lives!”

In the middle of the room was a large round furnace with a number of small
doors, three or four feet from the ground, forming a sort of belt around the
furnace. In front of these doors the glass-blowers were working. With long
wrought-iron blowpipes the blowers deftly took from the furnace little wads
of waxlike molten “metal” which they blew into balls and then rolled on
their rolling boards. These elongated rolls they dropped into moulds and
then blew again, harder than before, to force the half-shaped mass into its
proper form. With a sharp, clicking sound they broke their pipes away and
repeated the whole process. There was not, of course, the fascination about
their work that the more artistic forms of glass-blowing possess. There was
none of that twirling of the blowpipes till they looked like so many magic
wands which for centuries has made the glass-blower’s art a delightful,
half-mysterious thing to watch. But it was still wonderful to see the

exactness of each man’s “dip,” and the deftness with which they
manipulated the balls before casting them into the moulds.
Then began the work of the boys. By the side of each mould sat a “take-out
boy,” who, with tongs, took the half-finished bottles—not yet provided with
necks—out of the moulds. Then other boys, called “snapper-ups,” took
these bodies of bottles in their tongs and put the small ends into gas-heated
moulds till they were red hot. Then the boys took them out with almost
incredible quickness and passed them to other men, “finishers,” who shaped
the necks of the bottles into their final form. Then the “carrying-in boys,”
sometimes called “carrier pigeons,” took the red-hot bottles from the
benches, three or four at a time, upon big asbestos shovels to the annealing
oven, where they are gradually cooled off to insure even contraction and to
prevent breaking in consequence of too rapid cooling. The work of these
“carrying-in boys,” several of whom were less than twelve years old, was
by far the hardest of all. They were kept on a slow run all the time from the
benches to the annealing oven and back again. I can readily believe what
many manufacturers assert, that it is difficult to get men to do this work,
because men cannot stand the pace and get tired too quickly. It is a fact,
however, that in many factories men are employed to do this work,
especially at night. In other, more up-to-date factories it is done by
automatic machinery. I did not measure the distance from the benches to the
annealing oven, nor did I count the number of trips made by the boys, but
my friend, Mr. Owen R. Lovejoy, has done so in a typical factory and very
kindly furnished me with the results of his calculation.[118] The distance to
the annealing oven in the factory in question was one hundred feet, and the
boys made seventy-two trips per hour, making the distance travelled in
eight hours nearly twenty-two miles. Over half of this distance the boys
were carrying their hot loads to the oven. The pay of these boys varies from
sixty cents to a dollar for eight hours’ work. About a year ago I gathered
particulars of the pay of 257 boys in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; the
lowest pay was forty cents per night and the highest a dollar and ten cents,
while the average was seventy-two cents.

NIGHT SHIFT IN A GLASS FACTORY

In New Jersey, since 1903, the employment of boys under fourteen years of
age is forbidden, but there is no restriction as to night work for boys of that
age. In Pennsylvania boys of fourteen may work by night. In Ohio night
work is prohibited for all under sixteen years of age, but so far as my
personal observations, and the testimony of competent and reliable
observers, enable me to judge, the law is not very effectively enforced in
this respect in the glass factories. In Indiana the employment of children
under fourteen in factories is forbidden. Women and girls are not permitted
to work between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M., but there is no restriction
placed upon the employment of boys fourteen years of age or over by night.
[119]

The effects of the employment of young boys in glass factories, especially
by night, are injurious from every possible point of view. The constant
facing of the glare of the furnaces and the red-hot bottles causes serious
injury to the sight; minor accidents from burning are common. “Severe
burns and the loss of sight are regular risks of the trade in glass-bottle
making,” says Mrs. Florence Kelley.[120] Even more serious than the
accidents are those physical disorders induced by the conditions of
employment. Boys who work at night do not as a rule get sufficient or
satisfactory rest by day. Very often they cannot sleep because of the noises
made by younger children in and around the house; more often, perhaps,
they prefer to play rather than to sleep. Indeed, most boys seem to prefer
night work, for the reason that it gives them the chance to play during the

daytime. Even where the mothers are careful and solicitous, they find it
practically impossible to control boys who are wage-earners and feel
themselves to be independent. This lack of proper rest, added to the heat
and strain of their work, produces nervous dyspepsia. From working in
draughty sheds where they are often, as one boy said to me in Zanesville,
O., “burning on the side against the furnace and pretty near freezing on the
other,” they are frequently subject to rheumatism. Going from the heated
factories to their homes, often a mile or so distant, perspiring and
improperly clad, with their vitality at its lowest ebb, they fall ready victims
to pneumonia and to its heir, the Great White Plague. In almost every
instance when I have asked local physicians for their experience, they have
named these as the commonest physical results. Of the fearful moral
consequences there can be no question. The glass-blowers themselves
realize this and, even more than the physical deterioration, it prevents them
from taking their own children into the glass houses. One practically never
finds the son of a glass-blower employed as a “snapper-up,” or “carrying-in
boy,” unless the father is dead or incapacitated by reason of sickness. “I’d
sooner see my boy dead than working here. You might as well give a boy to
the devil at once as send him to a glass factory,” said one blower to me in
Glassborough, N.J.; and that is the spirit in which most of the men regard
the matter.
So great is the demand for boys that it is possible at almost any time for a
boy to get employment for a single night. Indeed, “one shifters” are so
common in some districts that the employers have found it necessary to
institute a system of bonuses for those boys who work every night in a
week. Out of this readiness to employ boys for a single night has grown a
terrible evil,—boys attending school all day and then working in the
factories by night. Many such cases have been reported to me, and Mrs. Van
Der Vaart declares that “it is customary in Indiana for the school boys to
work Thursday and Friday nights and attend school during the day.”[121] Mr.
Lovejoy found the same practice in Steubenville, O., and other places.[122]
Teachers in glass-manufacturing centres have repeatedly told me that
among the older boys were some who, because of their employment by
night in the factories, were drowsy and unable to receive any benefits from
their attendance at school.

In some districts, especially in New Jersey, it has long been the custom to
import boys from certain orphan asylums and “reformatories” to supply the
demand of the manufacturers. These boys are placed in laborers’ families,
and their board paid for by the employers, who deduct it from the boys’
wages. Thus a veritable system of child slavery has developed, remarkably
like the old English pauper-apprentice system. “These imported boys are
under no restraint by day or night,” says Mrs. Kelley, “and are wholly
without control during the idle hours. They are in the streets in gangs, in
and out of the police courts and the jails, a burden to themselves and to the
community imposed by the demand of this boy-destroying industry.”[123] It
is perhaps only indicative of the universal readiness of men to concern
themselves with the mote in their brothers’ eyes without considering the
beam in their own, that I should have attended a meeting in New Jersey
where the child labor of the South was bitterly condemned, but no word
was said of the appalling nature of the problem in the state of New Jersey
itself.

VI
According to the census of 1900, there were 25,000 boys under sixteen
years of age employed in and around the mines and quarries of the United
States. In the state of Pennsylvania alone,—the state which enslaves more
children than any other,—there are thousands of little “breaker boys”
employed, many of them not more than nine or ten years old. The law
forbids the employment of children under fourteen, and the records of the
mines generally show that the law is “obeyed.” Yet in May, 1905, an
investigation by the National Child Labor Committee showed that in one
small borough of 7000 population, among the boys employed in breakers
35 were nine years old, 40 were ten, 45 were eleven, and 45 were twelve—
over 150 boys illegally employed in one section of boy labor in one small
town! During the anthracite coal strike of 1902, I attended the Labor Day
demonstration at Pittston and witnessed the parade of another at
Wilkesbarre. In each case there were hundreds of boys marching, all of
them wearing their “working buttons,” testifying to the fact that they were
bona fide workers. Scores of them were less than ten years of age, others
were eleven or twelve.
Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched
over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate
and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the
cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less
deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for
some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that “He’s
got his boy to carry round wherever he goes.” The coal is hard, and
accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common
among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is
heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the
chute to be picked out later smothered and dead.[124] Clouds of dust fill the
breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and
miners’ consumption. I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to
do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at
a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me.
Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid, and the birds sang in

chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness,
clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the
machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the
ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal,
often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was
covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I
was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had
swallowed.

BREAKER BOYS AT WORK

I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve
years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day. Some of them had never
been inside of a school; few of them could read a child’s primer. True, some
of them attended the night schools, but after working ten hours in the
breaker the educational results from attending school were practically nil.
“We goes fer a good time, an’ we keeps de guys wots dere hoppin’ all de
time,” said little Owen Jones, whose work I had been trying to do. How
strange that barbaric patois sounded to me as I remembered the rich,
musical language I had so often heard other little Owen Joneses speak in
far-away Wales. As I stood in that breaker I thought of the reply of the small
boy to Robert Owen. Visiting an English coal-mine one day, Owen asked a
twelve-year-old lad if he knew God. The boy stared vacantly at his
questioner: “God?” he said, “God? No, I don’t. He must work in some other

mine.” It was hard to realize amid the danger and din and blackness of that
Pennsylvania breaker that such a thing as belief in a great All-good God
existed.
From the breakers the boys graduate to the mine depths, where they become
door tenders, switch-boys, or mule-drivers. Here, far below the surface
work is still more dangerous. At fourteen or fifteen the boys assume the
same risks as the men, and are surrounded by the same perils. Nor is it in
Pennsylvania only that these conditions exist. In the bituminous mines of
West Virginia, boys of nine or ten are frequently employed. I met one little
fellow ten years old in Mt. Carbon, W. Va., last year, who was employed as
a “trap boy.” Think of what it means to be a trap boy at ten years of age. It
means to sit alone in a dark mine passage hour after hour, with no human
soul near; to see no living creature except the mules as they pass with their
loads, or a rat or two seeking to share one’s meal; to stand in water or mud
that covers the ankles, chilled to the marrow by the cold draughts that rush
in when you open the trap-door for the mules to pass through; to work for
fourteen hours—waiting—opening and shutting a door—then waiting again
—for sixty cents; to reach the surface when all is wrapped in the mantle of
night, and to fall to the earth exhausted and have to be carried away to the
nearest “shack” to be revived before it is possible to walk to the farther
shack called “home.”
Boys twelve years of age may be legally employed in the mines of West
Virginia, by day or by night, and for as many hours as the employers care to
make them toil or their bodies will stand the strain. Where the disregard of
child life is such that this may be done openly and with legal sanction, it is
easy to believe what miners have again and again told me—that there are
hundreds of little boys of nine and ten years of age employed in the coal-
mines of this state.

VII

It is not my purpose to deal specifically with all the various forms of child
labor. That would require a much larger volume than this to be devoted
exclusively to the subject. Children are employed at a tender age in
hundreds of occupations. In addition to those already enumerated, there
were in 1900, according to the census, nearly 12,000 workers under sixteen
years of age employed in the manufacture of tobacco and cigars, and it is
certain that the number actually employed in that most unhealthful
occupation was much greater. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I have seen
hundreds of children, boys and girls, between the ages of ten and twelve
years, at work in the factories belonging to the “Cigar Trust.” Some of these
factories are known as “kindergartens” on account of the large number of
small children employed in them.[125] It is by no means a rare occurrence for
children in these factories to faint or to fall asleep over their work, and I
have heard a foreman in one of them say that it was “enough for one man to
do just to keep the kids awake.” In the domestic manufacture of cheap
cigars, many very young children are employed. Often the “factories” are
poorly lighted, ill-ventilated tenements in which work, whether for children
or adults, ought to be absolutely prohibited. Children work often as many as
fourteen or even sixteen hours in these little “home factories,” and in cities
like Pittsburg, Pa., it is not unusual for them, after attending school all day,
to work from 4 P.M. to 12.30 A.M., making “tobies” or “stogies,” for which
they receive from eight to ten cents per hundred.
In the wood-working industries, more than 10,000 children were reported to
be employed in the census year, almost half of them in saw-mills, where
accidents are of almost daily occurrence, and where clouds of fine sawdust
fill the lungs of the workers. Of the remaining 50 per cent, it is probable
that more than half were working at or near dangerous machines, such as
steam planers and lathes. Over 7000 children, mostly girls, were employed
in laundries; 2000 in bakeries; 138,000 as servants and waiters in
restaurants and hotels; 42,000 boys as messengers; and 20,000 boys and
girls in stores. In all these instances there is every reason to suppose that the
actual number employed was much larger than the official figures show.

In the canning and preservation of fish, fruit, and vegetables mere babies
are employed during the busy season. In more than one canning factory in
New York State, I have seen children of six and seven years of age working
at two o’clock in the morning. In Oneida, Mr. William English Walling,
formerly a factory inspector of Illinois, found one child four years old, who
earned nineteen cents in an afternoon stringing beans, and other children
from seven to ten years of age.[126] There are over 500 canning factories in
New York State, but the census of 1900 gives the number of children
employed under sixteen years of age as 219. This is merely another
illustration of the deceptiveness of the statistics which are gathered at so
much expense. The agent of the New York Child Labor Committee was told
by the foreman of one factory that there were 300 children under fourteen
years of age in that one factory! In Syracuse it was a matter of complaint, in
the season of 1904, on the part of the children, that “The factories will not
take you unless you are eight years old.”[127]
In Maryland there are absolutely no restrictions placed upon the
employment of children in canneries. They may be employed at any age, by
day or night, for as many hours as the employers choose, or the children can
stand and keep awake. In Oxford, Md., I saw a tiny girl, seven years old,
who had worked for twelve hours in an oyster-canning factory, and I was
told that such cases were common. There were 290 canning establishments
in the state of Maryland in 1900, all of them employing young children
absolutely without legal restriction. And I fear that it must be added with
little or no moral restriction either. Where regard for child life does not
express itself in humane laws for its preservation, it may generally be
presumed to be non-existent.
In Maine the age limit for employment is twelve years. Children of that age
may be employed by day or night, provided that girls under eighteen and
boys under sixteen are not permitted to work more than ten hours in the
twenty-four or sixty hours in a week. In 1900 there were 117 establishments
engaged in the preservation and canning of fish. Small herrings are canned
and placed upon the market as “sardines.”[128] This industry is principally
confined to the Atlantic coast towns,—Lubec and Eastport, in Washington
County, being the main centres. I cannot speak of this industry from
personal investigation, but information received from competent and
trustworthy sources gives me the impression that child slavery nowhere

assumes a worse form than in the “sardine” canneries of Maine. Says one of
my correspondents in a private letter: “In the rush season, fathers, mothers,
older children, and babies work from early morn till night—from dawn till
dark, in fact. You will scarcely believe me, perhaps, when I say ‘and
babies,’ but it is literally true. I’ve seen them in the present season, no more
than four or five years old, working hard and beaten when they lagged. As
you may suppose, being out here, far away from the centre of the state, we
are not much troubled by factory inspection. I have read about the
conditions in the Southern mills, but nothing I have read equals for sheer
brutality what I see right here in Washington County.”
In the sweatshops and, more particularly, the poorly paid home industries,
the kindergartens are robbed to provide baby slaves. I am perfectly well
aware that many persons will smile incredulously at the thought of infants
from three to five years old working. “What can such little babies do?” they
ask. Well, take the case of little Anetta Fachini, for example. The work she
was doing when I saw her, wrapping paper around pieces of wire, was very
similar to the play of better-favored children. As play, to be put aside
whenever her childish fancy wandered to something else, it would have
been a very good thing for little Anetta to do. She was compelled, however,
to do it from early morning till late at night and even denied the right to
sleep. For her, therefore, what might be play for some other child became
the most awful bondage and cruelty. What can four-year-old babies do? Go
into the nursery and watch the rich man’s four-year-old child, seated upon
the rug, sorting many-colored beads and fascinated by the occupation for
half an hour or so. That is play—good and wholesome for the child. In the
public kindergarten, other four-year-old children are doing the same thing
with zest and laughing delight. But go into the dim tenement yonder;
another four-year-old child is sorting beads, but not in play. Her eyes do not
sparkle with childish glee; she does not shout with delight at finding a prize
among the beads. With tragic seriousness she picks out the beads and lays
them before her mother, who is a slipper-beader—that is, she sews the
beaded designs upon ladies’ fancy slippers. She works from morn till night,
and all the while the child is seated by her side, straining her little eyes in
the dim light, sorting the beads or stringing them on pieces of thread.
In the “Help Wanted” columns of the morning papers, advertisements
frequently appear such as the following, taken from one of the leading New

York dailies:—
WANTED.—Beaders on slippers; good pay; steady home work. M. B——, West —— Street.

In the tenement districts women may be seen staggering along with sack
loads of slippers to be trimmed with beadwork, and children of four years
of age and upward are pressed into service to provide cheap, dainty slippers
for dainty ladies. What can four-year-old babies do? A hundred things,
when they are driven to it. “They are pulling basting threads so that you and
I may wear cheap garments; they are arranging the petals of artificial
flowers; they are sorting beads; they are pasting boxes. They do more than
that. I know of a room where a dozen or more little children are seated on
the floor, surrounded by barrels, and in those barrels is found human hair,
matted, tangled, and blood-stained—you can imagine the condition, for it is
not my hair or yours that is cut off in the hour of death.”[129]

HOME “FINISHERS”: A CONSUMPTIVE
MOTHER AND HER TWO CHILDREN

Both of the children work and sleep with the
mother.

There are more than 23,000 licensed “home factories” in New York City
alone, 23,000 groups of workers in the tenements licensed to manufacture
goods. How difficult it is to protect children employed in these tenement
factories can best be judged by the following incident: Two small Italian
children, a boy of five and his sister aged four, left a West-side kindergarten

and were promptly followed up by their kindergartner, who found that the
children were working and could not, in the opinion of their mother, be
spared to attend the kindergarten. They were both helping to make artificial
flowers. The truant officer was first applied to and asked whether the
compulsory education law could not be used to free them, part of the time at
least, from their unnatural toil. But attendance at school is not compulsory
before the eighth year, so that was a useless appeal. Then the factory
inspector was applied to, and he showed that the work of the children was
entirely legal; they received no wages and were, therefore, not “employed”
in the technical sense of that term. They were working in their own family.
The room was not dirty or excessively overcrowded. No law was broken,
and there was no legal means whereby the enslavement of those little
children might be prevented.[130]
This kind of child labor, be it remembered, is very different from that
wholesome employment of children in the domestic industry which
preceded the advent of the system of machine production. Then there was
hope in the work and joy in the leisure which followed the work. Then
competition was based on human qualities; man against man, hand against
hand, eye against eye, brain against brain. To-day the competition is
between man and the machine, the child and the man,—and even the child
and the machine. Children are employed in the textile mills because their
labor is cheaper than that of adults; boys are employed in the glass factories
at night because their labor is cheaper to buy than machinery; children in
the tenements paste the fancy boxes in which we get our candies and
chocolate bonbons for the same reason. Such child labor has no other
objective than the increase of employers’ profits; it has nothing to do with
training the child for the work of life. On the contrary, it saps the
constitution of the child, robs it of hope, and unfits it for life’s struggle.
Such child labor is not educative or wholesome, but blighting to body,
mind, and spirit.

VIII
There has been no extensive, systematic investigation in this country of the
physical condition of working children. In 1893–1894 volunteer physicians
examined and made measurements of some 200 children, taken from the
factories and workshops of Chicago.[131] These records show a startling
proportion of undersized, rachitic, and consumptive children, but they are
too limited to be of more than suggestive value. So far as they go, however,
they bear out the results obtained in more extensive investigations in
European countries. It is the consensus of opinion among those having the
best opportunities for careful observation that physical deterioration quickly
follows a child’s employment in a factory or workshop.
It is a sorry but indisputable fact that where children are employed, the most
unhealthful work is generally given them.[132] In the spinning and carding
rooms of cotton and woollen mills, where large numbers of children are
employed, clouds of lint-dust fill the lungs and menace the health. The
children have often a distressing cough, caused by the irritation of the
throat, and many are hoarse from the same cause. In bottle factories and
other branches of glass manufacture, the atmosphere is constantly charged
with microscopic particles of glass. In the wood-working industries, such as
the manufacture of cheap furniture and wooden boxes, and packing cases,
the air is laden with fine sawdust. Children employed in soap and soap-
powder factories work, many of them, in clouds of alkaline dust which
inflames the eyelids and nostrils. Boys employed in filling boxes of soap-
powder work all day long with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. In the
coal-mines the breaker boys breathe air that is heavy and thick with
particles of coal, and their lungs become black in consequence. In the
manufacture of felt hats, little girls are often employed at the machines
which tear the fur from the skins of rabbits and other animals. Recently, I
stood and watched a young girl working at such a machine; she wore a
newspaper pinned over her head and a handkerchief tied over her mouth.
She was white with dust from head to feet, and when she stooped to pick
anything from the floor the dust would fall from her paper head-covering in
little heaps. About seven feet from the mouth of the machine was a window
through which poured thick volumes of dust as it was belched out from the

machine. I placed a sheet of paper on the inner sill of the window and in
twenty minutes it was covered with a layer of fine dust, half an inch deep.
Yet that girl works midway between the window and the machine, in the
very centre of the volume of dust, sixty hours a week. These are a few of
the occupations in which the dangers arise from the forced inhalation of
dust.
In some occupations, such as silk-winding, flax-spinning, and various
processes in the manufacture of felt hats, it is necessary, or believed to be
necessary, to keep the atmosphere quite moist. The result of working in a
close, heated factory, where the air is artificially moistened, in summer
time, can be better imagined than described. So long as enough girls can be
kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but
when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep
going, the mills are closed. The children who work in the dye rooms and
print-shops of textile factories, and the color rooms of factories where the
materials for making artificial flowers are manufactured, are subject to
contact with poisonous dyes, and the results are often terrible. Very
frequently they are dyed in parts of their bodies as literally as the fabrics are
dyed. One little fellow, who was employed in a Pennsylvania carpet factory,
opened his shirt one day and showed me his chest and stomach dyed a deep,
rich crimson. I mentioned the incident to a local physician, and was told
that such cases were common. “They are simply saturated with the dye,” he
said. “The results are extremely severe, though very often slow and, for a
long time, almost imperceptible. If they should cut or scratch themselves
where they are so thoroughly dyed, it might mean death.” In Yonkers, N.Y.,
are some of the largest carpet factories in the United States, and many
children are employed in them. Some of the smallest children are employed
in the “drum room,” or print-shop, where the yarns are “printed” or dyed.
Small boys, mostly Slavs and Hungarians, push the trucks containing boxes
of liquid dye from place to place, and get it all over their clothing. They can
be seen coming out of the mills at night literally soaked to the skin with dye
of various colors. In the winter time, after a fall of snow, it is possible to
track them to their homes, not only by their colored footprints, but by the
drippings from their clothing. The snow becomes dotted with red, blue, and
green, as though some one had sprinkled the colors for the sake of the
variegated effect.

