Chapter 321, the Requirement of Fireproof Construction Was Removed From

tenement houses of not more than four stories and not more than fifty feet in height, but here again came a proviso limiting these houses to “two families, or less, above the second story.”

This is the present tenement house law of Boston. It seriously handicaps the construction of tenement houses, but whether this is too stringent, and the influences are harmful, is not yet apparent. So far as an impulse is given to scatter the population out into the healthier suburbs and into the small, separate, detached suburban homes, each with its little plot of land, instead of the fearful overcrowding of families in the huge new tenement houses, students of the social welfare of the people must certainly rejoice.

In the old North End of Boston, where population is densest and rentals are highest, the erection of new tenement houses and the remodeling of old buildings into tenement houses are visible in many of the streets. On the other hand, in the southerly part of old Boston, such enterprise is nearly at a standstill and rents are falling, owing probably to the greater attractiveness of the neighboring suburbs.

The definition of a tenement house by the number of tenements, rather than by the number of rooms, discriminates with unintended harshness on just that class whose welfare ought especially to be studied, the very poor, the lone widow, the widower, the parent with a single child, who always find with difficulty a single spacious room, and usually pay higher rents because of the short supply of such much-needed accommodation. Twenty years ago a committee of the Associated Charities made a report to show the importance of building tenements of a single room and to call the attention of capitalists to this need. A small one-storied house with only four rooms, adapted for the needs of four separate women, must conform to all the expensive provisions of the tenement house code.

A just and judicious amendment should define a tenement house as having more than three tenements “and containing more than twelve rooms.”

Workers among the poor were surprised last year at orders issuing from the Board of Health, for single tenants to vacate single rooms. Such a notice was nailed on the door of the large “square room” in the model block of the Boston Co-operative Building Company, on Canton street, occupied by a lone old woman. It is supposed that this mistaken policy has been abandoned.

A strange thing happened in 1892; the building law of that year, chapter 419, in its final section 138, repealing numerous laws, included a repeal of the health provision, 1885, chapter 382, section 4, defining for health purposes a “tenement house.” So that since 1892, the Board of Health has been shorn of so much of its powers over tenement houses as depended on the definition, so carefully inserted in the health law of 1885, which has been since then the health code of Boston. Perhaps it is stranger still that no allusion can be found in the annual reports of the Board of Health, to this mysterious and probably unintended curtailment of health powers, the exact legal effect whereof no man can tell.

5. A crusade for the extirpation of the slums of Boston has been waged for the last fifteen years, thus far with no great success. Housing conditions are justly to be condemned so long as old, dilapidated and unsanitary buildings are allowed to stand, often so overcrowded upon the land that sunlight and air are practically shut out. Such conditions are a disgrace to any city. They tempt the most wretched of the poor, or vicious, or criminal classes to worse degradation. The breadwinner loses his health, which is his only wealth. Children grow up in shameless loss of self-respect. Frequent visitors are physicians, police officers, and charity agents; physicians to struggle with needless disease, the police to arrest criminals created by their foul environment, and charity agents to relieve countless varieties of want caused by cruel and unjust conditions of life.

Private initiative has been struggling in these years to secure more vigorous action by the Board of Health in the destruction of the worst slums. Prof. Dwight Porter, acting under the auspices of a voluntary committee, made an investigation and “Report upon a Sanitary Inspection of Certain Tenement house Districts in Boston,” in 1888, which really started the movement.

Committees of the Associated Charities have lodged indictments against many vile slums and have been heard by the board. In 1891–2, the state caused the Bureau of Labor to make a thorough and exhaustive investigation. The report of Hon. H. G. Wadlin sets forth in two volumes the results. (22d and 23d Annual Reports of the Bureau of the Statistics of Labor. “A Tenement House Census of Boston,” made pursuant to chapter 115, Resolves of 1891.)

Sanitary conditions were classified under five heads: excellent, good, fair, poor, and bad. It may be truly stated that tenements falling so low as to be classed “bad” are so intolerable as to demand most summary measures for their destruction, yet 1,346 houses were found to deserve this just but terrible condemnation (Vol. 1, p. 577).

“It may be safely assumed that whenever a tenement was designated as entirely bad as to its inside condition—that is, to be more explicit, was bad as to facilities for light and air, ventilation and cleanliness—such a tenement was unfit for human habitation. The existence of such tenements forms primarily an indictment against the landlord who is responsible for their condition. They should either be abandoned or improved. In some cases such improvement as would render them suitable for occupancy can easily be made; in other cases, no doubt, they should be permanently abandoned.” (Vol. 2, p. 417.)

“The existence of defective outside sanitary conditions is, upon the whole, an indictment against the city; for while some of the defects are due to unclean or poorly kept private ways and alleys, the responsibility of the city for the existence of such defects can hardly be avoided.” (Italics are the writer’s.) (Vol. 2, p. 418.)

