chusetts Committee on Technical Education of 1906 found eighty percent of the children from fourteen to sixteen years of age at work employed in unskilled industries. These years are "wasted years" so far as the actual producing value of the child is concerned and so far as increasing his industrial and producing efficiency.20 Mrs. Florence Kelley describes very vividly a can factory near Chicago where little boys were once employed fourteen hours a day to pick out defects in the lids of tomato cans. She tells how she once started to show this same factory to a writer and student of social conditions (Henry D. Lloyd); but they never reached the place because on the way they met a man of the writer's own age who had spent twelve years of his life sitting on the same stool watching an interminable procession of cans.

The work of making cans is not uncommonly monotonous. "Our industry tends all the time to that standard of work, to such complete perfection of machinery that the work of the human observer of the machine is simply to sit passive and use the eye to discern occasional defects and pick out occasional defective products. The human being in that way becomes a truly monstrous byproduct of industry." When this by-product is made out of the lives of boys and girls under sixteen ought it not to be prohibited by law? In 1911 it appears that 20,000 girls between fourteen and sixteen years of age entered industry in New York of which "the watching of the tops of tomato cans coming down through a slot,

is a fair type. "'21

Is it any wonder that tramps are often recruited from those tired to death with monotonous labor? The worker possessed of spirit and energy rebels from such conditions, while the one without driving power or individual

ity becomes a mere automaton: either result is very likely to spell trouble socially. "Child labor means racial degeneracy, the perpetuation of poverty, the enlargement of illiteracy, the disintegration of the family, the increase of crime, the lowering of the wage scale, and the swelling of the army of the unemployed."'22

The British Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, in its report made in 1909, declared that “it is unfortunately only too clear that the mass of unemployment is continually being recruited by a stream of young men from industries which rely upon unskilled boy labour, and turn it adrift at manhood, without any specific industrial qualification, and that it will never be diminished till this stream is arrested."'23

Again, the same report stated that boy labor was the most serious phenomena encountered in their study of unemployment.24 Mr. Sidney Webb, in his testimony before the Commission, also said that he regarded "the growing up of hundreds of thousands of boys without obtaining any sort of industrial training, specialised or unspecialised, as a perpetual creating of future pauperism, and a grave social menace" 25 Reference was made to the fact in this connection that the unskilled laborer was "too old at 40"; and it was added that he might as truthfully be described as "no use at five-and-twenty".

The significance of such statements does not need much explanation. If a young man learns nothing that will make him a better workman at twenty-five than at fifteen, he has attained his greatest industrial efficiency at that time and is more likely to degenerate afterwards than to advance. As soon as his physical strength begins to decline, he is likely to go down grade- that may happen any time from twenty-five to forty years of age. It

has cost the community something to rear such a worker and he possesses potential value. If, like unworked natural resources, he is undeveloped, the community has lost something; and if, like wasted natural resources, he is used up at labor that simply takes his vitality without other result, he is more definitely and quickly lost. What the United States and England have lost in these ways is beyond calculation: the utilization of the child in mill and mine is "like grinding the seed corn' 26

V

CAUSES OF CHILD LABOR

VARIOUS causes are responsible for the existence of child labor, such as the greed of the parent, the desire of the child to be a man and become independent, the competition of employers that makes it necessary to reduce cost in every possible way and leads to the use of cheap labor, and finally the thoughtlessness of the public which in its search for "bargains" forgets the producers. These causes are of a general character and need only be stated clearly to be understood. Only the last one mentioned can be very much modified by social action. The others are almost inevitably the results of the interaction of human nature and industrial and social development.

Probably the most frequently used reason for the existence of child labor is the "necessity" of a "widowed mother", or stated more broadly, the need for the wages of the child laborer in the support of the family. Undoubtedly there are a considerable number of such cases in the aggregate where the easiest solution of the problem would seem to involve the employment of children under fourteen years of age. More careful investigation will lead to the conclusion that such a settlement is merely a palliative, and leaves the real problem to be dealt with later in an aggravated form. Experience in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburg, Boston, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Baltimore has demonstrated that the number of families dependent.

upon child labor is much smaller than opinion, unsupported by facts, had supposed. Of applications made in New York City for scholarships for children whose earnings were thought to be needed for family support, a little less than 30 percent were found to be really in that condition. In Philadelphia the labor of about one-fifth of the applicants was found to be really needed for the support of dependent families.27

An investigation of the need of families for the earnings of children between fourteen and sixteen years of age in Massachusetts produced the following results of 100 children who obtained working papers, 22 declared their earnings were needed. All the cases were carefully checked up by the study of incomes and expenditures, and in 67 instances there was no doubt of the ability of the family to get along without the support of the children. The remaining 33 were studied according to two standards of living. Fourteen families were found to be able to get along without the aid of their children according to a "fair" standard and ten more were found to be able to do the same according to a "minimum" standard, leaving only nine families who would be forced below the standard if deprived of the earnings of the children.28

A study of classified wage statistics shows that half of the adult males working in the industrial sections of the United States are earning less than $500 a year; that three-fourths are earning less than $600 annually; that nine-tenths are receiving less than $800 a year; while less than one-tenth receive more than $800. A corresponding computation of the wages of women shows that one-fifth earn less than $200 annually; three-fifths are receiving less than $325; and nine-tenths less than $500 a year; while only one-twentieth are paid more than $600 a year.