Children employed as varnishers in cheap furniture factories inhale
poisonous fumes all day long and suffer from a variety of intestinal troubles
in consequence. The gilding of picture frames produces a stiffening of the
fingers. The children who are employed in the manufacture of wall papers
and poisonous paints suffer from slow poisoning. The naphtha fumes in the
manufacture of rubber goods produce paralysis and premature decay.
Children employed in morocco leather works are often nauseated and fall
easy victims to consumption. The little boys who make matches, and the
little girls who pack them in boxes, suffer from phosphorous necrosis, or
“phossy-jaw,” a gangrene of the lower jaw due to phosphor poisoning. Boys
employed in type foundries and stereotyping establishments are employed
on the most dangerous part of the work, namely, rubbing the type and the
plates, and lead poisoning is excessively prevalent among them as a result.
Little girls who work in the hosiery mills and carry heavy baskets from one
floor to another, and their sisters who run machines by foot-power, suffer all
through their after life as a result of their employment. Girls who work in
factories where caramels and other kinds of candies are made are constantly
passing from the refrigerating department, where the temperature is perhaps
20 degrees Fahr., to other departments with temperatures as high as 80 or 90
degrees. As a result, they suffer from bronchial troubles.
These are only a few of the many occupations of children that are inherently
unhealthful and should be prohibited entirely for children and all young
persons under eighteen years of age. In a few instances it might be
sufficient to fix the minimum age for employment at sixteen, if certain
improvements in the conditions of employment were insisted upon. Other
dangers to health, such as the quick transition from the heat of the factory to
the cold outside air, have already been noted. They are highly important
causes of disease, though not inherent in the occupation itself in most cases.
A careful study of the child-labor problem from this largely neglected point
of view would be most valuable. When to the many dangers to health are
added the dangers to life and limb from accidents, far more numerous
among child workers than adults,[133] the price we pay for the altogether
unnecessary and uneconomic service of children would, in the Boer
patriot’s phrase, “stagger humanity,” if it could be comprehended.
No combination of figures can give any idea of that price. Statistics cannot
express the withering of child lips in the poisoned air of factories; the tired,

strained look of child eyes that never dance to the glad music of souls tuned
to Nature’s symphonies; the binding to wheels of industry the little bodies
and souls that should be free, as the stars are free to shine and the flowers
are free to drink the evening dews. Statistics may be perfected to the extent
of giving the number of child workers with accuracy, the number maimed
by dangerous machines, and the number who die year by year, but they can
never give the spiritual loss, if I may use that word in its secular, scientific
sense. Who shall tally the deaths of childhood’s hopes, ambitions, and
dreams? How shall figures show the silent atrophy of potential genius, the
brutalizing of potential love, the corruption of potential purity? In what
arithmetical terms shall we state the loss of shame, and the development of
that less than brute view of life, which enables us to watch with unconcern
the toil of infants side by side with the idleness of men?

IX

The moral ills resulting from child labor are numerous and far-reaching.
When children become wage-earners and are thrown into constant
association with adult workers, they develop prematurely an adult
consciousness and view of life. About the first consequence of their
employment is that they cease almost at once to be children. They lose their
respect for parental authority, in many cases, and become arrogant,
wayward, and defiant. There is always a tendency in their homes to regard
them as men and women as soon as they become wage-earners. Discipline
is at once relaxed, at the very time when it is most necessary. When children
who have just entered upon that most critical period of life, adolescence, are
associated with adults in factories, are driven to their tasks with curses, and
hear continually the unrestrained conversation, often coarse and foul, of the
adults, the psychological effect cannot be other than bad. The mothers and
fathers who read this book need only to know that children, little boys and
girls, in mills and factories where men and women are employed, must
frequently see women at work in whom the signs of a developing life within
are evident, and hear them made the butt of the coarsest taunts and jests, to
realize how great the moral peril to the adolescent boy or girl must be.
No writer dare write, and no publisher dare publish, a truthful description of
the moral atmosphere of hundreds of places where children are employed,
—a description truthful in the sense of telling the whole truth. No publisher
would dare print the language current in an average factory. Our most
“realistic” writers must exercise stern artistic reticence, and tone down or
evade the truth. No normal boy or girl would think of repeating to father or
mother the language heard in the mill—language which the children begin
before long to use occasionally, to think oftener still. I have known a girl of
thirteen or fourteen, just an average American girl, whose parents,
intelligent and honest folk, had given her a moral training above rather than
below the average, mock a pregnant woman worker and unblushingly
attempt to caricature her condition by stuffing rags beneath her apron. I do
not make any charge against the tens of thousands of women who have
worked and are working in factories. Heaven forbid that I should seek to
brand as impure these women of my own class! But I do say that for the

plastic and impressionable mind of a child the moral atmosphere of the
average factory is exceedingly bad, and I know that none will more readily
agree with me than the men and women who work, or who have worked, in
mills and factories.
I know a woman, and she is one of many, who has worked in textile
factories for more than thirty years. She began to work as a child before she
was ten years old, and is now past forty. She has never married, though
many men have sought her in marriage. She is not an abnormal woman,
indifferent to marriage, but just a normal, healthy, intelligent woman who
has yearned hundreds of times for a man’s affection and companionship. To
her more intimate friends she confesses that she chose to remain lonely and
unwed, chose to stifle her longings for affection, rather than to marry and
bring children into the world and live to see them enter the mills for
employment before they became men and women. When I say that the
moral atmosphere of factory life is contaminated and bad, and that the
employment of children in mills and factories subjects them to grave moral
perils, I am confident that I shall be supported, not, perhaps, by the owners
of the mills and factories, but by the vast majority of intelligent men and
women employed in them.
In a report upon the physical conditions of child workers in Pennsylvania,
the Rev. Peter Roberts has discussed at some length the moral dangers of
factory employment for children. He quotes an Allentown physician as
saying, “No vice was unknown to many of the girls of fifteen working in
the factories of the city;” and another physician in the same city said,
“There are more unhappy homes, ruined lives, blasted hopes, and diseased
bodies in Allentown than any other city of its size, because of the factories
there.” Another physician, in Lancaster, is quoted as saying that he had
“treated boys of ten years old and upwards for venereal affections which
they had contracted.”[134] In upwards of a score of factory towns I have had
very similar testimony given to me by physicians and others. The proprietor
of a large drug store in a New England factory town told me that he had
never known a place where the demand for cheap remedies for venereal
diseases was so great, and that many of those who bought them were boys
under fifteen.
Nor is it only in factories that these grosser forms of immorality flourish.
They are even more prevalent among the children of the street trades,

newsboys, bootblacks, messengers, and the like. The proportion of
newsboys who suffer from venereal diseases is alarmingly great. The
Superintendent of the John Worthy School of Chicago, Mr. Sloan, asserts
that “One-third of all the newsboys who come to the John Worthy School
have venereal disease, and that 10 per cent of the remaining newsboys at
present in the Bridewell are, according to the physicians’ diagnosis,
suffering from similar diseases.”[135] The newsboys who come to the school
are, according to Mr. Sloan, on an average one-third below the ordinary
standard of physical development, a condition which will be readily
understood by those who know the ways of the newsboys of our great cities
—their irregular habits, scant feeding, sexual excesses, secret vices,
sleeping in hallways, basements, stables, and quiet corners. With such a low
physical standard the ravages of venereal diseases are tremendously
increased.

SILK MILL GIRLS
AFTER TWO
YEARS OF
FACTORY LIFE

The messenger boys and the American District Telegraph boys are
frequently found in the worst resorts of the “red-light” districts of our cities.

In New York there are hundreds of such boys, ranging in age from twelve to
fifteen, who know many of the prostitutes of the Tenderloin by name. Sad
to relate, boys like to be employed in the “red-light” districts. They like it,
not because they are bad or depraved, but for the very natural reason that
they make more money there, receiving larger and more numerous tips.
They are called upon for many services by the habitués of these haunts of
the vicious and the profligate. They are sent out to place bets; to take notes
to and from houses of ill-fame; or to buy liquor, cigarettes, candy, and even
gloves, shoes, corsets, and other articles of wearing apparel for the “ladies.”
Not only are tips abundant, but there are many opportunities for graft of
which the boys avail themselves. A lad is sent, for instance, for a bottle of
whiskey. He is told to get a certain brand at a neighboring hotel, but he
knows where he can get the same brand for 50 per cent of the hotel price,
and, naturally, he goes there for it and pockets the difference in price. That
is one form of messengers’ graft. Another is overcharging for his services
and pocketing the surplus, or keeping the change from a “ten-spot” or a
“fiver,” when, as often happens, the “sports” are either too reckless to
bother about such trifles or too drunk to remember. From sources such as
these the messenger boy in a district like the Tenderloin will often make
several dollars a day.[136]
A whole series of temptations confronts the messenger boy. He smokes,
drinks, gambles, and, very often, patronizes the lowest class of cheap
brothels. In answering calls from houses of ill-repute messengers cannot
avoid being witnesses of scenes of licentiousness more or less frequently.
By presents of money, fruit, candy, cigarettes, and even liquor, the women
make friends of the boys, who quickly learn all the foul slang of the
brothels.[137] The conversation of a group of messengers in such a district
will often reveal the most astounding intimacy with the grossest things of
the underworld. That in their adolescence, the transition from boyhood to
manhood, fraught as it is with its own inherent perils, they should be thrown
into such an environment and exposed to such temptations is an evil which
cannot possibly be overemphasized. The penal code of New York declares
the sending of minors to carry messages to or from a house of ill-fame to be
a misdemeanor, but the law is a dead letter. It cannot possibly be enforced,
and its repeal would probably be a good thing. While it may be urged that
the mere existence of such a law has a certain moral value as a
condemnation of such a dangerous employment for boys, it is exceedingly

doubtful if that good is sufficient to counterbalance the harm which comes
from the non-enforcement of the law.
I have dwelt mainly upon the grosser vices associated with street
employment, as with employment in factories and mines, because it is a
phase of the subject about which too little is known. I need scarcely say,
however, that these vices are not the only ones to which serious attention
should be given. Crime naturally results from such conditions. Of 600 boys
committed to the New York Juvenile Asylum by the courts, 125 were
newsboys who had been committed for various offences ranging from
ungovernableness and disorderly conduct to grand larceny.[138] Mr.
Nibecker, Superintendent of the House of Refuge at Glen Mills, near
Philadelphia, was asked, “Have you, in disproportionate numbers, boys who
formerly were engaged in some one particular occupation?” He replied
promptly, “Yes, district messengers.”[139] It seems to be the almost
unanimous opinion of probation officers and other competent authorities in
our large cities that messenger boys and newsboys furnish an exceedingly
large proportion of cases of juvenile delinquency. I wrote to six probation
officers in as many large cities asking them to give me their opinions as to
the classes of occupation which seem to have the largest number of juvenile
delinquents. Their replies are summarized in the following schedule:—
Occupations of Juvenile Delinquents in Six Large Cities, showing the
Relative Number of Each Occupation

Report A B C D
1 Messenger Newsboys Factory boys Miscellaneous
boys
2 Newsboys Messenger Factory boys Truants
boys
3 Newsboys Messenger Truants Factory boys
boys
4 Messenger Factory boys Newsboys Miscellaneous
boys
5 Messenger Newsboys Truants Miscellaneous
boys

6 Factory boys Truants Messenger Newsboys
boys
In six smaller cities, where the number of factory workers is much larger in
proportion than in the great cities, and the number of newsboys and
messengers is much smaller, the results were somewhat different. The
following schedule is interesting as a summary of the replies received from
these towns:—
Occupations of Juvenile Delinquents in Six Towns of Less than
100,000 Inhabitants, showing the Relative Number of Each
Occupation[E]

Report A B C D
1 Mine Truants Messenger Miscellaneous
boys boys
2 Glass- Other Miscellaneous Truants
house factory
boys boys
3 Mill boys Messenger Truants Miscellaneous
boys
4 Mill boys Mine boys Truants Miscellaneous
5 Mill boys Truants Newsboys Miscellaneous
6 Mine Messenger Miscellaneous Truants
boys boys
These facts, and other facts of a like nature, are only indicative of the ill
effects of child labor upon the morals of the children. In some cases the
moral peril lies in the nature of the work itself, while in others it lies, not in
the work, but in the conditions by which it is surrounded. In the Chicago
Stock Yards, for example, judging by what I saw there, I should say that in
most, if not all, of the departments the work itself is degrading and
brutalizing, and that no person under eighteen years of age ought to be
permitted to work in them. In large laundries little girls are very commonly
employed as “sorters.” Their work is to sort out the soiled clothes as they
come in and to classify them. While such work must be disagreeable and
unwholesome for a young girl, there is nothing necessarily demoralizing

about it. But when such little girls are compelled to work with men and
women of the coarsest and most illiterate type, as they frequently are, and to
listen to constant conversation charged with foul suggestions, it becomes a
soul-destroying occupation. At its best, even when all possible efforts are
made to keep the place of employment pure and above reproach—and I
know that there are many such places—still the whole tendency of child
labor is in the direction of a lower moral standard. The feeling of
independence caused by the ability to earn wages, the relaxation of parental
authority, with the result that the children roam the streets at night or
frequent places of amusement of questionable character; the ruthless
destruction of the bloom of youthful innocence and the forced
consciousness of life properly belonging to adult years—these are
inevitably associated with child labor.

X

These are some of the ills which child labor inflicts upon the children
themselves, ills which do not end with their childhood days but curse and
blight all their after years. The child who is forced to be a man too soon,
forced too early to enter the industrial strife of the world, ceases to be a man
too soon, ceases to be fit for the industrial strife. When the strength is
sapped in childhood there is an absence of strength in manhood and
womanhood; Ruskin’s words are profoundly true, that “to be a man too
soon is to be a small man.” We are to-day using up the vitality of children;
soon they will be men and women, without the vitality and strength
necessary to maintain themselves and their dependants. When we exploit
the immature strength of little children, we prepare recruits for the
miserable army of the unfit and unemployable, whose lot is a shameful and
debasing poverty.
This wrong to helpless childhood carries with it, therefore, a certain and
dreadful retribution. It is not possible to injure a child without injuring
society. Whatever burden society lays, or permits to be laid, upon the
shoulders of its children, it must ultimately bear upon its own. Society’s
interest in the child may be well expressed in a slight paraphrase of the
words of Jesus, “Whatsoever is done to one of the least of these little ones
is done unto me.” It is in that spirit that the advocates of child-labor
legislation would have the nation forbid the exploitation, literally the
exhaustion, of children by self-interested employers. For the abuse of
childhood by individual antisocial interests, society as a whole must pay the
penalty. If we neglect the children of to-day, and sap their strength so that
they become weaklings, we must bear the burden of their failures when they
fail and fall:—
“There is a sacred Something on all ways—
Something that watches through the Universe;
One that remembers, reckons and repays,
Giving us love for love, and curse for curse.”

It is a well-known fact that the competition of children with their elders
entails serious consequences of a twofold nature,—first, in the displacement

of adults, and, second, in the lowering of their wage standards. There are
few things more tragic in the modern industrial system than the sight of
children working while their fathers can find no other employment than to
carry dinners to them. I know that many persons are always ready to
suggest that the fathers like this unnatural arrangement, that they prefer to
live upon the earnings of their little ones, and there are, no doubt, cases in
which this is true. But in the majority of cases it is not true. Every one who
is at all familiar with the lives of the workers must realize that when applied
indiscriminately to the mass of those who find themselves in that condition
of dependence upon their children’s labor, this view is a gross libel. Some
months ago, I stood outside of a large clothing factory in Rochester, N.Y.
Upon the front of the building, as upon several others in the street, there
hung a painted sign, such as I have seen there many times, bearing the
inscription, “Small Girls Wanted.” While I stood there two men passed by
and I heard one of them say to the other: “That’s fourteen places we’ve seen
they want kids to-day, Bill, but we’ve tramped round all week an’ never got
sight of a job.” I have known many earnest, industrious men to be weeks at
a time seeking employment while their children could get places without
difficulty. The displacement of adult workers by their children is a stern and
sad feature of the competition of the labor market, which no amount of
cynicism can dispose of.
A brief study of the returns published in the bulletins and reports of the
various bureaus of labor and the labor unions will show that child labor
tends to lower the wages of adult workers. Where the competition of
children is a factor wages are invariably lowest. Two or three years ago I
was associated in a small way with an agitation carried on by the members
of the Cigarmakers’ Union in Pennsylvania against the “Cigar Trust.” One
of the principal issues in that agitation was the employment of young
children. The labor unions have always opposed child labor, for the reason
that they know from experience how its employment tends to displace adult
labor and to reduce wages. In the case of the cigarmakers’ agitation the
chief grievance was the fact that children were making for $2 and $2.50 per
thousand the same class of cigars as the men were paid from $7.50 to $8 per
thousand for making.[140] The men worked under fairly decent, human
conditions, but the conditions under which the children worked were
positively inhuman. That such competition as that, if extensive, must result
in the gradual displacement of men and the employment of children,

accompanied by the reduction of the wages of the men fortunate enough to
be allowed to remain at work, is, I think, self-evident. In their turn the
unemployment of adults and the lowering of wages are fruitful sources of
poverty, and force the employment of many children.
These are some of the most obvious immediate economic consequences of
child labor, simple facts which we can readily grasp. But there are other,
subtler and less obvious, economic consequences of even greater
importance, so vast that their magnitude cannot be measured nor even
guessed. It is impossible to conceive how much we lose through the
lessened productive capacity of those who have been prematurely exploited,
and even if that were possible, we should still have to face the stupendous
problem of determining how much of our expenditure for the relief of
poverty, caring for the diseased and crippled, and the expensive
maintenance of a large criminal class in prisons and reformatories, has been
rendered necessary by that same fundamental cause. It is an awful,
bewildering problem, this ultimate economic cost of child labor to society.
If it were proposed to saddle the bulk of these expenditures for the relief of
the necessitous and the maintenance of the diseased, maimed, and criminal
classes upon the industries in which their energies were used up, their
bodies maimed, or their moral natures perverted and destroyed, there would
be a great outcry. Yet, it would be much more reasonable and just than the
present system, which permits the physical, mental, and moral ruin to be
carried on in the selfish and sordid interests of a class, and the imposition of
the resulting burden of misery and failure upon the shoulders of society as a
whole.

XI

What are the reasons for the employment of children? It is almost needless
to argue that child labor is socially unnecessary, that the labor of little boys
and girls is not required in order that wealth sufficient for the needs of
society may be produced. If such a claim were made, it would be an all-
sufficing reply to point to the great army of unemployed men in our midst,
and to say that the last man must be employed before the employment of
the first child can be justified. When there is not an unemployed man, when
there is not a man employed in useless, unproductive, and wasteful labor, if
there is then a shortage of the things necessary for social maintenance, child
labor may be necessary and justifiable. Under any other conditions than
these it is unjustifiable and brutally wrong. In the primitive struggle with
the hostile forces of nature, such struggles as pioneers have had in all lands
before the deserts could be made to yield harvests of fruit and grain, the
labor of wives and children has been necessary to supplement that of
husbands and fathers. But what would be thought of the men, under such
conditions, if they forced their wives and children to work while they idled,
ate, and slept? Yet that is, essentially, the practice of modern industrial
society. Here is a great country with natural resources unparalleled in
human experience for their richness and variety; here labor is so productive,
and inventive genius so highly developed, that wealth overflows our
granaries and warehouses, and forces us to seek foreign markets for its
disposal. The children employed in our factories are not employed because
it would otherwise be impossible to produce the necessities of life for the
nation. The little five-year-old girl seen by Miss Addams working at night
in a Southern cotton mill was not so employed because it was necessary in
order that the American people might have enough cotton goods to supply
their needs. On the contrary, she was making sheeting for the Chinese
Army![141] Not that she or those by whom she was employed had any
interest in the Chinese Army, but because there was a prospective profit for
the manufacturer in the making of sheeting for sale to China for the use of
her soldiers. The manufacturer would just as readily have sacrificed little
American girls in the manufacture of beads for Hottentots, or gilt idols for
poor Hindoo ryots, if the profit were equal.