In the reports of the Boston Board of Health no allusion is found to this fearful indictment by the authorities of the Commonwealth, or to the following municipal report.

In 1895 a special committee of the Common Council was appointed to consider what improvement could be made in the tenement districts of Boston, and what legislation was needed. They made a very brief “Partial Report” (Document 125 of 1895) from which may be quoted:—“In the North End the tenement houses are to-day a serious menace to public health.... The most astounding circumstance in connection with this investigation that attracted the attention of your committee is the social and financial standing of the owners of the most of these tenement houses.”

In 1897 a study was made, under the direction of the Tenement House Committee of the Twentieth Century Club, of certain typical slums, and the results were published with plans of some seven areas where buildings were old, dilapidated and so overcrowded on the land, that no remedy was possible except destruction either of all or of many of the tenements. (“Some Slums in Boston,” by H. K. Estabrook, May 15, 1898.)

A public hearing was granted by the Board of Health on June 27, 1898, and many competent experts and real estate owners testified to the intolerable conditions. Mayor Quincy attended the hearing and promised strong support. Commendable progress was made in vacating or destroying some of the worst slums for about three years. But the exercise of the power to “destroy” seems recently to have been paralyzed, perhaps, as a result of pending litigation.

The law grants two powers to the Board of Health to deal with these evils. Since 1850, chapter 108, tenements may be “vacated” if adjudged unfit for human habitation. This power should be exercised only after thorough investigation and on deliberate judgment, setting forth true and sufficient causes. It may easily work grave injury to owners if exercised unjustly. Yet, when justly exercised, orders to vacate should be adhered to and not lightly rescinded because of political or other pressure. Observe that this power to vacate requires no destruction of the building and cannot justly prevent use of the vacated tenement for other fit purposes, not of human habitation.

In 1897, chapter 219, the power to destroy [the statute word is “remove”] buildings first appeared in Massachusetts. Its origin is interesting. The British “Housing of the Working Classes Act,” 1890 (53–54 Vict., chapter 70), sections 30–37, is the origin, so far as I know, of this new power “to order the demolition” of a “dwelling-house” “unfit for human habitation.” Section 38 enlarged this power and made it apply to “obstructive buildings,” thus condemning one building because it injures another building. It is surprising that any American lawyer could suppose that such a power would be sustained in America, where the unlimited powers of the British Parliament are much curtailed by constitutional safeguards.

Yet New York soon copied this British Act (1895, chapter 567, amended by 1897, chapter 57) in shape so condensed as to make its injustice more conspicuous. This act was enforced for a few years in the city of New York, till owners of property began to defend their rights in court. The suit of Dassori vs. the Health Department of New York has settled that this law cannot be enforced to its full extent.

“Proof that rear tenement houses, each five stories high, lighted only from a court on the west or front from five to eleven feet wide, and a space or opening of eleven inches wide at the southeast corner of the court, and a space on the east side of eight inches filled with all sorts of filth, occupied by 115 persons, showing a death-rate almost twice the normal one, damp, filthy, infested with vermin, and filled with foul smells, and by their construction interfering with the light which would otherwise have been enjoyed by tenement houses on the front of the lots, justifies a finding that the rear tenement houses are unfit for habitation, but does not necessarily establish the fact that they are not capable of being made fit for other uses to which the owner might lawfully put them, nor does it show that the nuisance could not be abated in any other way than by their destruction.

“The owner of a tenement house cannot be compelled to submit to its destruction, if it is on his own land, merely because some building adjacent to it is, by reason of its existence, deprived of proper ventilation.” (N. Y. Health Dept. vs. Dassori, Appellate Division Reports, Vol. 21, p. 348. October, 1897.)

Boston deserves no credit for the slovenly shape in which this faulty law was reproduced, 1897, chapter 219, closely following the language of the New York act. First the power to vacate is set forth, yet while covering the same ground as our ancient and well-tried statute (1850, chap. 108; Pub. Sts., chap. 80, sec. 24; Revised Laws, chap. 75, sec. 71), neither repeals nor amends it. Then follows the power to order “removed,” i. e., destroyed, a building irremediably “unfit for human habitation.”

Statute 1899, chapter 222, enlarged these powers of the Board of Health so that the order may be not merely to “vacate” a building “unfit for human habitation,” but to “cease to use” a building “unfit for use”; the power to order buildings destroyed remaining limited to those “unfit for human habitation.”

The suit (October, 1900) of Holland vs. Durgin et al. (Board of Health) has gone on appeal to the Supreme Court. It raises interesting questions as to this last statute, its constitutionality, the lawfulness of a decree to remove, without previous notice to or opportunity to be heard by the owner, as well as the lawfulness of an order to remove stables occupied by horses and sheds only for storage as “unfit for habitation” (sic), the statute language being “unfit for human habitation.”