A “KINDERGARTEN” TOBACCO
FACTORY IN PHILADELPHIA

That is the root of the child-labor evil; it has no social justification and
exists only for the sordid gain of profit-seekers. It is not difficult, therefore,
to understand the manufacturers’ interest in child labor, or their opposition
to all efforts to legislate against it. Cheap production is the maxim of
success in industry, and a plentiful supply of cheap labor is a powerful
contributor to that end. The principal items in productive cost are the raw
material and the labor necessary, the relative importance of each depending
upon the nature of the industry itself. Now, it is obviously to the interest of
the manufacturer, as manufacturer, to get both raw material and labor-power
as cheaply as possible, whether the industry in which he is interested is
governed by competitive, or monopolistic, or any intermediate conditions.
If competition rules, cheapness is vitally important to him, since if he can
get an advantage over his competitors in that respect he can undersell them,
while if he fails to get his supplies of labor and raw material as cheaply as
his competitors, he will be undersold. If, on the other hand, monopoly
conditions prevail, it is still an important interest to secure them as cheaply
as possible, thereby increasing his profit.
It is an axiom of commercial economy that supply follows demand, and it is
certain that the constant demand for the cheap, tractable labor of children
has had much to do with the creation of the supply. At bottom the
employers, or, rather, the system of production for profit, must be held
responsible for child labor. There are evidences of this on every hand. We

see manufacturers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania getting children from
orphan asylums, regardless of their physical, mental, and moral ruin, merely
because it pays them. When the glass-blowers of Minotola, N.J., went on
strike, in 1902, the child-labor question was one of their most important
issues. The exposures made of the frightful enslavement of little children
attracted widespread attention. There is very little in the history of the
English factory system which excels in horror the conditions which existed
in that little South Jersey town at the beginning of the twentieth century.[142]
When the proprietor of the factory was asked about the employment of
young boys ten and eleven years of age, many of whom often fell asleep
and were awakened by the men pouring water over them, and at least two of
whom died from overexhaustion, he said: “If two men apply to me for work
and one has one or two or three children and the other has none, I take the
man with children. I need the boys.” In actual practice this meant that no
man could get work as a glass-blower unless he was able to bring boys with
him. A regular padrone system was developed in consequence of this: the
glass-blowers, determined to keep their own boys out of the factories if
possible, secured children from orphan asylums, or took the little boys of
Italian immigrants, boarded them, and paid the parents a regular weekly
sum.
In the mills of the South it is frequently made a condition of the
employment of married men or women that all their children shall be bound
to work in the same mills. The following is one of the rules posted in a
South Carolina cotton mill:—
“All children, members of a family, above twelve years of age, shall work regularly in the mill, and
shall not be excused from service therein without the consent of the superintendent for good
cause.”[143]

Many times I have heard fathers and mothers—in the North as well as in
the South—say that they did not want their children to work, that they could
have done without the children’s wages and kept them at school a little
longer, or apprenticed them to better employment, but that they were
compelled to send them into the mills to work, or lose their own places.
Even more eloquent as evidencing the keen demand of the manufacturers
for child labor is the fact to which Mr. McKelway calls attention, that, in
response to their demand, cotton-mill machinery is being made with
adjustable legs to suit small child workers. Mr. McKelway rightly contrasts
this with the experience in India when the first cotton mills were erected

there. Then, for the first time, it was found necessary to manufacture
spinning frames high enough from the floor to accommodate adult workers.
[144]

With such facts as these before us, it is easy to see that the urgency of the
employers’ demands for child labor is an important factor in the problem.
Underlying all other causes is the fundamental fact that the exploitation of
the children is in the interests of the employing class. It may be urged that it
is necessary for children to begin work at an early age because the work
they do cannot be done by men or women, but the contention is wholly
unsupported by facts. There is no work done by boys in the glass factories
which men could not do; no skill or training is required to enable one to do
the work done by breaker boys in the coal-mines; the work done by children
in the textile mills could be done equally well by adults. The fact that in
some cases adults are employed to do the work which in other cases is done
by children, is sufficient proof that child labor is not resorted to because it is
inevitable and necessary, but on account of its cheapness.
It does not, of course, necessarily follow that low-priced labor is really
cheap labor; it may prove to be just as uneconomical to employ such labor
as to buy poor raw materials merely because they are low-priced. The
quantitative measure is no more satisfactory as a standard of value when
applied to labor than when applied to other things. Thomas Brassey, the
famous English engineer and contractor, used to declare that the cost of
carrying out great works in different countries did not vary according to the
wages paid, and that his experience had been that in countries where wages
were highest the rate of profit was also highest. Very similar testimony has
been given by many large employers of labor, and the point seems to be
fairly well established. It is said, for instance, that the cost of erecting large
buildings does not differ very much in the great capitals of the world,
though the rate of wages differs enormously, and that in America, where
wages in the building trades are much higher than anywhere else in the
world, the labor cost is really less than elsewhere.[145] In view of this
economic fact, it has been urged that child labor is not cheap labor, except
in a false and uneconomic sense, that it is inefficient, and that it would be to
the interest of the employers themselves to employ adult labor instead.
Doubtless this argument has been used in the true propagandist spirit of
appealing to as many interests as possible, and proving the sweet

reasonableness of the demand for the abolition of child labor, but I am
inclined to doubt its value. We may, I think, trust the employers to look after
their own interests. It is true that if you put an underpaid and underfed
Italian laborer at a dollar a day to work, and alongside put a decently fed
American laborer at double that wage, you will probably find the labor of
the latter the more profitable; just as cheap, miserably paid coolie labor is
the most expensive of all. But I do not think it follows that adult labor
would be cheaper than child labor to the employer. Most child labor is made
possible by machinery and conditioned by it, and adult labor would be
conditioned by it in the same manner. There is very little scope for
individual differences to manifest themselves where the machine is the
controlling power. In other industries, such as glass manufacture, where
machinery plays a relatively unimportant part as yet, the labor of the boys is
conditioned by the speed of the men they serve. The men, urged on by the
piecework system, work at their utmost limit of speed, and the boys must
keep pace with them. It is unlikely that if men were employed to do the
work now done by the “snappers-up,” they would be able to increase the
speed of the glass-blowers, the only way in which their labor could prove
cheaper. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that men would
not consent to be driven as boys are driven. I have gathered from glass-
blowers themselves that they are very often as much opposed to the
introduction of adult helpers as are their employers, for the reason that they
believe adults would not serve them with the same speed as boys. For these
reasons, and many others into which it is impossible to enter here, I am
convinced that little good will result from a propaganda aiming to show the
employers that their economic interests would be best served by the
abolition of child labor.
In a similar way it has been urged, with ample evidence of its truth, that the
employment of children retards the introduction of mechanical devices and
their fullest development.[146] This is perfectly true, not only of child labor,
but of almost all forms of labor that are unhealthful or degrading. There is
absolutely no need of human street sweepers, exposed in all weathers and
constantly inhaling foul, disease-laden dust, any more than there is need of
little boys working in the glass factories, carrying red-hot bottles to the
ovens. In each case machinery has been invented to do the work, and it is
used to a small extent. If these occupations, and scores of others, were
absolutely prohibited, and the prohibitory law rigidly enforced, streets

would still be swept, but by mechanical sweepers, and bottles would still be
taken to the annealing ovens, but by mechanical means. The world will
probably, let us hope, never become the paradise dreamed of by the German
dreamer, Etzler, who believed that all the work of the world would be done
by machinery in the future, and human labor become altogether
unnecessary.[147] But there is no doubt that much of the work which to-day
degrades body, brain, and soul could be done just as well by mechanical
agents. Not, however, through sermonizing or appealing to the employers
will these mechanical devices be generally adopted to take the place of the
life-destroying labor of boys and girls; but by making it increasingly
difficult, and finally impossible, for them to employ child labor at all.
Not long ago I was in a glass factory where the “carrying-in boys” had been
displaced by automatic machinery. As I watched the machine doing the
work I had been accustomed to seeing little boys perform, I asked the
manager of the factory why it had been introduced. His answer was simple
and direct, “Why, because it had become too difficult to get boys.” A few
days later I went into another factory where boys were, as usual, employed
in doing the work. I asked the owner of the factory why he did not use
machinery instead of employing boys. “Because it is not practicable,” he
replied. “We must have boys and can’t do without them.” When I told him
that I had seen the work done by machinery with perfect satisfaction, he
laughed. “Yes, that is true, but I still say that it is not a practicable
proposal,” he rejoined. “I mean that it is not a practical business
proposition. I am not interested in machinery, as machinery, and if I can get
all the boys I want, at wages making their labor no more expensive than the
cost of running machinery, why should I tie up two or three thousand
dollars of my capital to install machines? So long as I can get boys enough,
I don’t want to bother with machines.” Then I asked: “What would you do
if you could not get boys—if their employment was forbidden, and the law
strictly enforced?” His reply was suggestive. “Why, then machinery would
be the only thing; then it would be a practical business proposition,” he
said.

A GLASS FACTORY AT NIGHT

I have given this manufacturer’s opinion, as nearly as possible in his own
words, because it is an admirably clear statement of what I believe to be the
natural attitude of the employing class upon a grave question. All that
stands in the way of a general use of machinery to do the work now
performed at such an enormous cost in human life and happiness, is the
temporary inconvenience of the employers from having to tie up some of
their capital. Just as the woollen manufacturers in England, as soon as they
were debarred from employing children, adopted the piecing machine,[148]
so the employers of America to-day would have no difficulty about securing
machinery, much of it already invented, if the employment of children
should be forbidden. But, generally speaking, they will not of themselves
make the change.

XII

It is less easy to understand the problem of child labor in its relation to
parental responsibility. It is continually asked: “Why do parents send their
little ones to work at such an early age? Is it possible that there are so many
parents who are so indifferent to the welfare of their children that they send
them to work, and surround them with perils and evil influences, or are
there other, deeper reasons? Are the parents helpless to save their little
ones?” These are questions which have never yet been satisfactorily
answered; they deal with a phase of the problem which has never been fully
investigated, notwithstanding that it is of vital importance.
As already noted, when the manufacturers of England sought first to get
child workers for the cotton and woollen mills, they found the parents
arrayed against them, defending their children. For a long time no self-
respecting father or mother would allow a child to go to the factories to
work, and it remained for many years a brand of social disgrace to have
one’s children so employed. Not until their pride was conquered by poverty,
not until they were subjugated by hunger and compelled to surrender and
accept the inevitable, did the parents send their children into the factories. It
was poverty, bitter poverty, which led the first “free” child into the mills to
economic servitude, and I am disposed to think that poverty is still the main
reason why parents send their children to body-and-soul-destroying toil.
Many of those whose work for the enactment of legislation to protect the
children from the ills of premature labor entitles them to lasting honor and
gratitude, have shown an inclination to minimize the extent to which
poverty is responsible for child labor. The opponents of child-labor
legislation have so strongly insisted upon the hardships which would follow
if parents were deprived of their children’s earnings, and have so eloquently
pleaded the cause of the “poor widowed mothers,” as almost to make the
employment of children appear as a philanthropic enterprise. Very often, it
seems to me, the advocates of child-labor legislation, in their eagerness to
refute their critics, have resorted to arguments which rest upon exceedingly
slight foundations of fact, and, in this case especially, laid insufficient stress
upon the logical answer. The more closely the problem is scrutinized and

investigated, the larger the influence of poverty will appear, I think. At the
same time, it is well to remember that poverty is not the only cause by any
means. There are many other causes, some closely associated with poverty,
others only remotely or not at all. Ignorance, cupidity, indifference, feverish
ambition to “get on,”—these are a few of the many other causes which
might be named.
It is declared, then, that actual inquiry has shown that the claim that the
earnings of the children are necessary to the support of the family, and that
widows and others would suffer serious poverty if their children under
fifteen were not permitted to work, is “rarely if ever justified.” Mrs.
Frederick Nathan, of the Consumers’ League of the City of New York,
whose splendid devotion to the cause of social righteousness lends weight
to her words, expresses this view with admirable clearness. She says:
“Whenever preventive measures for child labor are enacted or enforced,
there is always a wail heard to the effect that the child’s labor is absolutely
requisite for the living expenses of the family. Yet, upon investigation, this
statement is rarely corroborated. In Illinois, there was recently enacted a
law prohibiting children under sixteen from working more than eight hours
a day, or after 7 P.M. Thousands of diminutive toilers were discharged.
Then a cry of hardship went up in behalf of hundreds of families.
Philanthropic women undertook an investigation, supposing they would
find a number of cases in which the wages of the working child were
absolutely necessary to the family income. To their amazement they found
only three families in Chicago, and five in the remainder of the state, where
this was true. In every other case it was discovered that either the parent or
older children could support the family, or some relative was willing to
assist until the child reached the legal age.”[149]
Where there are so many coöperating causes, it would be easy to
overestimate the importance of any one, and correspondingly easy to
underestimate it. How the investigations in Illinois were conducted, what
standards were adopted by the investigators, I do not know, and cannot,
therefore, in the absence of specified data, express an opinion upon the
validity of the conclusions drawn. Frankly, however, I distrust them. Not
long since I heard of a case in which a “philanthropic lady investigator”
decided that the wages of a child of thirteen were not necessary to the
maintenance of the family, because she “had a father in regular

employment.” It did not, apparently, occur to her that $9 a week was too
little to support decently a family of six persons.
Whatever the nature of the Illinois investigation, I am certain that in my
own experience the proportion of cases in which there is actual dependence
upon what the children earn is very much larger. It must not be forgotten in
discussing this question that although a child may earn only $1.50 a week,
that sum may mean a great deal to the family. It may mean the difference
between living in a comparatively good house on a decent street and going
to a foul tenement in a bad neighborhood. It may mean the difference
between coal and no coal in winter, or ice and no ice in summer. As a poor
woman said to me quite recently, “Joe only earns thirty cents a day, but that
thirty cents means supper for all five in the family.” The investigations of
Mr. Nichols in the coal-mining and textile-manufacturing towns,[150] of Mr.
Kellogg Durland,[151] and, particularly, the inquiries made in New Jersey
concerning the immediate effects of the Child Labor Law of 1904,[152] all
tend to show that the dependence of families upon children’s earnings is
much greater than the Illinois figures would indicate. I venture the opinion
that there is not a Settlement worker in America who has studied this
problem whose experience would confirm the optimism of the Illinois
investigators. I am certain that within a radius of three blocks from the little
Settlement in which this is written, and with which I am at present most
familiar, there are more families known to be absolutely dependent upon the
earnings of young children than were found in the whole State of Illinois,
according to the report quoted. I know of at least twice as many such
families as were found in Illinois living in this little city with its population
of about sixty thousand as against the nearly 5,000,000 in Illinois.
Settlement workers in various parts of the country have, without exception,
declared the Illinois report to be absolutely at variance with their
experience.
In the hope that I might be able to gather sufficient accurate data to warrant
some fairly definite conclusions upon this point, I spent several weeks
making careful personal investigations into the matter in four states, New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. I made inquiries into
213 cases, first getting the children’s stories and then carefully investigating
them. The results are clearly set forth in the accompanying schedule, but
explanation of a few points may be helpful to the reader.

In choosing a wage standard to represent the primary poverty line, I
somewhat arbitrarily fixed upon $10 per week. In either of the four states
named, such a wage must mean poverty and lead to the employment of
children at the earliest possible moment. Intemperance appears in four
cases, but that does not mean that it did not enter into other cases at all. In
the four cases noted the fathers were earning from $12 to $18 per week, and
while it is possible that with such wages they might be honestly and
honorably poor, since even $18 is not a very princely wage, it is a fact that
their expenditures upon drink constituted the real cause of the poverty
which forced their children to work. On the other hand, I do not suppose
that all the cases of child labor due to the primary poverty of their families
are noted. In the last column several cases are given of children who were
“sick when attending school,” or who “could not get on at school.” For
reasons given in an earlier chapter, I am inclined to believe that these cases
would have to be transferred to the other column if it were only possible to
investigate them more fully.

Table showing Reasons for the Employment of 213 Children

No. of Occupations[F] Reasons given Reasons given
Children which indicate Other than
Primary Poverty Apparent
Primary Poverty
Boys, 34. Glass Wages of father 9 Parents saving
factory less than $10 money to
Workers. per week buy their
[G]
homes, etc.
Father sick or 5 Children
injured working to
keep father
who is able
to work but
won’t
Father dead 2
Father 1
unemployed
Father in prison 1 Not
determined
Boys, 23. Textile Wages of father 14 Tired of 1
mill less than $10 school
workers. per week
Girls, 57. Father 6 Discouraged
unemployed by being
“put back”
at school
every time
family
moved
Father dead 5 Parents saving
the money
Father sick or 6 Because
injured companions

went to
work
Father deserted 2 To get better
family clothes
Father 1 Not
drunkard determined
Boys, 33. Cigarette, Father’s wage 14 Because
cigar, less than $10 friends
and per week worked
tobacco
workers.
Girls, 22. Father dead 3 Tired of
school
Father sick or 4 Parents saving
injured money
Father 4 To get better
unemployed clothes
Father 3 Sick while at
drunkard school
Not
determined
Boys, 18. Delivery 4 Wages of father 15 Couldn’t get
wagon less than $10 on at school
boys per week
Girls, 26. Match 12 Father dead 2 To get better
packers clothes
Candy 10 Father sick or 4 Because
factory injured friends
girls went to
work
Wire 7 Father 2 Sick while at
factory unemployed school
workers
Rubber 11 Father deserted 2 Not
factory family determined
workers

Boys, 108. Low wages 52 School 3
difficulties
Girls, 105. Unemployment 13 Because 1
friends
went to
work
Father’s death 12 To get better 1
clothes
Father’s 19 To enable 1
sickness parents to
save
Father’s 4 Sickness of
desertion of child while
family at school
Father’s 4 Father’s
intemperance laziness
Father in prison 1 Not 2
determined
Total, 213. Total, 105 = 49.30% Total, 108 =
50.70%

I do not offer this table as conclusive testimony upon the point under
discussion. The number of cases investigated is too small to give the results
more than suggestive value. Personally, I believe that the cases given are
fairly typical, and that is the opinion also of some of the leading authorities
upon the subject to whom I have submitted the table. No private
investigator can ever hope to investigate a sufficient number of cases to
establish anything conclusively in this connection. What is needed most of
all is a coöperative investigation under the direction of the leading
sociological students of the country until such extensive returns are
gathered as will justify more positive conclusions. In the meantime such
tables as this can at best only serve to call attention to what may be a
general fact.
The table shows more than mere poverty. First of all there is the senseless,
feverish, natural ambition of the immigrant to save money, to be rich. “Ma
boy getta much mona—I get richa man,” said one of the Italians included in

the first line of the fourth column of the foregoing table. How often I have
heard that speech! Not always in the broken music of Italian-English, but in
the many-toned, curious English of Bohemian, Lithuanian, Scandinavian,
Russian, Pole, and Greek—all drawn by the same powerful magnet of
wealth—all sacrificing, ignorantly and blindly, the lives of themselves and
their children in their fevered quest. In this, as in so many other problems of
the republic, the immigration of hundreds of thousands of people of alien
races, customs, and speech enters. Whether their admission is wise or
unwise is a subject outside the scope of this discussion, but one thing is
certain, and as vital as it is true, namely, that hospitality has its obligations
and duties. If the nation is to receive these immigrants, the nation must
accept the responsibility of protecting them and itself. It must protect the
immigrants from the dangers which their ignorance does not permit them to
see, and protect itself from having to bear in the near future an Atlantean
load; an economic burden which must come to it if these “strangers within
the gates” in their ignorance are allowed to barter the manhood of their sons
and the womanhood of their daughters for gold.
The virtual breakdown of our school system is one of the gravest problems
indicated by the table and enforced by general observation. The children
who go to work in factories and mines because they are “tired of school,” or
“because they could not learn,” are, it is to be feared, not always but too
often, the victims of undernutrition. The school spends all its energies in the
vain attempt to educate wasting minds in starving bodies, and then the
child, already physically and mentally ruined, goes to the mine or the
factory, there to linger on as half-starved plants in arid soil sometimes
linger, or to fade away as a summer flower fades in a day. Poverty began the
ruin of the child by denying it proper nourishment, and ignorance and greed
combine to complete the ruin by sending the child in its weakness forth to
labor.
The other reasons for the employment of children shown in the table cannot
be discussed separately. The moral contagion of poverty and ignorance,
evidenced by the number of those who work, not from necessity, but
because their friends work, is not new to those who have studied this and
kindred problems. The influence of a single family in lowering the moral
and economic standards of a whole street, especially in our smaller towns,
is notorious. The pathos of the mothers of families who are worse than

widows, with their drunken, dissolute husbands, and the tragedy of little
child lives crushed by brutal, selfish, indolent fathers who place the
responsibility of maintaining the family upon their young shoulders, are
familiar phases of the problem of child labor.
It is a solemn responsibility which the presence of this menacing evil of
child labor places upon the nation. It is not only the interests of the children
themselves that are menaced; even more important and terrible is the
thought that civilization itself is imperilled when children are dwarfed
physically, mentally, and morally by hunger, heavy toil, and unwholesome
surroundings. If one of the forts along our far-stretching coasts were
attacked by an enemy, or if a single square mile of our immense territory
were invaded, the nation would rise in patriotic unison, and there would be
no lack either of men or money for the defence. Surely, it is not too much to
hope that, before long, the nation will realize in the destruction of its future
citizens by greed and ignorance a far more serious attack upon the republic
than any that could be made by fleets or armed legions. To sap the strength
and weaken the moral fibres of the children is to grind the seed corn, to
wreck the future for to-day’s fleeting gain.
A great Frenchman once said of the alphabet, “These twenty-six letters
contain all the good things that ever were, or ever can be, said,—only they
need to be arranged.” To complete the truth of this aphorism, he should
have included all the bad things as well. And so it is with the children of a
nation. Capable of expressing all the good or evil the world has known or
may know, it is essentially a matter of arrangement, opportunity,
environment. Whether the children of to-day become physical, mental, and
moral cretins, or strong men and women, fathers and mothers of virile sons
and daughters, depends upon the decision of the nation. If the responsibility
of this is fully recognized, and the employment of children under fifteen
years of age is forbidden throughout the length and breadth of this great
country; if the nation realizes that the demand for the protection of the
children is the highest patriotism, and enfolds every child within its strong,
protecting arms, then and not till then will it be possible to look with
confidence toward the future, unashamed and unafraid.

E. “Messenger boys” includes errand boys in stores.

F. No inquiry was made among mine workers because, on account of
the large number of boys whose fathers have been killed or
permanently disabled, the data would be less representative. (See
Roberts’ Anthracite Coal Communities, p. 176.)

G. Mostly foreign born or the children of foreign-born parents, Slavs and
Italians. The entire absence of reference to school matters is
suggestive. Most of them never entered a school.

IV
REMEDIAL MEASURES

“But pity will not right the wrong,
Nor doles return the stolen youth;
When tasks are done without a song
And bargains wrung at cost of truth,
’Tis mockery to talk of ruth.”
—David Lowe.

I

Having stated the problem of poverty, as it bears upon the child, as plainly
and comprehensively as possible, I would fain leave it without further
comment, feeling with Whewell that, “Rightly to propose a problem is no
inconsiderable step towards its solution,” and believing that once the facts
are known, and their significance understood, reform cannot be long
delayed. Beyond the measures briefly suggested in the preceding pages, I
would gladly leave the whole subject of remedial action untouched,
regarding the purpose of this book as fulfilled in the statement of the
problem itself. But when I have submitted the substance of the evidence
herein presented to those whose knowledge and experience entitle them to
be regarded as experts, or to popular audiences in the form of lectures, they
have, with scarcely an exception, expressed the view that the statement of
such a problem should be accompanied by some suggestions as to its
solution; some indication of social and individual duty, lest the result be
heaviness of heart and blackness of despair.
Whoever has seriously contemplated the misery and suffering which, like a
poisonous cloud, encompasses modern society, must have experienced
doubts and fears for the future, and, like the chastened patriarch of Uz, felt
his hope “plucked up like a tree.” So many of the beacons that have shone
out over the rough, perilous path of Humanity’s pilgrimage have turned out
to be false lights, like the swinging lantern-lights of the old Cornubian
wreckers, which lured trusting mariners to head their vessels to destruction
upon the rocks, that we sometimes lose faith and despair of the visions of
world-ecstasy, the “passionate prefigurings of a world revivified,” with
which the seers of the race have beckoned us onward. And such despair
blights and starves the soul of progress. When men cease to yearn for, and
to believe in, justice, when they no longer aspire to social perfection, when
old men cease to dream dreams, and young men to see visions of a nobler
world than this economic anarchy, there can be no progress. Beautiful ideals
seem to mock us at times, but it is doubtful if ever a beautiful ideal found
lodgment in the heart of the humblest man without enriching the world.

If I were asked wherein the hope of the future lies, I should adopt for
answer the message of a great rock. Travelling along the Yellowstone River,
in the autumn of 1904, I saw an immense rock column, a veritable landmark
for many miles, upon which some enthusiast had painted in large red letters,
“Socialism is the Hope of the World.” Doubtless some ranchman, dreaming
of a future world-righteousness, had conceived the idea of making that great
natural obelisk a missionary for the faith he held, just as other enthusiasts
had pasted the similar legends I had seen along the trails of the North
Dakota prairies. I share that faith and hope, and believe that nothing short of
the socialization of the means of life will ever fully and finally solve the
problems inhering in our present industrial system, resulting in strife,
bitterness, and the denial of human brotherhood. But long, weary years of
suffering and struggle stretch between the present and that ideal state of the
future. Socialism will, it is to be devoutly hoped, save the world from red
ruin and anarchy and make possible a sweeter, nobler heritage for the
generations yet unborn. But the most sanguine Socialist must see that it is
little short of mockery to talk of the future triumph of his ideal in
connection with the problem of relieving present misery and distress, to
answer the hunger-cry of to-day with the promise of a coöperative
commonwealth in far-off years. All the Socialist parties of the world, with
the exception of a few minor and unimportant factions, frankly recognize
this and have formulated programmes of palliative measures for the
amelioration of present evils. So far as I am aware, no non-Socialist
political party has ever included in its programme demands for such
measures as the abolition of child labor, the feeding of school children by
the municipality, and the maintenance of municipal crèches—demands
which are included in practically all Socialist programmes. In suggesting
only such remedial measures as may be taken by society or individuals
within the present social state, and involving no fundamental change in the
social structure, I do so, therefore, as one believing in the ultimate necessity
of such change, and the right of every child born into the world to equal
opportunity and equal share in all the gifts and resources of civilization.

II

In view of all the difficulties by which the problem is surrounded, the
uncertain results which have attended some of the most intelligent and
sincere efforts in that direction, he would be foolish indeed who ventured to
dogmatize upon the reduction of the infantile death-rate, or the best
methods to be adopted toward that end. There are, however, certain well-
established facts, certain verities, upon which I would insist. It is perfectly
obvious, for instance, that every child should be ushered into the world with
loving tenderness, and with all the skill and care possible. The slightest
blunder of an incompetent, unskilled midwife may involve fatal
consequences to mother or child, or such injuries as are irreparable.[153] So
that the very first principle upon which everybody agrees, theoretically at
least, involves the need of important legislative reform providing for the
supervision of midwives, and the establishment of a system of training and
education without which no midwife should be allowed to practise. That
such a law would have the effect of materially lowering the rate of infant
mortality, as well as that of mothers, no one who has ever given the matter
serious consideration can doubt. From personal observation, and the
testimony of gynecologists and obstetricians of large experience, I am
satisfied that this reform alone would save many hundreds of lives each
year, alike of mothers and infants. It is appalling to think of the large
number of ignorant women who are practising as midwives. Many of them
have no conception of the importance of their work; they are often dirty and
careless, as well as ignorant of the first principles of obstetrical science.
Knowing nothing of the need or value of antiseptic precautions, they are
responsible for thousands of cases of blood-poisoning every year, and
because they are ignorant of the methods of restoring asphyxiated infants
they kill thousands of babes in the passage from the wombs of their
suffering mothers.[154]
In most states there is very little supervision of midwives; in some cases
practically none at all. New York, always rather prone to take pride in its
record upon such matters, has regulations which are wofully inadequate. All
that is necessary to enable a woman to practise as a midwife is: (1) a
certificate or diploma from some school of midwifery, native or foreign, or

(2) signed statements as to her fitness and character from two physicians.
No inquiry whatever is made into the bona fides or character of the school
granting the certificate, nor are the physicians held responsible in any way
for the women they recommend.[155] So long as the applicant meets either of
the foregoing slight requirements, the authorities must issue her a permit to
practise as a midwife. She becomes a “registered midwife,” and the title
creates an altogether unwarranted confidence in the minds of the people. It
is not only the poor, illiterate immigrants who are thus deceived, but many
very intelligent citizens are under the impression that a “registered
midwife” has had some sort of training. Immigrants coming from countries
like Germany, where all midwives have to undergo a thorough training, are
naturally unsuspicious of the fact that here we have nothing of the kind. It is
impossible to present the evil results of the employment of untrained and
incompetent midwives statistically, or even to estimate them. Some idea
may be gathered from the fact that, while the physicians of the New York
Lying-in Hospital, in 1904, attended over four thousand confinements, 2766
of them in the tenement districts among the very poor, with only three
deaths,[156] one midwife, in a very similar tenement district, showed me a
list of sixty-two cases she had attended with five deaths. And she spoke
proudly of her “good record”!

A FREE INFANTS’ MILK DEPOT
(MUNICIPAL), BRUSSELS

In Germany for some years midwives have had to pass a regular
examination. In England, under the Midwife Act of 1902, they are placed

under a much stricter supervision than ever before, and are made
responsible for the cleanliness and care of mother and child during the
lying-in period of ten days. While it is felt that this law is inadequate, it is
believed that its enforcement tends to improve conditions materially. For
years the New York County Medical Association and other medical
societies of standing, supported by Boards of Health and the leaders of the
medical profession, have tried to get legislation enacted providing for the
establishment of a standard of education and training for midwives. In
every state legislation of a uniform character should be enacted providing
that no person shall practise as a midwife or accoucheur without having
first undergone a thorough training and passed an examination set by the
State Board of Regents or some similar authority. They should be held
responsible for malpractice, incompetence, or neglect, just as physicians are
held responsible. While it is true that such a reform would inflict a certain
amount of hardship and suffering upon many women, on the other hand, it
would raise midwifery to the dignity of a profession, and provide lucrative
avocations for many other women. In any case, it is a most tragic folly to
set the hardship involved against the enormous gain to society.
It is probable that such trained midwives would command a much higher
rate of remuneration for their services than many of the incompetent women
who now act in that capacity, and that many poor mothers would be unable
to afford to employ them. Even now there are thousands of women who
cannot afford attendance of any kind at their lying-in, and doctors tell of
children, little girls ten years old,[157] for instance, caring for their mothers
through the pain and peril of parturition and for the newly born children.
The remedy for such a condition lies, not in the employment of incompetent
midwives licensed to destroy life because they are willing to do it
“cheaply,” but in the extension of free medical service, maternity hospitals,
and properly trained midwives as part of our district nursing services. This
subject of the extension of our public medical service is a most important
one. There is a tendency in some quarters to decry everything of this nature,
and to magnify unduly the extent to which such services are abused. That
they are sometimes abused, if by that term is understood their use by those
who could afford to pay for such services, is undoubtedly true, though it
would be easy to overestimate the extent of such abuses. On the other hand,
it is certain that in many of our cities we have scarcely begun to make
provision for the needs of the suffering poor. It is astonishing to find a

manufacturing city of more than sixty thousand inhabitants, with a
tenement-house problem as distressing as that of New York City, and with
the most appalling poverty, having no city physician upon whom the
suffering poor can call by right. I do not know if there are many other cities
in the United States so utterly indifferent to the claims of the sick poor as
Yonkers, the “city of beautiful homes and great industries” upon the
Hudson, but I do know that there are many cities in which there is a sad and
shameful failure to provide proper medical care and attention for the needy.

III
In order that the child may be surrounded at its birth with all possible care
and skill, it must be born somewhere else than upon the floor of a factory.
Notwithstanding all that may be said in its favor, it is little likely that the
Jevonian proposal to forbid the employment of any mother within a period
of three years from the date of the birth of her youngest child will be
adopted for many years to come, if ever at all. Among the foremost
opponents of such a proposal would be many of the advocates and
defenders of “women’s rights,” begging the whole question of children’s
rights, and ignoring the question whether it can ever be “right” for mothers
to leave their babies and enter the factory, displacing men, or, what is
finally the same thing, lowering their wages. It would be difficult, however,
to imagine any such opposition to the proposal that the employment of
women should be forbidden within a period of six weeks or two months
prior to and following childbirth. Decency and humanity alike suggest that
such a law should be embodied in the factory legislation of every industrial
state, as is the case in most countries at the present time.
With our cosmopolitan population it is certain that the enforcement of such
a law would be no easy matter.[158] Little difficulty would seem to be
necessarily involved in the enforcement of the period of rest after
confinement; all that would be necessary would be to insist upon a copy of
the birth certificate of the youngest child, accompanied by the sworn
statement of the mother. If the whole onus of responsibility were placed
upon the employer, and penalties were imposed in a few cases, there is no
reason to suppose that the law in this respect would be less effective than
other laws relating to employment. That it would not be perfectly successful
is no more an argument against its enactment than the partial failure of
child-labor laws, for example, is an argument for their repeal. But the
period of exemption prior to childbirth is a much more delicate and difficult
matter. It has not, I believe, been found possible in European countries to
enforce the law in this direction with as much success as in the other, but
the results have been sufficiently successful, nevertheless, to warrant
continued effort. In actual practice such a law would have a tendency,
doubtless, to discourage the employment of married women in factories,

since employers as a rule would not care to take the trouble, or to assume
the risks, thus involved in their employment.
But, as already noted, if working mothers are to be forced into prolonged
periods of idleness, in the interests of their offspring and the future of
society, some means must be provided whereby they may be maintained
and secured against want. The philanthropic experiments noted in an earlier
chapter owed all their success to such provisions. While it would perhaps be
too Utopian to advocate as a measure for immediate adoption state pensions
for childhood and youth as well as old age, as Mr. C. Hanford Henderson
does in his wonderfully suggestive and stimulating book, Education and the
Larger Life, it is not, it seems to me, too much to demand that the state shall
(1) allow no mother to imperil her own life and that of her offspring by
working too close to the period of parturition, nor (2) allow any mother to
suffer want because she is prevented from, or of her own free will and
intelligence avoids, such work. If the right of the child to be well born, to be
ushered into the world with loving care and all the skill possible, is to be
anything but a mere cant phrase, the safeguards thus briefly sketched
cannot, it seems to me, be lightly denied. Recently I visited the stables of a
friend interested in the breeding of horses. I saw that he had taken great care
and pains to secure a well-trained veterinary surgeon, that the brood mares
were patiently and lovingly cared for and tended, both before and after
foaling. No humane and intelligent breeder of animals would deny them the
protection and care here suggested for human beings. Until the state is
willing to care for its children, at least as well as enlightened individuals
care for their horses, or their dogs, it is mockery to speak of it as being
“civilized”!

IV

The foregoing proposals relate only to the conditions surrounding the child
at birth, but it is equally the duty of society to safeguard the whole period of
childhood. In its own interest, no less than in the interest of the child, the
state should protect every child from all that menaces its life and well-
being. Before the British Interdepartmental Committee many witnesses,
some of them factory surgeons of long experience, testified to the harm
resulting from the employment of mothers and the leaving of infants in the
care of children or old persons utterly incompetent to care for them. It was
proposed that the employment of married women in factories should be
forbidden, except in cases where there are children “absolutely dependent
on their wages.” In all such cases “the municipality must make provision
for the care of the child while the mother is at work.”[159] As a minimum,
this is a good and practicable proposal, though it falls far short of the ideal.
Much more commendable for its humane good sense is the method adopted
in some of the Socialist municipalities of France. In the case of widows and
others with children absolutely dependent upon their earnings, these
municipalities pay the mothers a weekly or monthly pension, thus enabling
them to stay at home with their children.[160] With characteristic good sense
and courage, Mr. Homer Folks has proposed a similar system of pensions to
widows and others dependent upon the wages of children, on the principle
that the poverty of its parents ought not to be allowed to despoil a child’s
life and rob it of opportunities of healthful physical and mental
development.[161] That is a perfectly sound principle, it seems to me, which
applies with equal force to the working mother; for it is surely just as
important to insist that poverty shall not be allowed to rob the child of its
mother’s care.

A GROUP OF WORKING MOTHERS

Photograph taken in the yard of a Day
Nursery, where the babies are left during
their mothers’
absence at work.

Wherever possible, then, I believe that the effort of society should be to
keep the mother in the home with her children, and where pensions are
necessary in order that this result may be attained, they should be given, not
as a charity, but as a right. It would be a very good investment for society,
much more profitable than many things upon which immense sums are
lavished year by year. In the meantime, much good might be accomplished
by the establishment of municipal crèches or day nurseries in all our
industrial centres, so that babies and young children could be properly cared
for during the absence of their mothers at work. Something is already being
done in this direction by private philanthropy in many cities, but it is
exceedingly little when compared with the magnitude of the need. In saying
that these institutions should be provided by the municipality, or by the
state, I do not mean that any attempt should be made to prohibit private
philanthropic effort in this direction, nor that such effort should be in any
way lessened; but that the municipality or the state should accept final
responsibility in the matter, and provide them wherever the failure of
philanthropy makes such a course necessary. In all our great cities, as well
as in many of the smaller manufacturing towns, there should be such a
crèche or nursery in the neighborhood of almost every primary school, until

it is found possible to enable the mothers to remain with their little ones
instead of going to work. With trained nurses in charge of such institutions,
it would be easy to control the dietary of the infants and to see that they
were not given pickles, candy, or other unwholesome things. Yet such a
system, no matter how perfected, can only be regarded as a makeshift, a
rather uneconomical substitute for the humane system of keeping the
mother with her child.
The heavy death-rate in most foundling hospitals, despite all scientific care
and the most elaborate equipment, have been accounted for by the lack of
maternal interest and affection. In the splendidly appointed Infants’ Hospital
on Randall’s Island New York City, little lonely, mother-sick foundlings
pined away at an alarming rate and died like flies until the Joint Committee
of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and the State
Charity Aid Association, investigated the matter. The Joint Committee
wisely decided that every one of the bits of human driftwood was entitled to
one pair of mother’s arms, and that no institutional ingenuity could ever
take the place of the maternal instinct. They instituted a system of placing-
out the children with foster mothers, and the results have been highly
gratifying.[162] That is the human way, answering to the universal child-
instinct for a mother’s love and presence. The same objection applies to
crèches as to foundling hospitals; the difference is only one of degree.
These institutions are far better for the children than the neglect or the
ignorant handling of “little mothers” from which they now suffer, but they
can never compare in efficiency with the personal attention of the mother.
There are few mothers, be they ever so ignorant, who would not attend their
own children with greater efficiency than any institution nurses could do. In
the ultimate result I am convinced that the pensioning of mothers to care for
their children adopted by the French municipalities where the Socialists
have obtained control is much more economical and effective.

V
The importance of impure milk as a contributing cause of infant mortality is
now pretty generally recognized. The splendid work of Mr. Nathan Straus
has done much more, perhaps, than anything else, to emphasize this fact. In
view of some rather caustic criticisms of charity in the preceding pages, it
may be well if I embrace this opportunity to explain my position somewhat
more fully. No one, I think, recognizes more fully than I do the important
experimental work which has been done by philanthropic enterprise. Such
work, of which that of Mr. Straus is a conspicuous example, has blazed the
path for much municipal and state enterprise. It would be impossible to
overestimate the value of the work done by social settlements and such
bodies. For the charity which denies justice and seeks to fill its place, I have
no sympathy, but for the charity which adopts as its motto the fine phrase
adopted by the ablest journal of philanthropy in America,[H]—“Charity to-
day may be Justice to-morrow,”—I have nothing but praise.

A “CLEAN MILK” DISTRIBUTING
CENTRE IN A BAKER’S SHOP,
ROCHESTER, N.Y.

I have long held the opinion that the milk supply of every city should be
made a matter of municipal responsibility. Some ten years ago, while

residing in England, where the subject was then beginning to be discussed
and agitated, I devoted a good deal of time to the propaganda of the
movement for the municipalization of the milk supply. In view of the
splendid achievement of the gouttes de lait in France, it was natural that we
should have attached much importance to the sterilization of the milk, and I
remember with what enthusiasm some of us hailed the introduction of the
system into St. Helen’s, Lancashire, the first English city to adopt it. I am
convinced now that sterilization is unnecessary and a grave mistake.
Undoubtedly it is well that dirty or impure milk should be sterilized, but it
would be still better to have clean, pure milk which needed no sterilization.
The testimony of Dr. Ralph M. Vincent before the British Interdepartmental
Committee[163] and, more emphatically still, the splendid results of the
Rochester experiment under the leadership of Dr. Goler[164] show that this
can be attained. Every municipality in America could adopt, and should
adopt, the plan. “Now that the way has been shown, upon ‘city fathers’
indifferent to the childhood of their cities, upon health officers and
departments warped into unbudgeable routine, upon near-sighted charity
workers and unknowing givers who care for the suffering, but do not get at
causes, will rest the responsibility for the continuance of a part of that
fearful tally of dead babies which each summer’s week jots down on a
town’s death-roll—your town and ours.” In these direct, unequivocal words
Charities sums up the whole question of responsibility.
The purely experimental work of such philanthropic efforts as that of Mr.
Straus has been done. The practicability and value of municipal control of
the milk supply has been abundantly proven, and there is no longer need of
private charitable effort and experiment. There lurks a danger in leaving this
important public service to philanthropy, a danger well-nigh as great as in
leaving it to private commercial enterprise. The dangers arising from the
amateurish meddling of “near-sighted charity workers and unknowing
givers” is much greater than is generally recognized. Many of these
charitable societies drag out a precarious existence, their usefulness and
success depending upon the measure of success attending the efforts of the
“begging committees.” Generally speaking, they are less economical, and,
what is more important, less effective, than municipal enterprises, besides
being based upon a fatally unsound and demoralizing principle. I know of
one large city in which a number of public-spirited citizens have for some
years interested themselves in the supply of sterilized milk for infants.

Notwithstanding that they receive each year in subscriptions a much larger
amount of money, in proportion to the milk supplied, than Rochester’s
deficit, they charge the parents more than twice as much as the latter city
for the milk.
Nor is this all; there are other, weightier objections than this. There are no
regular depots for the distribution of the milk, under the direct supervision
of the Committee, but it is handled by drug-store keepers and others. No
sort of control is exercised over the sale. Any child can go into the store and
buy a bottle of milk. This is what happens: small children, sometimes not
more than four or five years old, are sent by their parents to buy the milk.
These little children are, naturally, ignorant of the importance which the
medical advisers of the charity attach to the subject of modifications of the
milk to suit the age of the child to whom it is to be given, with the result
that babies less than three months old are given milk intended for babies
eighteen months old, while the latter are half starved upon the modified
milk intended for the former. Another evil, not, I am told, peculiar to this
particular charitable society, is the selling of milk irregularly and in single
bottles. When the mothers have the money, or when they are not too busy to
go for the Pasteurized milk, they buy a single bottle, but at other times they
send out to the grocery store for cheaper milk, or else feed the babies upon
ordinary table foods. Of course, there should be a system of registration
adopted; every child’s name should be enrolled, together with the date of its
birth, and no less than a full day’s supply should be sold. That is the custom
where the matter has been taken up by the municipal authorities. The result
is that the children can be weighed and examined more or less regularly;
facilities are offered for the periodical visiting of the homes of the infants
and their inspection; mothers can be taught how to care for their little ones;
and, instead of leaving it to chance, or depending upon the word of an
ignorant mother, or a child, the attendants in charge are able to regulate the
supply so that at the proper time each child gets milk of the proper strength
and richness. How far the abuses I have named are prevalent in
philanthropic experiments of this kind, I do not know, but I am convinced
that there should be no room for such well-intentioned but disastrous
muddling. The whole milk supply of every city should be the subject of
municipal management and control, and special arrangements should be
made for dealing with the milk intended for infant consumption. Personally,
I should like to see the principles of the Rochester system extended to cover

the entire milk supply of the city, and, in some one of our great cities, the
further experiment of a municipal farm dairy for the supply of all milk
necessary for hospitals and similar institutions upon the most hygienic
principles possible. This has been done to some extent in Europe with
success.

VI
It is a delightful and scientifically correct principle which those Utopia
builders have embodied in their schemes of world-making who have
advocated the restriction of matrimony to those women who have
undergone a thorough course of education and training in eugenics and
household economy. Most persons will agree that such a system of
education for maternal and wifely duties would be a great boon, if
practicable. But so long as hearts are swayed by passion, and the subtle
currents of human love remain uncontrolled by law, such proposals must
remain dreams. Even the modest suggestion of Mrs. Parsons that a
“matrimonial white list” be created by establishing continuation schools for
training young women in the domestic arts and the principles of child-
rearing and giving them certificates or diplomas, as well as certificates of
health,[165] is so far in advance of anything yet attempted that it sounds
almost Utopian. Still, there is nothing fanciful or impossible in the proposal
itself.
The preservation of child life must depend largely upon the dissipation of
maternal ignorance. Until mothers are enlightened, the infantile death-rate
must remain needlessly and unnaturally heavy. And so long as industrial
occupations absorb our young girls in the very years which should be spent
at home in practical training for the responsibilities of wifehood and
motherhood, there must continue to be a very large number of marriages
productive of poverty, misery, and disease, because of the ignorance and
inefficiency of the wives. So the fight against maternal ignorance, the
ignorance which breeds disease and poverty, appears as an almost
Sisyphean task. So long as such industrial conditions prevail, ignorance will
continue to sap the foundations of family life and mock our efforts at
reform. In such important matters of domestic economy as knowledge of
food values and how to spend the family income to the best advantage,
what but failure can be expected when a young woman worker graduates
from mill labor to wifehood? Even where such a young woman, or girl
growing into womanhood, feels the need of training in these important
matters of domestic economy, she is prevented by the fact that the family
cooking and buying are necessarily done during the hours she is at work.

By the time she returns home after her day’s labor, little or nothing remains
to be done except washing the dishes. Even were it otherwise, she would in
most cases be too tired to help. After confinement in a shop or factory for
ten or twelve hours, at monotonous tasks entirely devoid of interest or
attractiveness, it is natural and right that she should seek recreation and
pleasure. Further confinement, either in the home or a school, is extremely
liable to prove injurious.

PACKING BOTTLES OF “CLEAN MILK”
IN ICE BEFORE SENDING THEM TO
THE CITY, ROCHESTER, N.Y.

For these reasons, and others obvious to the reader, I am not very sanguine
that much can ever be accomplished by evening classes for working girls.
The British Interdepartmental Committee suggests that “continuation
classes for domestic instruction” should be formed, and attendance at them,
twice each week during certain months of the year, made obligatory, only
those employed in domestic service being exempted from compulsory
attendance. Realizing that it would be an injury to the girls to impose this
attendance and study upon them in addition to their already too long hours
of employment, the committee very properly suggests that some
modification of the hours of work would have to be introduced, so that in
fact the hours of instruction would have to be taken out of their ordinary
working time.[166] With such a provision as this, a system of compulsory
instruction in domestic science might very well be adopted. It is probable,

however, that the principal effect would be a considerable diminishing of
the employment of girls and young women within the ages prescribed for
compulsory attendance at the continuation classes.
The suggested curriculum for such classes is interesting. “The courses of
instruction at such classes should cover every branch of domestic hygiene,
including the preparation of food, the practice of household cleanliness, the
tendance and feeding of young children, the proper requirements of a
family as to clothing—everything, in short, that would equip a young girl
for the duties of a housewife.”[167] The further suggestion is made that the
members of these continuation classes should visit from time to time the
municipal crèches—the establishment of which is strongly recommended—
and receive there practical instruction in the management of infants. This is
such a comprehensive and courageous proposal that one would like to see it
given a fair trial.