The Board of Health is thus clothed with transcendent powers, whose exercise vitally affects the physical and moral welfare, especially of that large portion of the people who are lowest in the economic scale. These powers should only be lodged in the hands of men of strong character, sound judgment, sanitary experience and genuine love for the plain people. Yet the action of the Boston Board of Health has been characterized for many years past by mysterious apathy.

The law provides that the Board of Health shall make annually “a full and comprehensive statement of its acts during the year, and a review of the sanitary condition of the city,” yet in the annual volumes of the last ten years the space devoted to the sanitary condition of the city has been utterly insignificant.

“To this subject, houses vacated, nearly a whole page is devoted in the report for 1892; nearly two pages in the report for 1893; from four to six lines in each of the reports for 1894, ’95, and ’96; and not one word in the report for 1897. Throughout the 122 pages of this last report, this extremely important duty to vacate houses unfit for occupancy is not mentioned.

“The report for 1895 says only this: ‘The number of houses which the board has ordered vacated during the year because of their unsanitary condition is 112; of this number, however, a very large per cent were put in a satisfactory condition before the expiration of the time allowed the occupants to quit the premises, and in such cases the orders were not enforced.’ The report for 1896 simply quotes this one sentence, word for word—except that ‘121’ is substituted for ‘112.’ This one sentence, then, is the ‘full and comprehensive statement’ of the acts of the three years, 1895–7.”

In none of these reports since 1892 “is a list given either of houses ordered vacated or of houses actually vacated, yet hundreds of other lists and tables are given, as lists of stables ordered discontinued, of passageways paved, and even of minor defects in certain houses. While in the reports of the New York Board of Health there are complete lists of houses vacated and of those demolished, in only two of our reports, those for 1892 and ’93, are any of the houses ordered vacated named.”

The objection of injury to tenants by the destruction of slums has no weight. The Associated Charities (Report of 1898, pp. 40–48) seized the occasion of the building of the South Station and the change in the neighborhood, in 1897–8, to cause a careful study to be made of the results upon the welfare of the twelve poorest families known to them when that sudden and forced migration occurred. “It brought out the interesting fact that in every case the condition of the family was improved by the change.”

Death-rates by wards are shown in the annual report of 1901 of the Registry Department of Boston for the first time, so that it is possible to compare. The ghastly fact stands out that the death-rate in some wards is more than double what it is in the healthier wards, viz: one person dying in the year 1900 out of 39 in Ward 7, 40 in Ward 13, 41 in Ward 6, and 42 in Ward 5, contrasted with one in 81 in Ward 25, 72 in Ward 24, 71 in Ward 23, 69 in Ward 20 (p. 5).

Now that this table proves how the murder of the innocents goes on, the public conscience should be aroused. Statisticians will also tell us that the ratio of sickness keeps pace with the ratio of death, so that sickness among the poor, with its train of evils, is twofold more than good sanitary conditions should tolerate.

The model buildings of London have told the world what a powerful influence upon the length of life (and of course upon the amount of sickness) of their occupants is exerted by healthy homes. The Peabody buildings with a population of about 20,000 show a death-rate of about 1 in 71; and the Waterlow buildings, with 30,000 tenants, about 1 in 100, while the rate of all London is about 1 in 57. In Boston, 1 out of 48 dies yearly.

A Tenement House Commission will probably be appointed by the Mayor this year, to consider and report upon existing conditions and possible improvement.

On the whole, the outlook is full of hope. Vigilance and vigorous action are demanded of all municipal authorities. Public interest is aroused. The action of other cities in Great Britain as well as in New York and other American cities warns Boston not to fall behind in this movement, which will surely give to us and our children a healthier city for the homes of the plain people, with its plague spots extirpated, and an increasing proportion of the population living out in suburban homes in this city of unsurpassed suburban beauty.

HOUSING CONDITIONS IN JERSEY CITY

By MARY BUELL SAYLES

Fellow of the College Settlements Association

The housing of the working people in Jersey City presents few striking or distinctive features. There are in the crowded parts of the city no such alley-intersected or narrow back street districts as are found in certain sections of Chicago and Philadelphia; there is no block which presents such conspicuously bad conditions of overcrowded land areas, and consequently deficient lighting and ventilation, as prevail throughout the newer tenement house districts of New York. None the less the evils of construction of sanitary neglect and of overcrowded living quarters, which have been brought to light in the recently completed investigation upon which the present article is based, are of a character both to claim the interest of specialists and to compel the attention of citizens.

In his report on housing conditions and tenement laws in leading American cities, Mr. Veiller, then secretary of the New York Tenement House Commission of 1900, notes but four cities, out of the twenty-seven which he discusses, as having a tenement house problem. Among these is Jersey City. Yet compared with the situation in New York, the Jersey City tenement house problem is still in its early stages. The great mass of the working class population is housed either in converted dwellings or in tenement houses of the primitive type commonly erected here, as in Manhattan, twenty to forty years ago; and these two classes of houses, which in the great city have been rapidly giving way, during the last generation, before the onslaught of the dumb-bell tenement with its characteristic eighteen-inch wide air-shaft and overcrowded lot, in the smaller city show few signs of a similar yielding of place. Very few tenements are at present in process of erection, and so few built within the last five or even ten years were found in the districts investigated, that it is difficult to speak with certainty of present tendencies in construction. It is, therefore, chiefly to evils long fixed upon the community and grown so familiar as to be generally overlooked, that attention has been directed—evils none the less serious for this fact, and all the more difficult to eradicate.