VII

The efficient work done by the school nurses in New York City, and
elsewhere, though sadly restricted in its scope, suggests far wider
possibilities. If nurses were appointed in far greater numbers, at least one to
each large school, their functions might be enlarged. If, as has been
suggested, they were to receive special social training, possibly at the
expense of part of their present medical training, they might attend to the
needs of those below school age as well as of those enrolled at school.
Above all, they might be made a potent means of educating the mothers. It
has been found that visiting nurses attached to the schools receive cordial
welcome as a rule, are not viewed with suspicion as other officials or
philanthropic visitors are, and have a correspondingly greater influence.
The weak point in such a proposal lies in the fact that the school nurse
would not, if her work was based upon the school registration, reach those
families not represented in the schools. Thus the most important cases of
all, educationally, young mothers with their first babies, would not be
reached.
Elsewhere I have referred to the efforts made in some cities to educate
mothers by the distribution of leaflets and pamphlets upon the subject of
infant feeding and general care. Some of these leaflets and pamphlets which
I have seen are models of concise lucidity, and their wide distribution
among mothers intelligent enough to profit by them would be of great
value. One of the first difficulties presented when this plan is attempted
upon a large scale is the efficient distribution of the literature. To
accomplish anything at all, the literature must be printed in the various
languages represented in the city’s industrial population, and it is no easy
matter to see that each mother gets literature in her own language. Quite
recently, I heard of a tenement in which there were families representing no
less than fourteen nationalities, and in which lived Mrs. O’Hara, a German,
speaking little English! Added to this difficulty is the expense of
distribution. If sent by mail,—and in large cities no other method seems
possible,—the cost is enormous. To send a single circular to the registered
voters of New York City, for instance, requires an expenditure of upwards
of $60,000 for postage alone.[168] There would seem to be no good reason

why the Federal Government should not authorize the Health Boards to
send all such educational matter through the mails free of cost. Why should
the Health Department of a city not have the privilege of a local frank?
Nothing could well be more foolish than the system under which the city,
while performing a national service, must pay the national post-office for
doing its share of the work.
Many of the mothers, especially of our immigrant population, are quite
unable to read, and literature is wasted upon them. It will be seen, therefore,
that the propaganda of health by literature is subject to several important
restrictions. While admirably adapted to simple, homogeneous communities
in which there is a small percentage of illiteracy, it fails to meet the needs of
our great cosmopolitan cities. If it were possible to have all births reported
at once to the Health Department by telephone, in order that each case
might be visited by special maternity nurses, it would be comparatively
easy to give special, personal attention to those cases in which literature
would be worthless. This plan has been adopted in Australia with
conspicuous success. The State Children’s Department appoints women
inspectors to visit the children of the poor. These nurse inspectors have to
report, not only upon the condition of the homes, but of the children. The
mothers are furnished with printed instructions as to the kind of food to be
given, the proper quantities, methods of preparation, and times of feeding.
If the child does not thrive satisfactorily, the nurse inspector calls in one of
the physicians of the department. If milk cannot be properly assimilated,
something else is tried. In short, all that skill and care can do to protect the
lives of the infants is done, with the result that the infantile death-rate has
been reduced from 15 per cent to 8 per cent.[169]

A MAKESHIFT: HAMMOCKS SWUNG
BETWEEN THE COTS IN AN
OVERCROWDED DAY NURSERY

VIII
I would not leave this subject without insisting upon the urgent need of
State or Federal supervision of the manufacture and sale of patent infant
foods. The mortality from this one cause alone is enormous. There has been
no satisfactory or comprehensive inquiry into this important matter in this
country, and it is therefore impossible to get reliable figures. In Germany,
where the law requires that the death certificate of an infant under one year
of age must state what the mode of feeding has been as well as the cause of
death,—a wise provision which might with advantage be adopted in this
country,—it is possible to ascertain approximately the extent of the evil.
The records show that of children fed on artificial food 51 per cent die
during the first year, while only 8 per cent of the children exclusively
nursed by their mothers die during the same period.[170] No one familiar with
the work of our infants’ hospitals can fail to be impressed by the large
number of cases of illness and death in which artificial feeding appears as a
primary or contributing cause. I have gone over the record books of many
such hospitals in different parts of the country, with the almost invariable
result that artificial foods appeared to be the source of trouble in many
cases. Most of the patent foods, one might almost go farther and say all of
them,[171] are unhealthful because of the starch they contain, which the little
infant stomachs cannot digest. Many of the cheaper kinds of patent infant
foods upon the market are, as previously stated, little better than poisons.
The testimony of the greatest authorities upon the subject of infant feeding,
backed by the grim eloquence of hospital records and the death-rates, points
irresistibly to the need of some strict supervision of the production and sale
of artificial foods for children. Whether this should be done by the
establishment of certain standard formulæ, or by compelling the makers to
submit certified samples for official analysis, is a question which only a
body of experts should decide.
The question of reducing the rate of infant mortality is, it will be seen from
the foregoing, most complicated. It is not without reluctance and misgiving
that I have ventured upon this detailed discussion of measures to that end,
and in doing so I have kept from speculation and theory, confining myself
almost entirely to those measures which have been tested by experience and

found beneficial. If Berlin has been able to reduce its infantile death-rate
from 200 per thousand to 80 per thousand, Australia to reduce its rate from
15 per cent to 8 per cent; if Rochester can reduce its summer death-rate of
infants by 50 per cent, it is surely evident that, given the determination to
do so, we can at least hope to save one-half of the babies who, under
present conditions, are perishing each year. In other words, it is possible to
save almost 100,000 babies annually from perishing in the first year of life.
No greater, worthier task than this ever challenged the attention of a great
nation.

IX

When all the evidence is piled up, we are irresistibly driven to the
conclusion that no attempt to educate hungry, ill-fed children can be
successful or ought to be attempted. Danton’s fine phrase rings eternally
true, “After bread, education is the first need of a people.” That education is
a social necessity is no longer seriously questioned. But the other idea of
Danton’s saying, that education must come after bread,—that it is alike
foolish and cruel to attempt to educate a hungry child,—is often lost sight
of. In the early days of the public agitation for free and compulsory
education, it was not infrequently urged that before the state should
undertake to compel a child to attend its schools and receive its instruction,
it ought to provide for the adequate feeding of the child. That argument,
happily, did not prevent the establishment and development of public
education, but now that the latter system has been firmly rooted in the soil
of our social system, there is an increasing belief in the inherent wisdom
and justice of the claim that the state has no right to attempt to educate an
unfed or underfed child.[172]
There is something attractive about such elemental simplicity as that of the
Czar who drew a straight line across the map from St. Petersburg to
Moscow, when his counsellors asked him what course he wished a railroad
between the two cities to follow, and said, “Let it be straight, like that.” I
suppose that every worker for social improvement has felt oppressed at
times by the complexity of our social problems, and wished that they could
be solved in some such simple and direct manner. But social progress is not
made along straight lines in general. What seems to the agitator axiomatic,
simple, and easy, appears to the constructive statesman doubtful, complex,
and difficult. There is at least one European municipality, however, which
has solved this problem of the feeding of school children in a delightfully
direct and simple way. The city of Vercelli, Italy, has made feeding as
compulsory as education![I] Every child, rich or poor, is compelled to attend
the school dinners provided by the municipality, just as it is compelled to
attend the school lessons. Not only food, but medical care and attention, are
provided for every child, as a right, on the principle that it is absurd and
wrong to attempt to develop the mind of a child while neglecting its body. It

is a mocking judgment of our civilization that such a natural, intelligent
solution of a pressing problem should be impossible for our greatest and
richest cities, though attained by a little Italian city like Vercelli.
I do not suppose that it will be found possible to apply such a principle
generally until many years have passed and our social system has been
modified considerably. In the meantime, some less thorough and
comprehensive system, like that of the French Cantines Scolaires, for
instance, will probably be adopted. It is not, however, my intention here to
advocate any particular scheme. I can only reiterate that the feeding of
school children is an imperative, urgent, and vital necessity, and emphasize
certain principles. Elsewhere I have given a résumé of the methods adopted
in several other countries,[J] and I need not, therefore, go over that ground.
Whatever is done should be free from the taint of charity. There must be no
resorting to the pernicious principle, sometimes advocated by our so-called
“practical reformers,” of subsidizing charitable societies to undertake the
work. There must be no discrimination against the child whose parents have
failed to do their duty. The child of the inebriate, the idler, or the criminal
must not be made to suffer for his parent’s sin. The state has no right to join
with the sins of the fathers in a conspiracy to damn the children’s lives, and
only a perverted sense of the relation of the child to the state could have
made it possible for such a proposal to be made. Upon the principle that
every child born into the world has a right to a full and free supply of the
necessities of life during the whole period of its helplessness and training
for the work of the world, so far as the resources of the world make that
possible, the state should proceed until in all schools where children attend
compulsorily, free, wholesome, and nutritious meals are provided for all
children as a common right.
Of course, the cry will be raised that such a system would result in
wholesale pauperization. I am not afraid of that cry—it has become too
familiar. When I first went to school in the West of England, I used to carry
my school fees—six cents a week—each Monday morning. Under that
system it was necessary for the school authorities to employ officers to see
that the fees were paid, and frequently defaulting parents were summoned.
The children of poor parents were exempted from paying the school fees,
but they had to present big cards to be marked by the teacher, and were thus
made conspicuous. I remember very well that when it was proposed to

make the schools free to all, the same bogey of pauperization was raised.[173]
The school fees were abolished, however, and the objection was heard no
more. In the early days of the Free Libraries movement, a similar outcry
was heard, but one never hears it nowadays, nor does anybody consider that
he is pauperized when he takes home a book from the city library to read.
And so one might go on, through a long list of things which were opposed
upon the same grounds by many earnest people, but are now commonly
enjoyed. If, moreover, the alternative to pauperization is slow starvation and
suffering, I unhesitatingly prefer pauperization.

X

Next to the feeding of school children in importance is the need of a much
more efficient and thorough system of medical inspections in all our
schools. In most of our cities something is already done in this direction,
but it is very little. As a rule, the medical inspections now made are most
perfunctory and superficial. With a few honorable exceptions, the practice
is to look only for cases of contagious and infectious disease or verminous
heads. The excessive prevalence of “granular lids,” or trachoma, which is
an acquired disease,[174] has led to a good deal of attention being given of
late to the whole subject of defective vision. But practically no effort at all
has been made to combine remedial treatment with inspection. Children
suffering from infectious diseases are simply excluded from the schools,
and those found to be suffering from defective vision are given notes asking
their parents to provide them with suitable glasses. In a very large
proportion of cases, probably a majority, the requests are ignored. I have
had children pointed out to me who were suffering from such serious
defects of vision as materially to handicap them in their school work, whose
parents had taken no notice whatever of repeated notices and warnings from
the school doctors. Many parents are too poor to buy glasses, many more
are too ignorant to understand the importance of complying with the
request. I know many parents of this type. On the other hand, I know many
cases in which it would be just as reasonable to ask the parents to make
glasses for their children as to buy them. For instance, I know of one public
school in which the teachers have repeatedly reported upon the number of
children with defective vision, but without appreciable effect. I spoke to the
priest to whose church a majority of the children’s parents belong about it,
and he replied: “What can they do? They cannot afford to buy glasses. Of
the 300 families belonging to my church, I am in a position to say that there
are not more than 10 in which the father earns more than $9 a week. Many
of them earn only six or seven. They have all they can do to get food;
glasses are impossible.” Now, while it is true that in many of these families
there will be supplementary wages from the children or the mothers, it is
perfectly obvious that there must be many unable to procure glasses for
their children.

INTERIOR OF THE COMMUNAL
SCHOOL KITCHEN, CHRISTIANIA,
NORWAY

Little or no attention has been given as yet to the ears, teeth, nervous and
respiratory systems, and the general health of our school children. The
inspections conducted by Dr. Cronin and his assistants in New York City
are by far the most important yet made in the United States, and show the
importance of this largely neglected subject. When I have stood in some of
our American public schools and observed the way in which the medical
inspections were made,—as many as 2000 children being “inspected” in ten
or twelve minutes,—I have with shame contrasted the farcical proceeding
with the thorough, systematic work done in several European countries. In
this, as in so many other matters, the United States and England are far
behind countries like Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and
Switzerland.[175]
In Brussels every child in the public elementary schools is medically
examined once every ten days. “Its eyes, teeth, ears, and general physical
condition are overhauled. If it looks weak and puny, they give it cod-liver
oil or some suitable tonic. At midday it gets a square meal ... and the
greatest care is taken to see that no child goes ill shod, ill clad, or ill
fed.”[176] In Norway there is a very similar system. Sickly children are put
upon a special dietary and given special individual medical care. There are
sanatoria and convalescent homes in connection with the schools.[177] In
Switzerland again poor children are fed and frequently clothed or shod at

the public expense. Day homes are provided for the very young children.
Every child is medically examined before being admitted to the schools,
and periodically thereafter. Sick children are sent to the school sanatoria
and convalescent homes for treatment. “Holiday Colonies” are provided, to
which hundreds of children are sent each year for a period of twenty-five
days each. The cost of this is partly borne by the city, out of the
“Alcoholzehntel”; partly by private contributions to the “school fund,” and
partly by the payments received from parents. The “Alcoholzehntel” is
perhaps worthy of explanation. It originates in this manner,—the
manufacture of spirits is a federal monopoly, and yields a handsome profit.
This is divided among the various cantons, which are bound to spend one-
tenth of the sum so received to combat the effects of alcohol.[178]
Very similar to the Swiss Holiday Colonies are the Colonies Scolaires of
France. These “School Colonies” take two forms. In one case the
arrondissement hires or borrows a boarding-school in the country for the
summer months, to which it sends several hundred children. In the other
case, it acquires a former château in the country, to which it despatches
relays of children during the year. The ordinary stay for each child is three
weeks, and the effect upon the physique of the children is remarkable.[179]
Berlin and, I believe, several other German cities, not only provide for the
regular, thorough medical examination of every child, but weak, sickly
children, especially those who are predisposed to tuberculosis, are sent to
school homes in the country, not far from the city, where, amid the most
healthful surroundings, they are given special medical and tutorial care until
they are entirely well and strong.[180]
In view of such facts as these, which might be multiplied almost
indefinitely, it will be seen that there is nothing impracticable or Utopian in
the proposal that there should be a regular medical examination of every
child, both before its admission to the school, and at stated, frequent periods
during the whole of its school life. In fact, there should be two inspections,
one medical, the other dental.[181] Every school should have a well-equipped
dispensary connected with it, and a dental laboratory, so that the children
could get prompt treatment. Provision should also be made to remove
physically weak and sick children from the crowded city schools to more
favorable surroundings with a view to preventing their degeneration, and
restoring them to health and vigor. While the responsibility for these things

should rest upon and be accepted by the municipality, with, possibly, some
subvention from the state, there seems to be no good reason why some of
our puzzled millionaires, who find the wise bestowal of their wealth an
increasingly difficult problem, should not contribute to the city treasuries
for that special purpose.

XI

When we come to deal with the child-labor problem, or, rather, with the
problem of its repression by legislative enactment, we are at once
confronted with a great difficulty that arises out of our political system
rather than out of industrial conditions. The child-labor problem is a
national one, but when we face the question of its solution, we are
handicapped by the division of the country into forty odd states, a division
which makes it almost impossible to deal with any of our great social and
industrial problems nationally upon uniform principles. The same difficulty
exists, of course, in connection with all our social and industrial problems.
We have legislation in the various states of a conflicting character, adding to
the complexity of the problem the legislators meant to solve. But because
this is conspicuously so in the case of child-labor legislation,—every
advance made in the Northern states serving as a premium upon reaction
and delay in the Southern states,—I have chosen to deal with it in this
connection.

WEIGHING BABIES AT THE MUNICIPAL
INFANTS’ MILK DEPOTS (GOTA DE
LECHE), MADRID

Up to the present time, the advocates of child-labor legislation have,
apparently, shrunk from making any definite proposals upon this important
question, while fully recognizing its tremendous importance. Sooner or
later, if ever our greatest social problems are to be intelligently dealt with,
the question of state rights will have to be fought out and the paramountcy
of the nation in all such matters established, and I can imagine no better
issue for raising that question than the legislative protection of children.
Here, again, we must turn for guidance and suggestion to the Old World. In
Germany they have had to face a similar problem, the difference being one
of degree only, and they have found a solution which might well be adopted
in the United States. Child labor in Germany is regulated partly by the
ordinances of the federal council and partly by the legislation of the
different states of the Empire. The federal enactments establish a minimum
standard for the whole Empire, and it is specifically provided that each state
may enact more stringent measures as it may desire.[182] It is difficult to see
why this principle could not be applied to the problem here in the United
States, giving us a uniform minimum standard of legislation throughout the
whole country. Such a law should prohibit the employment of any child
under fifteen years of age at any employment whatsoever, and the
employment of any child or young person under eighteen years of age in all
“dangerous occupations” specified by a federal commission. It would be
well, also, to insist upon a certain educational test up to eighteen years, the
test to be made in all cases by the school authorities.[183]
Coming to details for legislation within the states, it is perfectly obvious
that legislation necessary for, and suited to, big cities would be useless and
unsuited to the small towns and rural communities. In the case of
messengers and newsboys, for example, in a town of 10,000 inhabitants,
conditions are entirely different from those existing in a city of 50,000 or
100,000. What would be a perfectly harmless and unobjectionable
occupation in the former city becomes in the latter a serious menace to
health and morals. In the smaller community, the boy is under the
supervision of his parents, his employers, and many of the citizens who
know him personally. His paper business is not of the kind which takes him
out upon the streets as early as four or five o’clock in the morning and as
late as midnight, or after. The New York legislature, in April, 1903,
amended the law relating to children employed in the streets and public
places in cities of the first class, of which there are two—New York and

Buffalo. The amendment provided “that no male child under ten and no girl
under sixteen shall, in any city of the first class, sell or expose for sale
newspapers in any street or public place. No male child actually or
apparently under fourteen years of age shall sell or expose for sale unless
provided with a permit and a badge. No child to whom such a permit and
badge are issued shall sell papers after ten o’clock at night.” Such a law as
that might, I think, be applied to the smallest town in the country without
injustice to any one, but it is almost ridiculously inadequate to a great city.
The city ordinance of Boston is a good deal better, though it is also
inadequate to the needs of a great city. The ordinance provides that no child
shall work as a bootblack or newsboy unless he is over ten years of age, nor
sell any other article unless he is over twelve years of age. No minor under
fourteen years of age is allowed to sell or expose for sale, in any street or
public place, any books, newspapers, pamphlets, fuel, fruit, or provisions,
unless he has a minor’s license. These minors’ licenses are only granted
upon the recommendation of the principal of the school, or school district to
which the child belongs. Of this law, again, I should say that it might very
well be adopted as applying to all towns and villages in the United States up
to a certain size, but that, in view of the terrible menace to the health and
morals accompanying these occupations in our great cities, they should be
absolutely forbidden for children or young persons under eighteen years of
age. It should be borne in mind that the usual objection urged against child-
labor legislation—that it would inflict hardship upon the parents—scarcely
applies at all to these boys of the streets in our large cities. Most of them, it
has been shown over and over again, are not at all subject to parental
control, and contribute little or nothing at all to the support of their families.
[184]

It seems to me important also that, in the larger cities at least, and perhaps
generally, the present system of allowing boys and girls to work during the
vacation period should be abolished. The system not only robs the child of
the rest the vacation was intended to give it, but it is a fruitful source of
child labor. Many of those who go to work during the vacation periods
never return to school again. The parents become dependent upon the extra
earnings of the children in a surprisingly short time, and the children
themselves are naturally unwilling to lose their newly acquired freedom and
the extra pocket money which their labor entitles them to. The ideal system
would be to establish summer school camps, something like the school

colonies of Europe, in the country, where recreation amid healthful
surroundings could be combined with a certain amount of instruction.

FIVE O’CLOCK TEA IN THE COUNTRY

“Fresh Air Fund” children from tenement
homes.

XII
In this brief sketch of suggested remedial measures, I have confined myself
entirely to those measures which have been successfully tried elsewhere. I
have simply tried to correlate the constructive work in child saving which
has thus far been accomplished into something like a definite and
comprehensive policy. Discussion by earnest men and women who have
given the matters dealt with careful and patient study will, doubtless, show
the need of many changes, both in the direction of modification and of
extension. The important thing at the present time is to secure an intelligent
discussion of the whole problem of the duty of society to the child, and I
venture to hope that the foregoing may help in that direction. While I have
insisted mainly upon the legislative aspect of the problem, I am not
insensible of the importance of individual responsibility and effort. Much of
the child labor of to-day, for example, is due to the carelessness and
indifference of purchasers’ forever demanding “cheap” goods; and a
recognition on their part of all the monstrous wrong and tragedy hidden in
that word “cheap” would do much to diminish the evil.
We need in our modern life something of that spirit which prompted David
to pour out upon the ground the precious cooling draught his brave
followers, at the risk of their lives, brought him from the well by
Bethlehem’s gate. The water had been obtained at too great a cost, the
risking of human lives, and David could not drink it.[185] We need that spirit
to be applied to our social relations. Those things which are cheap only by
reason of the sacrifice, or risk of sacrifice, of human life and happiness are
too costly for human use. While it is to a large extent true that there is no
problem which depends more completely upon collective action, through
the channels of government, it is also true that there is abundant room for
well-directed private effort. The coöperation of all the constructive forces in
society, private and public, is necessary if the children are to be saved from
the evils by which they are surrounded, and the future well-being of the
race made possible and certain. Here is the real reconstruction of society—
the building of healthy bodies and brains to insure a citizenship free from
physical and moral decay, worthy of liberty and aspiring to brotherhood.

H. Charities.

I. See Appendices A and B.

J. Appendix A.

V
BLOSSOMS AND BABIES

There is an affinity between children and flowers. To me the sight of a
blossom often suggests a baby, and the sight of a baby often suggests a
favorite flower.
Many a mother singing lullabies to the baby at her breast calls it her
“blossom.”
And children, healthy children, are fond of flowers.
I once saw a boy of ten who didn’t know what a flower was. He knew what
each card in a pack was, and he wasn’t afraid of a policeman. But he was
afraid of a grassy and daisy-spangled field. London had destroyed for him
all sense of kinship with Nature.
But most children, even city children, love flowers. The country child loves
familiarly as it loves its own mother, but the city child loves and worships.
Yesterday I saw a group of little girls with their noses pressed flat against a
florist’s window. “My, ain’t they sweet!” they cried in chorus.
If only the flowers could know!
Some sympathetic and leisured ladies have formed themselves into a guild
to give such children as I saw at the florist’s window growing flowers to
tend and love. I do not know the ladies. We live in the same city, but in a
different world.
And yet we have some things in common, these good ladies and I. Perhaps
many things, but chief of all a love for children and flowers. In our different
worlds, so little alike, this love flourishes with equal freedom. My wife

loves blossoms and babies, too, but she is not a member of the guild. Its
meetings are not held in our world.
The guild got together 10,000 little children from the tenements of this great
city of New York. To each child a potted plant was given, in the hope that
its presence would brighten the home, and its care “refine” and
“spiritualize” the child.
Good, generous ladies of the guild!
And from each child was exacted the promise that upon a given date at the
end of a full year, the plant should be brought back and placed upon
exhibition. Ribbons were promised as prizes to those children whose plants
should be in the most flourishing condition.
The year passed. The day of the exhibition arrived. Richly gowned women,
calling themselves “patronesses,” were there. They went in luxuriously
equipped automobiles to smile and be condescending toward children who
went in rags and were hungry.
But not all the children to whom the year before they had given flowers
were there. Some of them had drooped during the summer and died like
flowers in parched ground.
And many of the plants were withered and dead, too.
What an exhibition, to be sure! Geraniums without fragrance. Geraniums
which a year ago bore deep, rich, green leaves and bright scarlet blossoms,
were now straggling and wretched, with pale-green—almost white—stems,
with poor, sickly-looking little leaves and with no flowers. And many a pot
containing only a withered and rotted stick, with maybe a little note,
“Please, ma’am, it died because our rooms is dark.”
Some of the richly gowned women wept as they looked at the long rows of
pitiful flowers, and at the long rows of withered and dead flowers.
Wept? I wonder why.
I wonder if they wept because they began to appreciate faintly how poverty
withers and oppresses all life; or only because the sight of so many dead
flowers, and flowers worse than dead, overwhelmed them? Or had they
heard the flowers tell their sad little histories?