The investigation upon which, as has been said, the present paper is based, was necessarily very limited in scope, as it was undertaken single-handed and, under the conditions of the College Settlements Association fellowship, confined to a single academic year. Five hundred houses having been decided upon as a reasonable estimate of the field which could and should be covered, three districts were selected as representative both of the worst and—hardly less important—of average housing conditions. Seventeen blocks in all were investigated. Of these the investigation of the first was largely experimental, as it was undertaken before the printing of the regular schedules used later on, and its results, though hardly less complete than those afterwards obtained, are not in all respects uniform with them, and have therefore, for the present, been set aside. It is then with the returns from sixteen blocks, consisting of the records of five hundred and four houses, and of two thousand one hundred and fifty-four apartments, that we shall deal in this paper.

Of the three districts, the first and largest includes the eight blocks bounded by Sussex and Essex and by Van Vorst and Hudson streets, together with two others adjoining, extending between Hudson and Greene to Grand, and between Van Vorst and Warren to Dudley street. The widest range of conditions, as might be expected from its relative size, is to be found in this district. From the comfortable well-built dwellings of Sussex street, only recently converted to tenement house uses, and still in a large proportion of cases unaltered, to the four and five story brick tenements and the huddled rear houses of Morris and Essex streets, every type and grade of house is represented. The population of the district is overwhelmingly foreign. Only 18 per cent of the 1,278 families interviewed were of American stock, while in some of the blocks south of Morris street the percentage falls as low as 11 per cent. The foreign elements most largely represented are the Polish and Russian, who together lead with 18 per cent; the Germans who follow with 20 per cent, and the Irish with 18 per cent. Twenty other nationalities are represented, but as the most numerous, the Jewish, is represented by but thirty-two families, no one of them forms an important element numerically in the population.

The industrial attractions which have brought together this foreign population are not far to seek. The great American Sugar Refinery looms conspicuously on the southern boundary of the district; numerous other factories and workshops are interspersed through the blocks; while to the north, within a few minutes’ walk, lies the Pennsylvania Railroad, and to the south, across a narrow strip of water, stretch the docks of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. The foreign population shows, as was to be expected, a heavy preponderance of factory hands, railroad employees, and longshoremen.

The second district includes the two blocks bounded by Railroad avenue and Morgan street and by Henderson and Warren streets, and another adjoining, extending between Provost and Henderson to Bay street. Bounded to the south by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s elevated tracks, stretching out toward the Erie Railroad, and hedged in towards the Hudson by factories, foundries and workshops, it offers to the immigrant almost the same inducements of employment as does District I, and presents an even larger percentage of foreign born inhabitants. Of the 506 families whose apartments were investigated, not quite 14 per cent were Americans, 42 per cent were Polish, 18 per cent Irish, 13 per cent Italians and 4 per cent Germans. Among the remaining families the Jewish lead, numbering 16.

The houses of this district correspond with the older and more neglected portion of District I, showing, however, a larger proportion of wooden buildings and a smaller proportion of high tenements.

District III, consisting of the three blocks bounded by First and Second and by Monmouth and Merseles streets, is located farther from the business centre of the city and from the water front, near the foot of the hill on which are situated most of the better-class resident districts. It lies in the heart of what is known as Little Italy—the most distinctively national section of the city, and the most dilapidated and neglected. Sixty-five per cent of the 377 families interviewed were Italians, and their manner of packing themselves solidly where once they enter into possession gives to the southern half of the district, with the blocks adjoining, an intensely foreign aspect. The remaining 35 per cent, among whom the Irish, the American with 10 per cent, and the German nationalities predominate, are interspersed chiefly on the northern side of the blocks, along Second street.

Rival attractions to the railroads, factories and docks, which claim so large a part of the population in the other two districts, are here offered by the dump-grounds adjacent. Irregular heavy laboring work is, however, the predominating occupation among the Italians, though the rag-picker and junk-dealer are frequently found, as well as the omnipresent factory hand.

So much for the characteristics of the separate districts. For the remainder of the paper, the houses will be dealt with, in the main, without regard to district lines. Some preliminary classifications may properly be given before more detailed points of construction and sanitation are taken up, or special evils pointed out.

First of all, classifying the 504 houses by materials, we find that just 55 per cent are of wood, and 45 per cent of brick—a few of the former having brick, and a few of the latter stone, fronts. If we group them by the number of stories, three-story and three-story-and-basement houses are found to lead with 54 per cent; four and four-story-and-basement houses come next with 31 per cent; 5 per cent have five stories; the remaining 10 per cent have either two stories or two stories and basement, with the exception of two houses, one and one-half stories and one-story-and-basement respectively.