For every one of the flowers had a story to tell to understanding hearts.
Yes, madam, that tall, withered geranium stick, which made you weep as
you remembered how beautiful its scarlet blossoms had looked the year
before, when you gave it to little crippled Polly with the flaxen hair, could
unfold a story, if you could but understand it. But it is a story of the
tenement, not of your world. And you cannot understand.
But little Polly (who doesn’t understand either) can tell you enough to give
you cause for tears. Real tears. Human tears.
I could tell you, for I know the tenement. It is in my world. But let Polly
tell.

“When youse gived us th’ prutty flow’r, leddy, I put ’er in our winder so’s
all th’ kids ’ud see from th’ street. An’ mamma wus so proud! An’ me little
baby bruver jes’ went wild, leddy. An’ when mamma wus washin’, he’d stay
so good and call out, so pert-like, ‘Putty! putty!’ An’ mamma said ‘twus a
blessin’, ’cause she wus able to do th’ washin’ when baby wus playin’.
“But when winter comed, leddy, yer flow’r an’ th’ leaves wus all dead like,
an’ comed off. An’ me mamma said ’twus th’ cold. An’ when I put ’er by th’
airshaft she said ’twus too dark. An’ so yer flow’r jes’ died like, an’ mamma
wus so cut up washin’ days, for me bruver wus teethin’ an’ there warn’t no
flow’r.
“But mamma said yer flow’r ’ud come up in th’ summer. So I jes’ kep’
waterin’, an’ when th’ fine days comed I put ’er in our winder again. An’ it
growed a bit, leddy, an’ mamma an’ me wus so glad! But ’twus allus
growin’ a bit an’ then dyin’ like, ’cause, mamma said, we didn’t git no sun
in our rooms. An’ I used to cry in th’ nights ’bout that flow’r, leddy!
“An’ when summer comed an’ folks wus sleepin’ ’pon their fire-’scapes, I
put yer flow’r outside an’ watered ’er ev’ry day. But when me little bruver
wus sick, an’ th’ doctor said he mus’ go to th’ country somewheres, yer
flow’r jes’ died an’ dried up like a stick, leddy. Me little bruver died, too,
an’ th’ doctor said he’d ’a’ lived if he’d gone into th’ country.
“I’m sorry, leddy, fur yer flow’r. P’raps ’twus ’cause it never went to no
country place. I tried me best, leddy, but—”

No, don’t reproach yourself, madam. You didn’t know. How could you
know, living in another world? It was really good of you to think of the
tenement children, and to give them your flowers.
Poor little children of the tenements! It was good of you to think of them.
Their homes are squalid, and flowers do make the home brighter. And their
little lives do need the refining and spiritualizing influence of flowers.
But neither the babies nor the blossoms can flourish there. They pine and
droop and die together. True, some of them live—babies and blossoms—but
how?
You are a woman and you love children and flowers. Tell me, did not the
pale, sickly children and the pale, sickly plants impress you as even more
saddening than the dead plants—the constant reminders of dead children?
Their slow, prolonged dying is more terrible than death to me. And I love
them both, children and flowers.
I honor your tears. They proclaim you to be possessed of a human heart.
But you are a misfit in your sphere. Your place is in our world.
You mean well, but your guild is only a toy. The problem is not to be solved
so easily. If you would help solve it, you must give something more than
plants. You must give yourself.
And this is the work which calls for your service and sacrifice:—
To bring blossoms and babies together where both can thrive. To restore the
child-sense of kinship with Nature, that to every child may come the joy of
understanding Nature’s eternal harmonies. To bring the freedom and beauty
and companionship of beast and bird, flower and tree, mountain and ocean,
stream and star, into the life of every child.

A LITTLE FISHERMAN

“Fresh Air Fund” child from a crowded
tenement district.

It is a big task, madam; flower shows and ribbons and tears will not fulfil it.
If you are serious, you will find more serviceable things to do.
Some there are, the despised builders of Humanity’s temples, who are
laboring to give this vast heritage to the children of all the world. They
build patiently, for they have faith in their work.
And this is their faith—that the power of the world springs from the
common labor and strife and conquest of the countless ages of human life
and struggle; that not for a few was that labor and that struggle, but for all.
And the common labor of the race for the common good and the common
joy will give blossoms and babies the fulness of life which sordid greed with
its blight makes impossible.
Are you of the faith of the builders? Are you a builder?

APPENDIX A
HOW FOREIGN MUNICIPALITIES FEED THEIR SCHOOL
CHILDREN

The problem of the underfeeding of children and its relation to the many
and complex problems of health, education, and morality has long been the
subject of careful study and experiment on the part of the most progressive
municipalities of several European countries.
At the present time it is one of the most vital issues in English politics.
When, in the early eighties, Mr. H. M. Hyndman and his few Social-
Democratic colleagues advocated the enactment of legislation compelling
the municipal authorities to undertake the feeding of the many thousands of
children in the public schools, the proposal was derided as “visionary.” To-
day, however, it has the earnest support of some of the ablest and most
influential members of the House of Commons. Men like Sir John Gorst,
ex-cabinet minister, on the Conservative side, and Mr. Herbert Gladstone,
on the Liberal side, are united in the advocacy of the Socialistic proposal.
Inquiries made by a Royal Commission, a Special Inter-Departmental
Committee, and several local investigating committees in cities like
London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen, have revealed a
most alarming state of affairs. In London, it has been estimated by the
leading authority, Dr. Eichholz, there are over 100,000 children of school
age who are chronically underfed. The reports from the other cities named
are equally serious. Public sentiment has been aroused to such an extent that
there seems to be little room for doubting that in the very near future,
Parliament will be compelled to enact some measure providing for the
feeding of children in the public schools. In the meantime, many thousands
of children are being fed by charitable organizations, working in

conjunction with the school authorities. In most cases the meals are sold to
the children at one cent per meal, with the understanding that if they are too
poor to pay, the meals will be given free of charge. It is astonishing to learn
that many thousands of the children are found, after careful investigation, to
be too poor to raise even one cent.
The experiment which has for some time been tried in Birmingham has
attracted widespread attention in sociological circles, not only in England,
but throughout Europe. This charity makes no effort whatever to deal with
any but the most destitute children, those that, in the words of the
Committee, are “practically starving.” The meals are kept scanty and
unattractive in order that no child will accept them unless compelled to by
sheer hunger. In addition to this safeguard, careful investigations of the
circumstances of the children are from time to time made. The meals are
given free of charge to the children, and the cost to the committee is less
than one cent per meal,—including the manager’s salary of $500 a year.
Yet, despite all the restrictions by which it is surrounded, his charity is to-
day feeding 2½ per cent of the total child population of the city.
The results of this feeding, poor and insufficient as it is, have been most
beneficial, both from a physical and mental point of view. Educationally, I
am informed by experienced teachers, the results have been most inspiring.
The children both learn and remember better than before. But it is felt upon
all sides, that this charity, admirable as it is in many ways, only touches the
fringe of the problem, and the demand is made for definite municipal
action, upon a much more generous basis, to take the place of private
philanthropy. It is difficult, in fact, practically impossible, to form any idea
of the extent of such private philanthropy throughout the country. Almost
every industrial centre has its “Free Dinner Association,” and in almost
every case the authorities find that private effort is inadequate, and that
there are many children who cannot afford to pay even one cent for a meal.
If the cent is insisted upon, they must go hungry. This is important to us in
America, because it has been the experience wherever similar experiments
have been tried here. In Chicago, for instance, at the Oliver Goldsmith
School, free dinners have been provided for a large number of children for
some time past. Here, as in England, it was found that a number of children
could no more afford a penny for a meal than they could afford to dine at
the Auditorium Hotel.

In Berlin, and several other German cities, children are fed in the public
schools upon a plan which provides that those must pay who can, while
those who cannot are given their meals free of charge at the public expense.
As a rule, however, these German experiments are confined to schools
situated in the poorest districts. As yet, the German authorities have not
gone so far as to provide meals for all children, irrespective of their
circumstances.
Much the same plan is followed in Reggia Emilia, San Remo, and some
other Italian cities, though the movement is more widespread in Italy than
in Germany. There is one Italian city, however, which has for some time
past gone very much farther than any other city that I know of, though his
Excellency, the Italian Ambassador at Washington, informs me that there
are other Italian cities which have adopted the same plan. Vercelli is a city
of about 25,000 inhabitants in the province of Novara, Piedmont. Its fame
chiefly rests upon its fine library, which contains a wonderful collection of
ancient manuscripts, some of them of fabulous value. In this little
municipality, then, the city fathers have for a long time provided free meals
for every child attending the public schools, and made attendance at the
meals absolutely compulsory as to the school itself! Every child must attend
school and partake of the meals, unless provided with a doctor’s certificate
to the effect that to attend the classes, or to partake of the school meals,
would be injurious to its health. Further, medical inspection is also
compulsory, and is accompanied by free medical attendance. The results
appear to have been most beneficial physically, and the educational gains
resulting from this intelligent, ordered, and regular feeding have been
enormous. It is unlikely, however, that such a system will be adopted in the
United States for many years to come, notwithstanding its many undoubted
advantages.
In Christiania, Trondhjem, and a number of other Norwegian cities, the
municipality provides all children who desire to avail themselves of it with
a nutritious midday meal, irrespective of their ability to pay. The entire cost
of the system is met by taxation. This has been felt by the Norwegian
authorities to be the simplest and best method of dealing with a grave
problem. It avoids the difficulties which inevitably arise when there is a
distinct class of beneficiaries created. “Where all are equally welcome none
are paupers,” they say. With its simple, homogeneous population, this direct

method is admirably adapted to Norway, however little suited it might be to
the needs of a cosmopolitan nation like ours. The free dinner is a part of
Norway’s admirable educational system, which abounds with features well
worthy of being copied. One of these is an arrangement whereby the school
children from the cities are taken, twice a month in winter, and three or four
times a month in the summer, on excursions into the country. The children
from the country districts are, in the same manner, taken into the cities. The
railroads have to carry the children at a purely nominal cost, which is also
met out of the public funds.
When I applied to one of the members of the Municipal Council of
Trondhjem for information as to the working of the school-meals system, he
replied: “You can best judge that, perhaps, from the fact that although the
scheme was bitterly opposed when first it was proposed by a small group of
radicals and Socialists, it is now unanimously supported by all sections.
There is now no demand whatever for its curtailment or abandonment.
Educationally, we have found that it pays. It is possible now to educate
children who before could not be educated because they were
undernourished. The percentage of ‘backward children’ has been greatly
reduced, notwithstanding that the test is more severe and searching.
Economically, we believe that we can see in the system the gradual
conquest of pauperism made possible.”
In Brussels, and other Belgian cities, good midday meals are provided for
all children who care to partake of them. A small fee, equal to about two
cents, is charged for each meal, but those children who cannot afford to pay
are given their meals just the same. There is also an excellent system of
medical inspection in connection with the schools. Every child is medically
examined at least once every ten days. Its eyes, ears, and general physical
condition are overhauled. If it looks weak and puny, they give it doses of
cod-liver oil, or some suitable tonic. The greatest care is taken to see that no
child goes ill shod, ill clad, or ill fed. There is also a regular dental
examination in connection with every school at regular periods.
In several Swiss towns the authorities for a long time granted substantial
subsidies to private philanthropic bodies, leaving to them the organization
of systems for providing school meals and the whole administration of the
funds. But this method proved to be very unsatisfactory. It led to abuses of
various kinds, and sectarian jealousies were aroused. Moreover, it proved to

be a most extravagant method, the cost being disproportionate to the results.
Consequently, the practice has been very generally abandoned, and most of
the municipalities have adopted the direct management of the school meals
as a distinct part of the school system. The plan generally followed is that of
Germany. Those who can must pay, but those who cannot pay must be fed.
But it is to France that we must turn for the most extensive and successful
system of school meals. Those who, particularly since the publication of
Mr. Robert Hunter’s book, Poverty, have advocated the introduction of
some system of school dinners in this country, have with practical
unanimity pointed to the French Cantines Scolaires as the model to be
copied. For that reason, and not less for its own interest, it may be worth
while giving a somewhat fuller account of the French system and its history.
The school-canteen idea is a development of an old and interesting custom,
borrowed by the French from Switzerland, the little land of so many
valuable experiments and ideals. The custom still obtains in Switzerland to
some extent, though not so extensively as formerly, of newly married
couples giving a small gift of money, immediately after the wedding
ceremony, to the school funds as a sort of thanksgiving for their education.
These funds are used to provide shoes and clothing for poor scholars who
would otherwise be unable to attend school.
In 1849, the time of the Second Republic, the mayor of the second
Arrondissement of Paris conceived the idea of introducing this Swiss
custom into Paris. Accordingly a fund was created, called the Swiss
Benevolent Fund. Before long the name fell into disuse, and we find the
caisse des écoles, or school funds, spoken of with no reference to their
Swiss origin or to their benevolent purpose. In the latter days of the Second
Empire, in April, 1867, the Chamber of Deputies passed a Primary
Instruction Law, which was drafted by M. Duruy, the Minister of Public
Instruction, providing that any municipal council might, subject to the
approval of the Prefect, create in the school districts under its jurisdiction a
“school fund.” The object of these school funds was to be the
encouragement of regular attendance at school, either by a system of
rewards to successful students, or material help in the shape of food,
clothing, or shoes to necessitous ones. These funds were to be raised by (1)
voluntary contributions; (2) subventions by the school authorities, the city,

or the state. Where deemed advisable, several school districts might unite in
the creation of a joint fund for their common benefit.
But the law of 1867, so far at least as the school funds were concerned, was
little more than a pious expression of opinion in favor of an idea. Three
years later the Franco-Prussian war broke out with its fury and devastation,
and, as war always does, set back all reforms. Not till 1874, three years
after the terrible bloodshed of the Paris Commune, was anything done.
Then the district of Montmartre and one or two others raised funds.
Montmartre is a district of some 200,000 inhabitants, which has always
been characterized by a strong radical or socialistic sentiment. From a
pamphlet issued by the managers of the school fund in that district, soon
after its establishment in 1874, it appears that they paid little attention to the
subject of giving prizes, deeming it of more importance to provide good
strong shoes and warm clothing for the poorer children. Next, it seems, they
undertook to provide outfits for some girls who had won scholarships at the
École Normale (Normal School), but were too poor to dress themselves
well enough to attend that institution. So, from the very first, the idea of
using the school funds to provide children with the necessities of life
prevailed. As a result there was soon developed a nucleus of bodies dealing
with poverty as it presented itself in the area of educational effort, and, what
is equally important, public opinion was being educated and accustomed to
the idea. It was, therefore, an easy transition to compulsory provision for
the feeding of children. In 1882 a law was passed compelling the
establishment of school funds in all parts of France, but leaving the
application of such funds still at the discretion of the authorities. So it
happens that the caisse des écoles are universal in France, but the cantines
scolaires are by no means so. The latter are, however, quite common
throughout France, and by no means confined to Paris. There is no official
record of the number of districts in which canteens have been established,
because the districts are not obliged to make returns showing how their
school funds are expended.
Since the state now makes education compulsory, and itself provides the
means of enforcing the law, the managers of the school funds do not have to
devise schemes to induce a regular attendance at school. They are therefore
free to use their funds in such manner as seems to them best calculated to
promote the health of the children. This they do mainly by the following

means: (1) Free meals, or meals provided at cost; (2) provision of shoes and
clothing where necessary; (3) free medical attendance; (4) sending weak,
debilitated, and sick children to the sea-side or the country, homes being
maintained, or in some cases subsidized for the purpose.
This last-mentioned feature of the French plan is most interesting. It
appears to have been adopted as a result of favorable reports upon the
working of a similar plan in Switzerland. The managers of the Montmartre
fund, for instance, purchased a great mansion with a magnificent park, and
to this delightful spot, not many miles from Paris, the children are sent in
batches and kept for two or three weeks at a time, much to their physical
betterment. There are several of these “school colonies” maintained by the
various school funds of Paris, and the City Government subsidizes them to
the extent of about $40,000 a year. The custom of providing a special grant,
or subsidy, in aid of these colonies is quite common throughout the whole
of France. The importance of these health-building institutions and the
provisions made for the medical care of sick children cannot be
overestimated. To give an idea of what is meant by medical care alone, it is
only necessary to refer to a recent inspection in the New York public
schools. Out of 7000 children examined, fully one-third were found to be
suffering from defective eyesight, while more than 17 per cent suffered
from defects so serious as to interfere with their chances of ever earning a
living, as well as with their general health. A similar investigation in the
public schools of Minnesota recently showed that there were 70,000
children with defective vision of the most serious nature, less than 10 per
cent of whom were provided with glasses. In a very large number of cases
the parents are simply too poor to buy glasses. Such children would, in
Paris, be provided with the necessary glasses and oculist’s care out of the
school funds. And there would be no suggestion of pauperism about it, no
humiliation; it is the child’s right. Medical inspection is thorough, and the
American witnessing it is very apt to feel ashamed of the farcical
“inspections” so common in his great and wealthy country.
For a long time, whenever food was given the managers of the school funds
simply issued coupons, or orders upon some restaurant, entitling the holder
to so many meals at a given cost. Usually some teacher or charitable worker
was deputed to accompany the child to see that it actually got what it was
intended to get. There was no system. But in 1877 the Prefect of the Seine

appointed a commission to study the question, raised by some Socialists, of
how good a warm meal might be provided in the schools at a low cost.
Most of the managers of the school funds treated the matter in a very
lukewarm, indifferent sort of way, and the commissioners reported that all
they had been able to ascertain was that good meals could be provided at an
average cost of twenty-five centimes (five cents) each. So the matter
dropped and was not again heard of until the trying winter of 1881. Then it
was suggested that, purely as an experiment, the children of school age
whose parents were receiving poor relief should be fed. The managers of
the Montmartre school fund at once volunteered to undertake the
experiment, and their example was soon followed by others. They did not
long confine the meals to the children of pauper parents, but at an early
stage of the experiment extended it so as to include all children. The
example of Montmartre was very soon followed, and within a year there
were fifteen canteens which had served between them 1,110,827 “portions.”
One-third of these “portions” were meat, each weighing twenty grammes,
one-third were bowls of soup, and the other third portions of vegetables,
these varying with the season. The number of portions paid for by the
children was 736,526, and the number given to children too poor to pay,
374,301. It should be said, perhaps, that a most searching investigation was
made to make sure of the inability of children’s parents to pay. The total
cost of the meals was 59,264 francs, of which amount the children paid
36,776 francs. After a while, when they had gathered experience in the
management of the canteens, the managers found that it was possible to
increase the size of the portions of meat and, at the same time, to cut down
expenses by nearly 50 per cent.
Nowadays the cost of a meal, consisting of a bowl of good soup, a plate of
meat, two kinds of vegetables, and bread ad libitum, is fifteen centimes
(three cents). That is the sum paid by the children, and I have been assured
over and over again by those in charge of various canteens that it is more
than sufficient to pay the cost. There would be a not inconsiderable profit if
all children paid for their meals, but that is not by any means the case.
When a child’s parents are too poor to pay the full price, and that fact has
been ascertained by the investigators, they are permitted to pay less, even as
little as two and a half centimes, or half a cent. The policy is to encourage
as many as possible to pay the full price, or such sums as they can muster.
But the very poor are never turned away, and in the poorer quarters

thousands of children are fed gratuitously, especially in winter, when in
Paris, as elsewhere, there is more distress due to sickness and interrupted
employment. In the poor quarter of Eppinette the children’s fees amount to
only about 20 per cent of the cost, while in the wealthier quarters they
amount to 75 or even 85 per cent. In an ordinary industrial district, like
Batignolles, the children pay about 45 per cent on a yearly average.
The Municipal Council of Paris makes an annual subsidy to cover the
natural deficit of the canteens. These deficits vary from year to year, but the
total subsidies required for the three years, 1901–1903, amounted to
$200,000. In connection with this question of financial management there
are two items worth noticing. One is the fact that private subscriptions to
the school funds show a great falling off now that in practice they have
become incorporated in the municipal government. It has not been found
that citizens are willing to contribute to the funds now that the city has
assumed responsibility for them. The other fact is that the expenditure in
poor relief on account of children is very much less. Children have always
served as the best of all reasons why poor relief should be given. Now,
when that plea is made by an applicant for relief, he or she is referred to the
school canteens, where the children are sure of being fed.
I fancy that I can hear some good reader’s mocking sneer at the idea of
being fed at a “common, socialistic trough.” Well, I can only say that,
having eaten meals in two or three of the schools, I much preferred them to
an average American restaurant “Regular Dinner” at twenty-five cents.
Everything is as neat and clean as it could possibly be, and the cooking—
well, it bears out the reputation of the French as the master-cooks of the
world. There is, apparently, no “graft,” and that is probably due in large part
to the fact that the meals are not confined to pauper children, who might,
alas! be badly served with impunity. From the first it has been one of the
chief aims of the authorities to keep the canteens free from the taint of
pauperism. The children of the well-to-do are encouraged to attend—not,
indeed, by direct solicitation, but by making the meals and the surroundings
as attractive as possible. And the plan succeeds very well. No child knows
whether the child next it has paid for its dinner or not. Small tickets are
issued, each child going through a little box-office, which only permits of
one being in at a time. If a little boy or girl claims to be too poor to pay for
a meal ticket, no questions are asked, the ticket is issued, and the child’s

name and address noted. By next day, or at most in two days, inquiries have
been made. If it is found that the parents can afford it, they are compelled to
pay the full price and to refund whatever sum may be due to the canteen for
the meals their child has had. If they are found to be really too poor to pay,
tickets are issued to the child for as long as it may be necessary. In such
cases the account is not charged against the parents. No distinction is made
between the tickets of those who pay and those who do not, and it is thus
practically impossible for the child who has paid for its meal to jeer at its
less fortunate, dependent comrade. Thus the self-respect of the poorest
children is preserved,—a most important fact, as every one who has studied
the problems of charitable relief knows.
Another highly important factor is the presence of the teachers at the meals.
Fully 90 per cent of the teachers use the canteens more or less regularly,
though there is absolutely no compulsion in the matter. They prefer to do so
on account of the cheapness and wholesome character of the meals. I have
myself sat down to a three-cent dinner in the company of a well-known
member of the Chamber of Deputies, a Professor of Languages, and several
teachers, each one of us having gone through the little box-office and
bought his ticket in exactly the same manner as the most ragged urchin. All
the children are provided with cheap paper napkins, and the presence of the
teachers is a sort of practical education in table manners. The canteen
serves, therefore, as a great educational and ethical force as well as a
remedy for one of the worst evils arising out of the national poverty
problem. The cantine scolaire is a great institution, well worthy of careful
study.
If, as the evidence gathered by Mr. Hunter seems to show, we have at least
two million underfed children in the public schools of the United States,
victims of physical and mental deterioration, the time must come, and the
sooner the better, when we must deal with the problem. Some of the
Utopians among us would doubtless like to see the all-embracing
compulsory system of Vercelli adopted, but it is most likely that we shall
find the French methods better suited to our needs.
Note.—I am indebted to the publishers of my Underfed School Children—The Problem and the
Remedy, Charles H. Kerr and Company, of Chicago, for permission to reproduce the foregoing paper
in this volume.