Again, we may group the houses by the number of apartments contained. Houses occupied by but one family were not touched in the investigation, but sixty-three two-family houses were examined, leaving 431 houses which contain accommodations for three families or more, thus falling under the definition of a tenement house most generally accepted throughout the country. Three-apartment houses are most common, 25 per cent of the total number falling under this head; 58 percent have from four to nine apartments; of houses containing ten apartments or more there are twenty-three, or 4 per cent.

Another significant classification of houses is that by position on the lot. Fourteen per cent of the houses investigated are rear houses. These figures, however, give little idea of the actual aspect of things, as two blocks are without any rear houses, and six others have but one or two each, while in one block rear houses constitute no less than 40 per cent of all. These houses are seldom over three stories in height, are almost always of wood, are in general very old and frequently dilapidated.

Turning now from classifications of the houses themselves to consider the apartments they contain, we find that three-room apartments lead by a wide margin, constituting 41 per cent of the total of 2,154. Next come four-room apartments with 28 per cent; two-room apartments with 12 per cent; five-room apartments with 7 per cent; six-room apartments with 4 per cent. Of one-room apartments there is less than 1 per cent. One per cent of the apartments examined contained over six rooms.

If now, leaving these preliminary statistics, we turn to matters of greater interest, we shall find it convenient to group the chief evils found, as first, evils of construction, under which we shall speak only of the two leading faults, lack of proper provision for escape in case of fire, and inadequate lighting and ventilation; next, sanitary evils, some of which are structural and some the result of natural conditions or neglect; and lastly, evils of occupancy, chief among which is that of overcrowded apartments.

The absence of fire-escapes is perhaps the most conspicuous and glaring fault observable in the tenement houses of Jersey City. Of the twenty-four five-story buildings found, just one-half were provided with fire-escapes; while of the 155 four-story or four-story-and-basement houses, only four were so equipped. After these figures it will hardly surprise anyone to learn that in no case was a fire-escape found upon a three-story house. There are thus out of a total of 431 tenement houses, most of them three stories or more in height, but sixteen, or 3 per cent, which are provided with fire-escapes of any kind.

The character of the fire-escapes found makes them in a number of cases practically valueless. The balconies of five had wooden floors; and not only in a large proportion of cases were balconies seriously encumbered and stairway or ladder openings covered by tenants, but in two instances trap doors were regularly fitted to these openings, the owner thus encouraging the use of the balcony as a general catch-all and storage place. Furthermore, in only three houses did all the apartments above the ground floor have access to a balcony, while in one instance, but one out of four families was provided with such means of egress. No form of fireproof construction was anywhere found, even the dumb-waiter shafts in the higher buildings, well known to be one of the most common paths by which fire spreads, being almost without exception of wood.

In regard to lighting and ventilation, the facts are less easily grouped. The buildings being seldom of a depth to encroach seriously upon the yards, we find, with the exception of a very few of the higher houses, that nearly all of the kitchens and general living-rooms open upon the yard or street and are thus adequately lighted. In the converted dwellings, and in all houses occupied by but one family on each floor, a large proportion of bedrooms also are open to the outer air. But in the three or four-story buildings erected originally for tenement uses, and furnishing accommodations for two families or more on a floor, a light bedroom is more nearly the exception than the rule. The typical interior room is lighted by a window to the outer living-room or a public hall, these windows seldom having more than five square feet of glazed surface, and more frequently an area of from three to four square feet. One thousand and eighty-four such rooms were noted in the course of the investigation; while—a still more serious evil—399 rooms were found which had no window at all, and in most cases not even a transom opening into another room.

Light and air-shafts were found in only a small proportion of the tenement houses investigated; and a light and air-shaft which is more than the merest travesty of its respectable name is emphatically an exception. The typical shaft is a triangular or oblong niche in the outer wall, with an area of from five to twenty square feet; an occasional variation being found in a square shaft of about the same area, let into the interior of the house and covered in most cases by a skylight. Below the top story such shafts furnish practically no light, while tenants bore almost unvarying witness that windows upon them were uniformly kept closed. A single whiff of the pent-up air within their narrow walls is quite sufficient to convince one of the wisdom of such disregard of their presence; and one feels no surprise in reading the evidence of chemists and physicians as to the positive injury to health wrought by pretended ventilation of this sort—evidence which has led to the giving of the suggestive name of culture tubes to such shafts. Among evils of sanitation only a few of the most serious can be touched upon. Most conspicuous and widespread of all is that of the foul and ill-smelling privy vault. Seventy-five per cent of the houses investigated furnish no toilet accommodations save these objectionable structures in the yard. The vaults are in the main sewer-connected, one block and part of another in District III being the only sections in which no street sewer is laid, though unsewered vaults were found in small numbers elsewhere. But a sewer connection is in a large proportion of cases a most illusory blessing. The great mass of solid matter frequently remains after the liquids have run off to the sewer, and its decomposition renders the air of the yard, upon which the rear rooms depend, many times almost intolerable. In two cases school-sinks—modified privies, with metal vaults in which water stands—were discovered in cellars; but as the water was changed, according to the testimony of tenants, but once a week, these cannot be said to offer many advantages over the ordinary privy. Among the 368 water-closets in use in the remaining houses, the old and objectionable pan closets number sixty-one; while numerous water-closet compartments are either entirely unventilated or have windows only to halls or rooms, and in a number of cases, especially on the top floor of five-story buildings, the water-flush is wholly inadequate to cleanse the bowl.

A serious evil is also found in the location and condition of household sinks. In seventy of the houses investigated all such sinks were located in the public hall, while in fifty-five other houses sinks were so located on one or more floors. Nearly every such sink is used by two families. In one block, chosen at haphazard from those of the Italian district, sixty apartments were found whose occupants were obliged so to share their sink; while fifteen other apartments were provided with but one sink to every three or four apartments. Furthermore, eight houses were found in which, in flat defiance of a city ordinance, no water at all was furnished indoors. One row of four such houses, containing in all twenty-two apartments, was provided with but two hydrants in the common yard, one hydrant serving for ten, the other for twelve apartments.

The collection of statistics as to the plumbing of sinks was not at first attempted, but was taken up as the result of an observation of conditions in the earlier blocks investigated. Eleven hundred and sixty-two sinks, located in four blocks of District I, and in the six blocks of Districts II and III, were examined. Of these only 10 per cent were properly trapped and vented; 68 per cent were trapped but not vented—a far from satisfactory state of affairs, especially where as in many cases traps were so small or otherwise defective as to be practically useless; 10 per cent were neither trapped nor vented, the pipes thus offering free passage to the contaminated sewer air; 12 per cent were boarded up solidly, so that the waste-pipes could not be examined—an almost sure sign that the concealed plumbing is of the oldest and worst type.

One serious element in the insanitary conditions of the districts investigated, which, unlike those just mentioned, cannot primarily be charged to the householder, is found in the character of the land upon which a large part of lower Jersey City is built. Only six of the sixteen blocks investigated are composed entirely of original solid ground. Five blocks in District I were in greater or less degree formed by the filling in of marsh land or the extension of the water front. All of District II, and nearly all of two blocks of District III, were so formed.

The significance of these facts appears when we realize that land so made is largely intermingled with refuse matter, and, still more important, is generally damp and is subject to periodic risings of tidewater. In a large proportion of the houses built upon such land, observations of the investigator, supplemented by the testimony of tenants, proves that the water in cellars unprotected, as are nearly all, by water-proof flooring, stands at times to a depth of several inches. Sewage is thus frequently washed back into yards and cellars, first floor apartments are rendered damp and unhealthful, and nauseating odors suggest the serious danger to health which such a condition brings upon the entire house. Fortunately the cellar-dwelling evil is not a prevalent one in Jersey City; yet one instance is recalled where a family paying for four rooms in the basement and first floor had been obliged to vacate the lower two rooms entirely—the men of the family wading through water knee-deep to rescue the kitchen stove.

One of the most serious evils from which the poorer classes suffer is that of overcrowded apartments. As was anticipated from the facts brought to light by investigations in other American cities, this evil was found to be most prevalent among the poorest foreign population, especially the Poles and Italians, and is largely due to the custom of taking so called boarders—really, in most cases, lodgers, who provide their own bedding and pay in the neighborhood of two dollars a month.

There are two ways of measuring overcrowding in apartments; by number of individuals per room, and by cubic air space per individual. To secure perfectly accurate results, it is of course necessary to discover just how many rooms in a given apartment are occupied for sleeping purposes and how many persons sleep in each. This may seem a simple matter, but in practice reliable results are not only very difficult, but in many cases impossible to secure, save by a night inspection. Not only must allowance be made for very general under-statement of the number of boarders taken, but in a large proportion of cases either no answers at all or wholly unsatisfactory answers can be obtained to questions as to the distribution of members of the family and of boarders at night. Under these circumstances it has seemed best, instead of attempting to state the number of individuals sleeping in each room and the precise cubic air space afforded by that room to each, to give the ratio of number of occupants to entire number of rooms in each apartment, and the cubic air space per individual afforded by that apartment as a whole. Only rough indications of the degree of overcrowding at night are of course given by this method, but it has at least the advantage of greater accuracy so far as it goes than could fairly be claimed for one seemingly more precise.