APPENDIX B
LETTER TO THE ROYAL ITALIAN AMBASSADOR AT
WASHINGTON FROM THE CHIEF OF THE BOARD OF
EDUCATION OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF VERCELLI,
ITALY, DESCRIBING THE SCHOOL-MEALS SYSTEM

Note.—I am indebted to the Italian Ambassador at Washington, his Excellency Mayor des Planches,
for permission to use the following letter. The translation was made for me by Mr. Teofilo Petriella,
of Cleveland, Ohio, an Italian journalist.—J. S.

Vercelli, September 13, 1905.

The school year, 1904–1905, just over, was the fifth since the school lunch
(refezione scolastica) was introduced in our City Elementary Schools, at the
complete expense of the Municipality.
The school lunch is distributed every day during the whole school year.
Limited, at the beginning, only to the city schools, it has been extended,
since the school year 1901–1902, to the suburban and rural schools.
To-day, therefore, all the male and female pupils of all the classes of all the
elementary schools, in both city and suburbs, take part in the lunch. There
are 65 schools with 91 classes, attended by an average of 2500 boys and
girls.
The lunch consists of bread with another victual (pane e companatico).
Each pupil gets a very good loaf of first quality wheat bread, weighing 140
grammes for the IV and V classes;[K] 120 grammes for the III class; and 100
grammes for the first two classes.

The victuals served with the bread are: On meat days, raw salt meat (salame
crudo) in rations of 14 grammes, alternated with cooked salt meat (salame
cotto) in rations of 20 grammes.[L] On fish days, cheese (either Bernesa or
Fontina alternated) in rations of 20 grammes. All is of first quality, and this
is daily ascertained by an inspection on the part of the Steward and the
Officer of the Board of Health.
Each ration costs from seven to eight cents of a franc.[M]
Every school morning each teacher, within 15 minutes of the
commencement of school (from 9 to 9.15), ascertains the number present by
roll-call, fills out an order in three copies, keeping for himself the one
attached to the stub and sending, by the ushers, the other two to the City
Steward.
The Steward keeps one of these duplicate copies for the office accounts and
registrations, while sending the other back to the teacher, along with the
requested rations in a closed basket.
The office of the Steward, after having received all the requests from all the
teachers, as above said, and after having classified same by degree, locality,
and number, sends the orders of purchase to the different supply-
contractors.
At 10 o’clock, in a suitable place, under the direction and supervision of the
City Steward, the baskets are made up, one for each class. The baskets,
once ready, are automatically padlocked—the teacher having the necessary
key—and forwarded by proper servants to the several suburbs, while others
take the rest, on pushcarts, to the city school buildings.
The School Trustees of the respective boroughs, the Principal and the
Steward in the City School, visit the different classes to make sure of the
regular and exact proceeding of the beneficent institutions.
So much, answering your favor of August 15th.
Truly yours,

The Mayor, per the Chief of the Board of Education, Cero Lucca.

K. Twenty-eight grammes equal one ounce avoirdupois. The children in
classes IV and V get loaves, therefore, weighing five ounces each.

L. Salame, here translated “salt meat,” is really the best kind of salted
dry sausage made of pork sirloin.

M. One U. S. dollar equals about 492 francs; 100 Italian cents equal one
franc, so that one cent of a franc equals about one-fifth of an
American cent.

APPENDIX C

I
THE QUESTION OF HEREDITY

In his testimony before the British Interdepartmental Committee on
Physical Deterioration, Dr. Alfred Eichholz, one of H. M. Inspectors of
Schools, a Doctor of Medicine, and formerly Fellow and Lecturer of
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, said:—
“I have drawn a broad distinction between physical degeneracy and
hereditary deterioration. The object of my evidence is to demonstrate the
range and the depth of degeneracy among the poorer population, and to
show that it is capable of great improvement—I say improvement purposely
even within the areas of the towns—and to show that there is a lack of any
real evidence of any hereditary taint or strain of deterioration even among
the poor populations of our cities. The point which I desire to emphasize is
that our physical degeneracy is produced afresh by each generation, and
that there is every chance under reasonable measures of amelioration of
restoring our poorest population to a condition of normal physique.
“I draw a clear distinction between physical degeneracy on the one hand
and inherited retrogressive deterioration on the other. With regard to
physical degeneracy, the children frequenting the poorer schools of London
and the large towns betray a most serious condition of affairs, calling for
ameliorative and arrestive measures, the most impressive features being the
apathy of parents as regards the school, the lack of parental care of children,
the poor physique, powers of endurance, and educational attainments of the
children.... While there are, unfortunately, very abundant signs of physical
defect traceable to neglect, poverty, and ignorance, it is not possible to
obtain any satisfactory or conclusive evidence of hereditary physical
deterioration—that is to say, deterioration of a gradual retrogressive
permanent nature, affecting one generation more acutely than the previous.
There is little, if anything, in fact, to justify the conclusion that neglect,
poverty, and parental ignorance, serious as their results are, possess any
marked hereditary effect, or that heredity plays any significant part in
establishing the physical degeneracy of the poorer population. In every case
of alleged progressive hereditary deterioration among the children

frequenting an elementary school, it is found that the neighborhood has
suffered by the migration of the better artisan class, or by the influx of
worse population from elsewhere. Other than the well-known specifically
hereditary diseases which affect poor and well-to-do alike, there appears to
be very little real evidence on the prenatal side to account for the
widespread physical degeneracy among the poorer population. There is,
accordingly, every reason to anticipate RAPID amelioration of physique so
soon as improvement occurs in external conditions, particularly as regards
food, clothing, overcrowding, cleanliness, drunkenness, and the spread of
common practical knowledge of home management. In fact, all evidence
points to active, rapid improvement, bodily and mental, in the worst
districts, so soon as they are exposed to better circumstances, even the
weaker children recovering at a later age from the evil effects of infant life.
(P. 20.)
“To discuss more closely the question of heredity may I in the first instance
recall a medical factor of the greatest importance: the small percentage of
unhealthy births among the poor—even down to the very poorest. The
number of children born healthy is even in the worst districts very great.
The exact number has never been the subject of investigation, owing largely
to the certainty which exists on the point in the minds of medical men—but
it would seem to be not less than 90 per cent.
“I have sought confirmation of my view with medical colleagues in public
work, e.g. public health, poor law, factory acts, education, and in private
practice in poor areas, and I have also consulted large maternity charities
and have always been strengthened in this view. In no single case has it
ever been asserted that ill-nourished or unhealthy babies are more frequent
at the time of birth among the poor than among the rich, or that hereditary
diseases affect the new-born of the rich and the poor unequally. The poorest
and most ill-nurtured women bring forth as hale and strong-looking babies
as those in the very best conditions. In fact, it almost appears as though the
unborn child fights strenuously for its own health at the expense of the
mother, and arrives in the world with a full chance of living a normal
physical existence.... The interpretation would seem to be that Nature gives
every generation a fresh start.”
[Q. 558. There is a fresh chance of getting rid of rickets with every
generation?]

“Yes; rickets, malnutrition, low height, poor weight, anæmia, and all the
other circumstances of neglected existence. It is from the moment of birth
that the sad history begins,—the large infant mortality, the systematic
neglect, the impoverishment of the constitution,—the resulting puny
material which is handed over to the school to be educated.
“... It seems clear that every generation receives its chance of living a good
physical life, and when to the fact of the large proportion of healthy new
births we couple the evidence of improving health and physique in children
who pass up the poorer elementary schools, it seems clear that we are not
dealing with a hereditary condition at all, but with a systematic postnatal
neglect by ignorant parents, and that heredity, if it makes for anything,
makes for recuperation, and so do the other social forces which are brought
into play in dealing with the poorer population.” (P. 31.)—Report of the
Committee, Vol. II.
Dr. Edward Malins, M.D., President of the Obstetrical Society of London
and Professor of Midwifery in the University of Birmingham, was
examined upon the same subject. From the Report of the Committee (Vol.
II, p. 136), the following extracts are taken:—
“3124. You have been good enough to attend here in consequence of certain
evidence that we received the other day in which it was stated by Dr.
Eichholz, on the authority of other medical men, that if people are going to
have children, they will have healthy children as though Nature were giving
every generation a fresh start, and he went on to say that healthy births were
about 90 per cent in the poor neighborhoods, and he suggested that we
should go to the London Obstetrical Societies to ascertain how far their
experience bore out this statement. What are you able to say on this point?
—What I have to say at the present time is more a matter of observation and
of opinion. We have not the figures at present to prove the accuracy of it,
but I think the testimony of experienced observers would be in accordance
with the views expressed by Dr. Eichholz, though perhaps not to such a large
extent. I should say that from 80 to 85 per cent of children are born
physically healthy.
“3125. Whatever the condition of the parents may be? Whatever the
condition of the mother may be antecedently.

“3126. And you think the deterioration sets in later?—I do, materially so.
The weight of children at birth as far as I know—and I have weighed a
great many—is generally not below the average; the average keeps up very
much no matter what the physical condition of the mother may be for the
time. Since receiving this information we have instituted at the Obstetrical
Society of London, in connection with Lying-in Charities and Hospitals in
London, a tabulated form for ascertaining these facts—what the weight of
children is at birth; their physical condition, and whether there is an
increase or otherwise during the time a woman is under observation. That
time is not very long, not more than 10 days or a fortnight generally.
“3127. Will you be able to furnish us with these facts when collected?—
Certainly. I will give the information later on, but I think there is a general
consensus of opinion, at all events irrespective of figures, which I am not
able to give, that the average is kept up no matter what the condition of the
mother may be.
“3128. That proves what you say in your précis,—that Nature intends all to
have a fair start?—Yes.”

II
MALNUTRITION

“One of the most striking things about children suffering from malnutrition
is their vulnerability. They ‘take’ everything. Catarrhal processes in the nose
(adenoids), pharynx, and bronchi are readily excited, and, once begun, tend
to run a protracted course. There is but little resistance to any acute
infectious disease which the child may contract. One illness often follows
another, so that these children are frequently sick for almost an entire
season. Their muscular development is poor, they tire readily, are able to
take but little exercise, and their circulation is sluggish. Mentally, they are
usually bright, often precocious. Many would be called nervous
children.”—The Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, by L. Emmet Holt,
M.D., LL.D., p. 231.
“General malnutrition is the commonest pathological feature of infant life.
Probably 50 per cent of all infants in this country (England) suffer from a
greater or less degree, and this large proportion is caused undoubtedly by
the extremely unsatisfactory methods of substitute feeding at present in
vogue. Illness, in the usually accepted sense of the word, is not present. No
specific disease can be diagnosed, and unless the indications are realized,
the degeneration is allowed to proceed until marasmus or some acute
disorder supervenes....
“Marasmus represents the extreme result of gradual and long-continued
malnutrition. Extreme wasting is the cardinal, and indeed only, specific
symptom. The term is not applicable to those cases where the wasting is the
result of exhaustion due to the incidence of specific disease, such, for
instance, as tuberculosis....
“The most striking and perhaps the commonest result of impaired nutrition
is the disease generally known by the name of rickets. Though some of its
most obvious features are those associated with changes in the osseous
system, those are by no means the only effects of the disease. Rachitis is the
expression of profound pathological changes occurring in practically all the
tissues of the body.

“No other disease illustrates so completely the effects of inadequate
nutrition. An infant nursed by its mother and receiving from her a sufficient
supply of adequate food, never contracts the disease, however
disadvantageous its environment may be in other respects.
“Defect in the diet is the prime and essential cause of rachitis; while, as
might be expected, the most advanced forms of the disease are to be seen
when the effects of inadequate food are intensified by unhygienic
environment....
“The effects of rachitis on the general constitution are extremely severe.
The relationship between the nutrition of the infant and the condition of the
child and adult has received but little attention. But there can be no doubt
that the defects of nutrition occurring in infancy are of paramount
importance in regard to the development of the adult. The cases of retarded
physical and mental development in the child and the adult are numerous at
the present time, and it is probable that their chief cause lies in defective
nutrition during the period of infancy.
“Rachitis is a disease attended with a high mortality with which it is never
credited, for the disease itself is seldom, if ever, fatal. In consequence of the
cachectic condition and the extreme debility associated with advanced
rachitis, the specific infectious diseases, such as measles, pertussis, and
others, are associated with a much higher mortality in these cases than in
others. Associated more or less closely with rachitis is a large class of
disorders, such as bronchitis, diarrhœa, laryngismus stridulous, convulsions;
these are attended with many fatal issues.”—The Nutrition of the Infant, by
Ralph M. Vincent, M.D., pp. 226 et seq.

III
MIDWIFERY AND DEATH
Dr. Thomas Darlington, President of the New York Board of Health, says:
Any movement for a proper regulation of midwives has my earnest support.
Under the laws of New York as they now exist there is no adequate
regulation. It is very easy for a woman to become a midwife in this city. She
is required, it is true, to come to the department of health with a certificate
from some school of midwifery, here or abroad, or to present statements
from two physicians as to her fitness and character, but the status of the
school does not enter into the consideration, and that it is not difficult to
obtain the indorsement from the two doctors is indicated by the great degree
of incompetency and carelessness to be found in the ranks of the 800
midwives of New York City. Under the laws now existing we have no right
to demand further proof of qualification. If the applicant meets the slight
requirements, we must put her down as a “registered midwife.” She brings
this phrase prominently into use in her solicitations for business in her
neighborhood, and it inspires confidence—a good deal more confidence
than it should. Thus are the people deceived by the laxity of the law. A
measure was introduced in the legislature, providing for a much stricter
supervision of midwives than is now the case. The bill had the support of
this department and of the medical societies of standing, and yet, because of
ignorance and indifference concerning the evils of the practice, it failed to
reach a place on the statute books. My own opinion is that the midwife
should, before being allowed to practise, undergo a schooling at least as
long and as careful as that of the trained nurse.
Dr. Henry C. Coe, Professor of Gynecology at Bellevue Hospital, New
York, and Chief Surgeon of Gynecology and Obstetrics at the General
Memorial Hospital, New York, says: Midwives are responsible for the
majority of cases sent to public hospitals. It is a sad commentary on the
mediæval customs of obstetrics that such facts, known to all doctors, should
be ignored by coroners. The remedy is plain,—to have educated midwives,
as in Germany.

Dr. J. Clarence Webster, of the Rush Medical College, Chicago, says: The
midwives are, as a class, uneducated and untrained. They are responsible
for the great majority of maternal deaths. Every gynecologist who works in
a large charity hospital can give evidence of the morbidity among poor
women resulting from infection where the attendant was a midwife. The
splendid results obtained by the lying-in hospitals and dispensaries, where
women are attended by skilled physicians and trained nurses, are chiefly
due to a rigid technique, the essential feature of which is cleanliness. It is a
disgrace to every city that the benefits of such institutions cannot be
extended to all poor women. Any surgeon who would dare to operate under
the conditions observed by midwives would be denounced not only by the
medical profession, but also by the enlightened laity. Yet the latter are
apparently indifferent to the work of the midwife, and allow her to carry on
her dangerous career uncensured. The extension of the benefits of scientific
obstetrics is chiefly due to the persistence and self-sacrifice of the medical
profession, but the doctors are unable, unaided, to do what remains to be
done.
Dr. Francis Quinlin, President of the New York County Medical
Association, says: All reputable physicians who have given the matter the
slightest consideration are of one mind in regard to the menace to life in the
ignorant work of the great majority of midwives. The New York County
Medical Association has let slip no opportunity to throw the weight of its
influence on the side of remedial measures. That little has been
accomplished so far is due to the fact that the midwife, as she exists to-day,
is a time-honored institution, difficult to uproot. Most midwives have
apparently no conception of the scientific cleanliness which is rightly
regarded by physicians as being of prime importance. The most ordinary
antiseptic precautions are ignored, with the result that, every day, women
who have been attended by midwives are brought to hospitals suffering
from blood-poisoning. In their habits of carelessness the midwives also
carry from one house to another the germs of infectious diseases. In the
interest of a host of poor mothers and of children whose lives are valuable
to the nation, I say that the practice of midwifery should come under a
much closer scrutiny of the law than is now the case.
Dr. Eleanor B. Kilham, Head of the Maternity Department of the Women’s
Infirmary, New York City, says: That much injury results to mothers and

children from the unrestrained practice of midwives there can be no doubt
in the mind of any physician who has been brought in contact with the
conditions. There is an opportunity here for an important reform, and I am
very glad to know that something is being done in this direction.
(These letters are quoted from Success, April, 1905.)

IV
MUNICIPALIZATION OF THE MILK SUPPLY AND THE
DANGERS OF STERILIZATION

“The real solution of the milk problem is not the supply of sterilized milk of
doubtful purity, but rather the supply of clean milk from sources above all
suspicion. The transport of milk from long distances under present
conditions, as to cooling, transit, etc., may render sterilization all important,
but the necessity for sterilization indicates the presence of avoidable organic
impurity, and to obtain a naturally pure milk supply is the really important
thing....
“If we municipalize water because the public health aspect is of such vital
importance, then from the same standpoint we should municipalize the milk
supply. We nearly all need milk—many live on it exclusively; its supply is
as regular as the water supply, and its distribution demands even greater
care for a longer time. The milkman calls more regularly than the postman
and the milk bill comes in as regularly as the rate card. Like the liquor
trade, the milk trade is a simple one, and the dividends of modern dairy
companies show that it is profitable....
“We should bear in mind that, although under present conditions of supply
any stringent enforcement of the most thorough sanitary regulations on
farmers, or any distinct raising of the legal minimum of fat in milk, would
certainly tend to raise the price of milk to the consumer, and any rise in
price would be most unfortunate, yet a high standard of production and
distribution is essential. The only way to get both low price and a better
article is by means of the enormous economies in distribution, cartage, etc.,
which would at once result from municipal ownership....
“Finally, it has been shown that all successful attempts to solve the question
have been those in which the aim has been other than the ordinary
commercial one, and those organizing the supply have been interested in the
public health, and in which there has been thorough organization on a large
scale both in supply and distribution. These facts alone show that the only
solution possible under modern conditions is that suggested by the

municipal ownership and control of the milk supply.”—F. Lawson Dodd,
M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., L.D.S., Eng., D.P.H., London, in The Problem of the
Milk Supply.
Sir Richard Douglas Powell, in his lecture to the Congress of the Sanitary
Institute at Glasgow, in July, 1904, said: “There can be no doubt that
scientifically conducted dairy farms on a large scale, with urban depots for
the reception and dispensing of pure milk in clean bottles at a fair price to
the poor, would pay, and would be a most laudable employment of the
municipal enterprise that is often devoted to matters of much less urgent
public interest and importance. Apart from the primary benefit of affording
a pure milk supply at a fair price, the object lesson to mothers and families
in food cleanliness would be beyond price.”
Mrs. Watt Smith, an expert employed by the British Medical Journal,
author of The Milk Supply in Large Towns, in her evidence before the
Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, condemned the
policy of the English Infants’ Milk Depots, saying: “The milk comes from
an uninspected source; they get it from a local dealer.... Then they sterilize
that milk to make it safe. It is like purifying sewage to make it into clean
water. It is not right.” Dr. Ralph M. Vincent also condemned the
sterilization process for the same reason, and, in addition, insisted that
sterilization impaired the nutritive value of the milk, causing at least one
specific disease, scorbutus.—Report of the Committee, Vol. II, Minutes of
Evidence.
Dr. George W. Goler, whose work in Rochester has been so much referred
to, says: “For two more years the milk was Pasteurized, though
considerable trouble was had with sour milk and in finding a man to furnish
reasonably clean milk. After the first year four stations in all were required
for the needs of four quarters of the city. Then, in 1899, we established our
central station on a farm, and instead of Pasteurizing milk, with all its
contained filth and bacteria, we strove to keep dirt and germs out of the
milk, and began to sterilize all of the utensils, bottles, etc., and to put out
milk that was clean. Clean milk, or milk approximately clean, having no
more than 20,000 bacteria per cubic centimeter needs no application of heat
to render it fit food for babies. Heat applied to milk alters it, makes its curd
tougher and more difficult to digest, often gives rise to indigestion,
diarrhœa, or constipation in the infant, and, further, the application of heat

to milk in the operation of Pasteurizing or sterilizing leads people to think
they may cure a condition that is more easily prevented by care in the
handling of milk used for food.”—“But a Thousand a Year,” reprinted from
Charities, August 5, 1905.

V
A COMMISSIONER OF CHARITIES ON CHILD LABOR

“The objection that is offered most frequently, and perhaps with most effect,
to further restriction of child labor, is the alleged fact that in a great many
instances the earnings of these little children are needed to supplement the
incomes of widows, of families in which the husband and wage-earner may
be either temporarily or permanently or partially disabled, and that without
the small addition which the earnings of these little boys and girls can bring
in, there would be suffering and distress. It would be easy, I think, to
overestimate the extent to which that is true.... So we should not admit that
that side is more serious than it is, but do let us cheerfully, frankly, gladly
add that there would be many cases in which the proposed legislation (for
the restriction of child labor) would deprive many families of earnings from
their children, and that we propose ourselves to step into the breach and
provide that relief in good hard cash that passes in the market.... If larger
means are necessary to support these children so that they need not depend
on their own labor, by all means let us put up the money and not push the
children for a part of their support before the time when they should
naturally furnish a part of their support.... In the long run it is never cheap to
be cruel or hard. It is never wise to drive a hard bargain with childhood.”—
Extract from an address by Homer Folks, Commissioner of Charities, New
York.

NOTES AND AUTHORITIES

I. The Blighting of the Babies

1. The Theory and Practice of Infant Feeding, by Henry Dwight Chapin,
A.M., M.D.

2. Registrar General’s Report, 1886, pp. 32–126.

3. Population Française, Levasseur, vol. ii, p. 403.

4. Tenement Conditions in Chicago, by Robert Hunter, pp. 154–157.

5. Poverty, by Robert Hunter, p. 144.

6. The Diseases of Children, by Henry Ashby, M.D., Lond., and G. A.
Wright, B.A., M.B., Oxon., p. 12.

7. Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social
Science, 1882, p. 388.