Applying the method of measurement by cubic air space to the 2,154 apartments investigated, we find that in 65 per cent of them each occupant has an allowance of 600 cubic feet of air or more. Living conditions in most of these apartments are fair, and in many good; yet some of the most disgraceful cases of overcrowding were found among them—as in one apartment, where in a single large room two little girls of about twelve years slept, together with a varying number of male boarders. The remaining 35 per cent of apartments afford less than 600 cubic feet of air space per occupant. This means in nearly all cases a serious degree of overcrowding; since if bedrooms alone are occupied at night such an allowance for the whole apartment means actually on an average less than 400 cubic feet, and often less than 300 or even 200 cubic feet for each person; while if the crowding compels the use of the kitchen for sleeping purposes, other evils hardly less serious are added to those of limited air space. Such being the meaning of the figures given, it becomes evident that in the 199 apartments, 9 per cent of all, in which there were found to be less than 400 cubic feet of air space to each occupant in the apartment as a whole, very serious danger to health exists. It is below the limit of 400 cubic feet per adult, with a smaller allowance for children, that government interference has generally been authorized, where authorized at all; as is notably the case in Glasgow, where the law is enforced by an especially efficient system of night inspection, and among American cities in New York.

The other test of overcrowding, by ratio of number of persons to number of rooms, while a less accurate means of estimating effect on health, furnishes a more accurate indication of the relation of overcrowding to standards of decency. An example typical of many cases met with will make this distinction clear. Suppose two large high-ceiled rooms with a total cubic contents of 3,500 cubic feet, occupied by eight people. Each person has then more than the minimum of 400 cubic feet; yet the absence of any possibility of privacy or decency of living involved where men and women boarders, parents and growing children make up the eight, need not be dwelt upon. It is evident that four rooms with an aggregate contents of less than 3,200 cubic feet might be occupied by the same eight persons with perhaps greater danger to health from limited breathing space, but with certainly better opportunities for separation by sexes.

If we apply this second method of measurement, we find that in 24 per cent of the total number of apartments there are two persons or more to each room. Such apartments may fairly be classed as overcrowded; since either every room is occupied for sleeping purposes, or if one room is reserved for kitchen and living-room, the bedrooms are shared by a minimum average of two and two-thirds, three or four persons each, according as the number of rooms in the apartment is four, three or two. To appreciate what this means it is of course necessary to realize that few bedrooms in such apartments contain more than 800 cubic feet, while a large proportion are dark interior rooms containing from 600 to 400 cubic feet or even less. These facts having been pointed out, it is unnecessary further to emphasize the seriousness of the state of affairs, where, as in 196 apartments, 9 per cent of the total number, the ratio of number of occupants to number of rooms rises as high as 2.5 or more.

Space will not permit of an extended comparison of these conditions of overcrowding with those revealed by similar investigations in other cities. It is interesting, however, to note in passing that the average number of individuals per room in the districts investigated is higher than the average number of occupants per room in the 9,859 apartments covered by the recent investigation of the City Homes Association in Chicago; the former being 1.35, and the latter 1.28 persons. While averages do not form the most satisfactory basis of comparison, a difference so marked as this unquestionably indicates a greater degree of overcrowding in the Jersey City than in the Chicago districts.

Enough has been said, it is believed, to show that serious housing problems demand solution in Jersey City. While the investigation covered the living environment of but 10,179 persons out of a total city population of 206,433, it may yet fairly claim to have some representative value. The districts investigated of course present conditions different in some respects from those of the city as a whole. Thus—to use a method of comparison too rough to have any but a suggestive value—while but 28 per cent of the total population of the city are foreigners, 84 per cent of the heads of families whose apartments were investigated are foreign born. Along with this large proportion of the poorest foreign population go unquestionably especially bad conditions of overcrowding, and in many respects of sanitary neglect; though such is not the case with faults of housing construction pure and simple. Nevertheless the accusation that an unfairly dark and harrowing picture has been presented cannot justly be brought; since on the one hand many tenement houses of the best type were included, as is shown by a range of monthly rents between extremes of $17 and $3 per apartment; while on the other, large numbers of blocks as bad in character as any of those investigated could be pointed out in other parts of the city. The hope of furnishing data upon which a movement for reform might safely base its demands was the determining incentive to the investigation; but this direct practical aim has by no means obscured the sociological and scientific interests involved. If the results obtained shall on the one hand be used as a point of departure for social effort, and on the other be judged a real though small contribution to the literature of the housing problem, the ends sought will have been fully attained.

IV. The Child Labor Problem

CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION

By MRS. FLORENCE KELLEY

Secretary National Consumers’ League

It is most desirable that the present widespread agitation for child labor legislation may achieve permanent results of a uniform character. Such laws as now exist are alike in no two states; they are enforced differently when they are enforced at all; they are uniform only in their failure to afford adequate protection to the rising generation of the working class.

It is the aim of this paper to set forth some essential points of an effective child labor law efficiently enforced; for whatever the local differences of industrial conditions may be, certain fundamental needs of childhood are constant and child labor legislation must ultimately be framed with regard to these.