8. Mulhall’s Dictionary of Statistics, p. 133.

9. Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration. Evidence.

10. Idem. Evidence of Dr. Eichholz and Others.

11. Parliamentary Paper [Cd. 1501] containing a Memorandum by Sir
William Taylor, the Director-General, Army Medical Service.
See also a letter to the London Times, February 2, 1903, by General F.
Maurice.

12. Tenement Conditions in Chicago, p. 157.

13. Information received from the Commissioner of Health.

14. Trans. Nat. Ass’n for the Promotion of Social Science, 1882, p. 387.

15. The Nutrition of the Infant, by Ralph M. Vincent, M.D., p. 246.

16. Diseases of Children, Ashby and Wright, p. 228.

17. Idem., pp. 44–45.

18. Figures quoted from a newspaper report of an interview with Mr.
Straus.

19. See the Article, But a Thousand a Year, in Charities, August 5, 1905;
Infants’ Milk Depots and Infant Mortality, by Dr. G. F. McCleary;
The Problem of the Milk Supply, by Dr. Lawson Dodd, etc.

20. Report Interdepartmental Committee, vol. ii, p. 442; Vincent, op. cit.,
pp. 268 et seq.

21. Report of the Health of the City of Birmingham, 1902, by Dr. Alfred
Hill. Quoted by Vincent, op. cit., p. 272.

22. Vincent, op. cit. Also Testimony before the Interdepartmental
Committee contained in the Report Evidence.

23. Mass and Class, by W. J. Ghent, p. 182.

24. From the newspaper report of an interview referred to above.

25. A Noviciate for Marriage, by Mrs. H. Ellis.

26. Twentieth Annual Report of the N. Y. Bureau of Labor Statistics, p.
61.

27. Charities, April 1, 1905.

28. See, e.g., the Fortnightly Review for 1876, the Contemporary Review
for 1882, and the various Transactions of the National Society for the
Promotion of Social Science.

29. Methods of Social Reform, by W. S. Jevons.

30. Report of the Proceedings of the Third International Congress for the
Welfare and Protection of Children,—Speech of Mr. Hartley, B. N.
Mothersole, M.A., LL.D., p. 166.

31. Idem.
Also the Transactions of the Nat. Soc. for the Promotion of Social
Science, p. 384.

32. Primitive Folk, by Élie Reclus, p. 35.

33. See the Comparative Summary of Legislation upon this Subject in
Dangerous Trades, edited by Prof. T. Oliver, pp. 53, 54.

34. Vide Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration and the frequent discussions in the British Press.

35. Transactions of the National Society for the Promotion of Social
Science, 1882, p. 363.

36. Idem., p. 382.

37. Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich, 1904.

38. Diseases of Children, by Ashby and Wright, pp. 14 et seq.

39. See, e.g., Infants’ Milk Depots and Infant Mortality, by G. F.
McCleary.

40. Report on Les Crèches, by Dr. Eugène Deschamps, Congrès
International d’Hygiene et de Démographie à Paris, 1900.
Other works consulted include: How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob A.
Riis; The Battle with the Slum, by the same author; The Diseases of
Infancy and Childhood, by L. Emmet Holt, M.D., LL.D.
System of Medicine, edited by Clifford Allbutt.
Antenatal Pathology, by J. W. Ballantyne, M.D.

The Study of Children, by Francis Warner, M.D., London, F.R.C.S.,
F.R.C.P.
The Nervous System of the Child, by the same author.
In the preparation of the text free use has also been made of the files of
the following journals: British Journal of Children’s Diseases; British
Medical Journal; New York Medical Journal, Archives of Pediatrics;
Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, etc.

II. The School Child

41. The Handwriting on the Wall, by J. C. Cooper, p. 222.

42. Education and the Larger Life, by C. Hanford Henderson, p. 85.

43. Poverty, by Robert Hunter, p. 11.

44. Hunter, op. cit., p. 216.
See also Mr. Hunter’s article, The Heritage of the Hungry, in the
Reader Magazine, September, 1905.

45. Address to the National Educational Association, September 24,
1904, as reported in the newspapers.

46. See Dr. Warner’s excellent little books, Mental Faculty; The Study of
Children; The Nervous System of the Child, for a discussion of
nervous signs and the whole subject of child health.

47. The tendency of children to give such answers has been frequently
noted and pointed out by foreign investigators. In general, I think it
can safely be said that children are prone to hide their poverty and to
exaggerate in an opposite direction.

48. Report to State Board of Charities. R. Hunter, The Heritage of the
Hungry.

49. The Hunger Problem in the Public Schools—What the Canvass of
Six Big Cities Reveals. Special correspondence in the Philadelphia
North American, May 21, 1905.

50. Idem.

51. Idem.

52. Idem.

53. Testimony before the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration, the Royal Commission on Physical Training
(Scotland), Reports of the London School Board on Underfed
Children, etc.

54. Quoted by G. Stanley Hall, in Adolescence.

55. Idem.

56. Final Report (1882–1883) of the Anthropometric Committee
appointed by the British Association in 1875.

57. The figures quoted are taken from an excellent little pamphlet, The
Cost of Child Labor,—A Study of Diseased and Disabled Children,
published by the Child Labor Committee of Pennsylvania.

58. Poverty,—A Town Study, by B. S. Rowntree.

59. In the pamphlet, The Cost of Child Labor, above referred to.

60. Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, 1877.

61. Growth of St. Louis School Children, by William T. Porter. Report of
the Academy of Science of St. Louis, vol. vi, pp. 263–380.

62. Special Report of Anthropological Investigation of 1000 white and
colored Children of the New York Juvenile Asylum, by Dr. Hrdlicka.

63. Report of the Royal Commission on Physical Training (Scotland), p.
30.

64. State Maintenance, by J. Hunter Watts, p. 10.

65. Adolescence, by G. Stanley Hall.

66. Feeble-minded Children in the Public Schools, by Will S. Monroe.

67. The Cost of Child Labor, pamphlet quoted above.

68. G. Stanley Hall, op. cit., vol. i, p. 401.

69. A Study in Youthful Degeneracy, by George E. Dawson, in the
Pedagogical Seminary, iv, 2.

70. American Journal of Psychology, October, 1898.

71. Dr. Eichholz, Evidence before the Interdepartmental Committee on
Physical Deterioration.

72. Reported in the New York Times, May 10, 1905.

73. Overpressure in Elementary Schools, by James Crichton-Browne,
M.D., LL.D., F.R.S., printed by Order of the House of Commons.

74. See Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, February, 1893.

75. Hansard’s Debates, 1883.

76. Justice, Organ of the Social Democratic Federation, vol. i, No. 35,
September 13, 1884.

77. Letter to the London Times, September 26, 1901.

78. Report of the Committee; Evidence, p. 484.

79. Idem.

80. Beretning om Kristiania folkeskolevæsen,—various yearly reports.

81. School Luncheons in the Special Classes of the Public Schools—A
Suggestive Experiment, by Elizabeth Farrell, in Charities, March 11,
1905.
Undernourished School Children, by Lillian Wald, a letter in
Charities, March 25, 1905.

82. Hungry Children in New York Public Schools, by E. Stagg Whitin, in
the Commons, May, 1905.

Hungry Children are Poor Scholars, an unsigned article in the Official
Journal of the Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers
of America, May, 1905.

83. See American Charities, by Professor Warner, for a careful statement
of this point.

84. Sixth Biennial Report of the Board of Control and Superintendent of
the Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected
Children.
Other works consulted include: Mentally Deficient Children: Their
Care and Training, by George E. Shuttleworth; The History of the
Treatment of the Feeble-minded, by Walter E. Fernald; After Bread,
Education, by Hubert Bland, 1905; Official Report of the National
Labor Conference on the State Maintenance of Children, held at the
Guildhall, London, Friday, January 20, 1905, Sir John Gorst, M.P.,
Presiding; Report of Investigations into Social Conditions in Dundee,
Scotland—The Medical Inspection of School Children; Report to the
Municipal Council of Paris on the Annual Expenditures in
Connection with the Cantines Scolaires; Various Reports of the U. S.
Commissioner of Education; Reports of the Department of Education
in many American and Foreign Cities.
The Pedagogical Seminary.
Special Reports on Educational Subjects, issued by the Board of
Education (England).

III. The Working Child

85. Politics, by Aristotle, A. IV, 4.

86. Architecture, Industry, and Wealth, by William Morris, p. 138.

87. Idem.

88. Farfolloni de gli Antichi Historici, by Abb. Lancellotti (Venice,
1636), quoted by Karl Marx in Capital, English edition, p. 427.

89. Marx, op. cit., p. 428.

90. A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles round
Manchester, by Dr. Aikin. Quoted by R. W. Cooke-Taylor, The
Factory System and the Factory Acts, p. 17.

91. Cooke-Taylor, op. cit., gives the real name of “Alfred” as Samuel
Kydd, a barrister-at-law.

92. Memoirs of Robert Blincoe, N.D.
Cooke-Taylor, Modern Factory System, pp. 189–198.
Annals of Toil, by J. Morrison Davidson, p. 262.
Industrial History of England, H. de B. Gibbins.

93. H. de B. Gibbins, op. cit., pp. 178–181.

94. Life of Robert Owen, Written by Himself, vol. i, xxvi, pp. 57 et seq.

95. H. de B. Gibbins, op. cit., p. 181.

96. Cooke-Taylor, The Factory System and the Factory Acts, p. 55.

97. Idem.

98. H. de B. Gibbins, op. cit., p. 181.

99. Hansard, 1832.

100. The whole poem is given in Mr. H. S. Salt’s little anthology, Songs of
Freedom, p. 81.

101. Report on the Ten Hours Bill. J. Morrison Davidson, op. cit., p. 268.

102. Robert Hunter, Child Labor in New York, Being a Report to the
Governor of New York.

103. Child Labor Legislation—A Requisite for Industrial Efficiency, by
Jane Addams, in the Annals of the American Academy, May, 1905, p.
131.

104. Problems of the Present South, by Edgar Gardner Murphy, p. 313.

105. Quoted in Charities, August 26, 1905.

106. Illiteracy Promoted by Perjury. A pamphlet issued by the
Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee.

107. U. S. Census, vol. ii.

108. Illiteracy Promoted by Perjury, p. 3.

109. U. S. Census, Occupations.

110. E. G. Murphy, op. cit., p. 110.

111. Annals of the American Academy, May, 1905, p. 21.

112. Jane Addams, op. cit., p. 131.

113. E. G. Murphy, op. cit., p. 143.

114. Idem., p. 103.

115. An address to the Manufacturers of Cotton, delivered at Glasgow, by
Robert Owen, 1815.

116. U. S. Census, vol. ix.

117. Idem.

118. Report (unpublished) to the Child Labor Committee, by Owen R.
Lovejoy.

119. Child Labor Legislation. Schedules of Existing Legislation.
Handbook of National Consumers’ League, compiled by J. C.
Goldmark and Madeline Wallin Sikes.

120. The Needless Destruction of Boys, by Florence Kelley, Charities,
June 3, 1905.

121. Boys in the Glass Industry, by Harriet M. Van Der Vaart, the
Churchman, May 6, 1905.

122. Owen R. Lovejoy, report quoted.

123. Florence Kelley, op. cit.

124. The Anthracite Coal Communities, by Peter Roberts, Ph.D., p. 177.
Poverty, by Robert Hunter, p. 237.

125. Working Children in Pennsylvania—Pamphlet issued by the Child
Labor Committee of Pennsylvania.

126. Child Labor in New York, by Robert Hunter, p. 5.

127. Idem.

128. U. S. Census, vol. viii, Manufactures, Part II.

129. From a press report of a lecture at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N.Y.,
by Margaret Dreier (Mrs. Raymond Robins).

130. From an address by Mrs. Florence Kelley, delivered at the Annual
Meeting of the Consumers’ League, January, 1904. Published in the
Report of the Consumers’ League of New York for the year ending
December, 1903.

131. Transactions Illinois Child Study Association, vol. i, No. 1.

132. Labor Problems, by Thomas Sewall Adams, Ph.D., and Helen L.
Sumner, A.B., pp. 62 et seq.

133. “In a recent investigation made by the Minnesota Bureau of Labor, it
was found that, of the few wage-earners considered, the boys under
sixteen had twice as many accidents as the adults, and the girls under
sixteen thirty-three times as many accidents as the women.”—Adams
and Sumner, op. cit., p. 63.

134. The Cost of Child Labor—pamphlet issued by the Child Labor
Committee of Pennsylvania, p. 31.

135. Children in American Street Trades, by Myron E. Adams, in the
Annals of the American Academy, May, 1905.

136. Child Labor—The Street, by Ernest Poole.
Child Labor—Factories and Stores, by Ernest Poole.
Myron E. Adams, op. cit.

137. Ernest Poole, op. cit.

138. Idem.

139. Unprotected Children—pamphlet issued by the Child Labor
Committee of Pennsylvania.

140. See also Child Labor in New Jersey, by Hugh F. Fox, in Annals of the
American Academy, July, 1902.

141. Jane Addams, op. cit., p. 131.

142. The Minotola Strike, by the Hon. John W. Westcott, in Wilshire’s
Magazine, September, 1903.

143. Hannah R. Sewall, op. cit., p. 491.

144. Child Labor in Southern Industry, by A. J. McKelway, in Annals of
the American Academy, May, 1905, p. 433.

145. The Economics of Socialism, by Henry M. Hyndman, p. 80.

146. See, for instance, Poverty, by Robert Hunter, p. 244; Mrs. Sidney
Webb, in The Case for the Factory Acts, etc.

147. History of Coöperation, by George Jacob Holyoake, vol. i, p. 213.

148. Mrs. Sidney Webb, op. cit.

149. Report of the Consumers’ League of the City of New York, 1903, p.
21.

150. The Children of the Coal Shadow, McClure’s Magazine, 1902.

151. The Churchman, August 5, 1905.

152. The Operation of the New Child Labor Law in New Jersey, by Hugh
F. Fox, in Annals of the American Academy, May, 1905.
Other works consulted include:—
Report of the Royal Commission on Labor (England); Report of the
Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration.
Hull House Maps and Papers.
Reports of the Industrial Commission (especially vol. xix).
Dangerous Trades, edited by Professor T. Oliver.
The Effects of the Factory System, by Allen Clarke.
Various Reports of the Different Bureaus of Labor, etc.

IV. Remedial Measures

153. The Diseases of Children, by Henry Ashby, M.D., and G. A. Wright,
B.A., pp. 14 et seq.

154. Idem.
See also the article on The Shameful Misuse of Wealth, by Cleveland
Moffett, in Success, March, 1905.

155. See, e.g., the letters from several leading physicians on this subject in
Success, April, 1905 (Appendix C).

156. Cleveland Moffett, op. cit.

157. Idem.

158. Hygiène de la Femme Enceinte. De la Puericulture Intrauterine, par
Dr. A. Pinard. Xe Congrès International d’Hygiène, etc., Paris, 1900,
p. 417.
Factory Employment and Childbirth, by Adelaide M. Anderson, in
Dangerous Trades, edited by Professor Thomas Oliver.
Is the High Infantile Death-rate due to the Occupation of Married
Women? by Mrs. F. J. Greenwood, Sanitary Inspector for Sheffield.
Reprinted from the Englishwoman’s Review, 1901.
In Germany, it is worth remembering, the working woman who is
compelled to cease work owing to the birth of a child receives a sum
equal to half her weekly wage.—See Infant Mortality and Factory
Labor, by Dr. George Reid, in Dangerous Trades, p. 89.

159. Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration.

160. The Social Unrest, by John Graham Brooks, p. 292.

161. Vide leaflet issued by the Child Labor Committee of New York.

162. How to Save the Babies of the Tenements, by Virginia M. Walker, in
Charities, August 5, 1905.

163. Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration, vol. ii, pp. 442–450.
The Nutrition of the Infant, by Ralph M. Vincent, M.D.
The Problem of the Milk Supply, by F. Lawson Dodd, M.R.C.S.
Infantile Mortality and Infants’ Milk Depots, by G. F. McCleary,
M.D.

164. Projet pour le Contrôle Hygiènique de l’Approvisionnement du Lait
Municipal, by George W. Goler, M.D.
But a Thousand a Year, by George W. Goler, M.D., reprinted from
Charities.

165. The School Child, the School Nurse, and the Local School Board, by
Elsie Clews Parsons, Charities, September 23, 1905.

166. Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration, vol. i, p. 47.

167. Idem.

168. The figures are quoted from a speech by Mr. Homer Folks, at the first
annual meeting of the Association for the Study and Prevention of
Tuberculosis, held at Washington, D.C., May 18–19, 1905.

169. Virginia M. Walker, op. cit.

170. Idem.

171. Ralph M. Vincent, M.D., op. cit., also evidence given before the
Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration.
Virginia M. Walker, op. cit.

172. This paragraph is taken, with slight changes, from my paper on The
Problem of the Underfed Children in our Public Schools, in the
Independent, May 11, 1905.

173. See the Official Report of the National Labor Conference on the State
Maintenance of Children, Held at the Guildhall, London, etc.

174. See, for instance, the evidence given by Mr. John Tweedy, F.R.C.S.
and L.R.C.P., President of the Royal College of Surgeons and of the
Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom, before the
Interdepartmental Committee.

175. Physical Efficiency in Children, by Sir James Crichton Browne, in
the Report of the International Congress for the Welfare and
Protection of Children, London, 1902.
See also the Reports of the Interdepartmental Committee and the
Royal Commission on Physical Training (Scotland), for descriptions
of the systems adopted in various European cities.
The Medical Inspection of School Children, by W. L. Mackenzie,
M.A., M.D.
For a very suggestive, but technical, account of a system of medical
inspection adopted in Dundee, Scotland, see the Report of
Investigation into Social Conditions, published by the Dundee Social
Union,—Part I, The Medical Inspection of School Children.

176. The Heritage of the Hungry, by Robert Hunter.

177. Special Reports on Educational Subjects, issued by the (English)
Board of Education.

178. Royal Commission on Physical Training (Scotland), Report.

179. Idem.

180. Poverty, by Robert Hunter, p. 259.

181. The importance of attending to the teeth of school children has been
sadly overlooked in the United States. In some of our cities, notably
Rochester, N.Y., the attention of the medical inspectors of the schools
has been specially directed to the teeth, with important results. See,
for instance, the paper by Dr. Goler on Some General Tuberculosis
Problems, in the New York State Journal of Medicine, August, 1905.

182. Bulletin of the U. S. Bureau of Labor, No. 59, p. 309.

183. The Field before the National Child Labor Committee, by Homer
Folks, in Charities, October 1, 1904.
Child Labor and the Schools, by Florence Lucas Sanville, in
Charities, August 26, 1905.
Illiterate Children in the Great Industrial States, by Florence Kelley,
reprinted from Charities.

184. Child Labor.—The Street, by Ernest Poole.
Children in American Street Trades, by Myron E. Adams, in the
Annals of the American Academy, May, 1905.
The Employment of Children, with Special Reference to Street
Trading, by Robert Peacock, Chief Constable of Manchester
(England). A Paper read at the Third International Congress for the
Welfare and Protection of Children, London, 1902.—Report, pp.
191–202.
See also the evidence given by various witnesses before the Royal
Commission on Physical Training (Scotland).

185. Education and the Larger Life, by C. Hanford Henderson, p. 142.

INDEX

A
Aberdeen, underfed school children in, 272.
Addams, Jane, 148, 196.
Adenoids, 107, 296.
Adulteration of Food, 85.
Aikin, Dr., 130.
Airy, Dr., H.M.I., 112, 113.
Alabama:
Child Labor Committee, 142.
Child Labor in, 148, 149.
Alcoholzehntel (Switzerland), 254.
“Alfred,” History of the Factory Movement, 131.
Allentown, Pennsylvania, 183, 184.
Anæmia, 5, 83, 294.
Annual Register, 1792, 135.
Apprentices, pauper, 131–140.
Aristotle, 100, 125, 126, 127.
Artificial flower making, 146, 172, 173, 177.
Ashby, Dr. Henry, 18.
Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, 233.

Asthma, 164.
Asylums:
New York Foundling, 22.
New York Juvenile, 187.
Furnishing Child Labor, 198.
Atrophy, 21.
Augusta, Georgia, 150.
Australia:
Death-rate reduced in, 245, 247.
Women nurse inspectors in, 244.
B
Back Bay, Boston, 7.
Backward Children:
Become child laborers, 103.
Condition traceable to poor nutrition, 108, 278
Experiments in feeding, 115–116.
Improvement of, when properly fed, 276.
Injurious influence of, on other children, 102.
Investigation of, in California, 101–102.
Number of, in United States, estimated, 102.
Poor physique of, 100–101.
Results of feeding in England, 111, 273.
Results of feeding in France, 115.
Results of feeding in Norway, 115, 276.
Special classes for, 101.
Tend to become criminals and paupers, 104, 105.
Baillestre, Dr., 21 n.
Ballantyne, Dr., 9 n.
Beach, Dr. Fletcher, 108.
Beading slippers, 172.
Belgium:
Meals for school children in, 276.

Medical inspection in schools, 253, 276, 277.
(See also Brussels.)
Belgravia, London, 5.
Berlin:
Infant death-rate reduced in, 247.
School meals in, 274.
School sanatoria in, 255.
Still-births registered in, 52.
Bethnal Green, London, 5.
Beyer, Professor, 100.
Biddeford, Maine, 153.
Birmingham, England:
Board of Education, 112.
Feeding of school children in, 112, 113, 272, 273.
Infant mortality in, 26.
Blincoe, Robert, quoted, 132.
Blood poisoning, 223.
Board of Charities, New York, 83.
Board of Education, Birmingham, England, 112, 113.
Board of Education, New York, 65, 66, 73.
Board of Education, Sheffield, England, 110.
Board of Health:
As educational agency, 244.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, 39.
New York City, 299.
Rochester, New York, 28.
Board of Regents, 225.
Bootblacks, 184.
Boston:
Child-labor legislation in, 259.
Death-rate in, 7.

Physical condition of poor children in, 98.
Underfed school children in, 85, 89.
Bowditch, Dr., 98.
Bowel disorders caused by malnutrition, 82.
Brassey, Thomas, 201.
British Anthropometric Committee, 96.
British Interdepartmental Committee:
Continuation classes recommended by, 241.
Dr. Airy’s evidence before, 112–133.
Dr. Vincent’s evidence before, 235.
Heredity considered, 291–294.
Obstetrical statistics, 8–9.
Regulations concerning the employment of married women, 230.
British Medical Association, 108.
Bronchitis:
Candy making predisposing to, 179.
Infant mortality from, 21.
Rachitis predisposing to, 15, 17, 298.
Browning, Mrs., 57.
Brussels:
Medical examination of school children, 253, 254, 277.
School dinners in, 276.
Buffalo, New York:
Child-labor legislation in, 259.
Underfed school children in, 83, 84, 85.
Bumbledom, British, 131, 134, 150.
C
Caisse des écoles, 278–286.
California, backward school children in, 101, 102.
Canning Factories:
In Maine, 170.