This fact is somewhat recognized in the statutes already enacted; for all these begin with a restriction upon the age at which the child may begin to work. This minimal age has varied from ten years to fifteen, differing in some states for boys and for girls, while the statutes prescribing it have been weakened in some states by exemptions and strengthened in others by educational requirements. The fundamental provision of all child labor legislation has always been the prohibition of work before a specified birthday.

Akin to the restriction of the age of employment is the restriction of the hours of work. The former secures to the child a fixed modicum of childhood; the latter assures to the adolescent certain leisure, all too little, for growth and development.

No one law can be selected as containing all the provisions needed or even as containing all the provisions now in force. It is not possible to say to students of the subject, “The law of Massachusetts should be copied everywhere,” for the laws of Ohio and Illinois contain single provisions in advance of that of Massachusetts.

Among the best child labor laws in the United States are those of Illinois and Indiana, which are almost identical. In Illinois no child under the age of fourteen years can be legally employed in any mine, manufacturing establishment, factory or workshop, mercantile institution, store, office, or laundry. The Indiana law adds, to the foregoing list, renovating works, bakeries and printing offices. This prohibition is absolute throughout the year, admitting no exemptions or exceptions. Herein lies the superiority of these laws. Under the New York law, children at work in stores are exempt from restrictions during half of December—from December 15 to December 31—and also during the vacations of the public schools, when they may be employed from the age of thirteen years everywhere outside of the factories, which happily they may not enter before the fourteenth birthday. This exemption in New York has been given such elastic construction that children have been employed on Saturdays and even on school-days out of school-hours.

The laws of Illinois and Indiana are humane; they set the highest age limit without exemptions yet attained; they are equitable since they place mine owners, manufacturers and merchants in the same position in relation to this particular source of cheap labor. The employment of children under fourteen years of age is prohibited to all three sets of employers alike.

Treating these laws as standard or normal, for purposes of comparison, the law of Pennsylvania, for instance, is seen to fall below, because under it children may work in certain mines at twelve years and in factories at thirteen years of age; while lowest in the scale among all the Northern and Middle states stands New Jersey, whose child labor law permits boys to work at twelve and exempts all children, on grounds of poverty, at discretion of the factory inspectors.

Exemptions.

From the foregoing brief statement it is clear that the subject of exemptions is a varied and complicated one. The most insidious form of exemption, and therefore perhaps the most dangerous, is that prescribed in the law of Wisconsin. Under it, no child may be employed under the age of fourteen years in manufacture or commerce, unless it is exempted on grounds of poverty by a judge of a local court. In practice, a judge has no time to investigate the economic condition of hundreds of families; hence he follows the recommendation of the deputy factory inspector. This overworked officer is drawn away from his proper duties to perform an economic investigation for which he possesses no especial fitness. His own work suffers. Children are exempted from school attendance and permitted to work, who more than any other children in the community need education because of the poverty or shiftlessness of their parents. Too often, drunken fathers are encouraged to further drunkenness because their young children, under exemption, are earning money which the parents spend. Finally, this exemption rests upon the pernicious principle that a young child under fourteen years of age may be burdened with the support of itself or its family.

It is not a legitimate function of the judiciary to investigate the poverty of individual families. It is not a legitimate function of the factory inspectors to investigate family life. Both officers are interrupted in the performance of their legitimate duties by every attempt to perform this alien task. Moreover, children under fourteen years of age are undesirable additions to the body of wage-earners, pressing by their competition upon the wages of their seniors and therefore tending to produce in other families the same poverty which serves as a pretext for their own exemption. The number of exempted children, under such a provision, tends to increase continuously, because greedy and pauperized parents are tempted to follow the example of the really needy, in urging applications for exemptions.

Reinforcements.

Besides being free from all the undermining effects of exemption clauses, the child labor laws of Illinois and Indiana profit by several reinforcing clauses. Chief among these is the requirement that children under sixteen years and over fourteen years must keep on file in the office of the place of employment an affidavit of the parent or guardian, stating the date and place of birth of the child. In Indiana, this must state also that the child can read and write the English language. While some parents are undoubtedly guilty of perjury, and others carelessly take the oath perfunctorily administered by a notary public, thousands of honest people are deterred by the requirement of the affidavit from sending their children to work before reaching the fourteenth birthday.

Employers must produce, on demand of factory inspectors, affidavits for all children under sixteen years of age in their employ. The penalty prescribed for failure to do this is the same as for employing a child under the age of fourteen years. The value of this provision for the protection of the children depends wholly upon the policy of the inspectors. If every failure to produce the affidavit is followed by immediate prosecution, manufacturers become extremely cautious about employing young children; children under fourteen years of age virtually cease to be employed; and the number of those employed under sixteen years of age diminishes because many employers refuse to be troubled with affidavits, inspections and prosecutions. On the other hand, employers of large numbers of children find it profitable to make one clerk responsible for the presence in the office of an affidavit for every child between the ages of fourteen and sixteen years. In these cases, the children who have affidavits acquire a slight added value, are somewhat less likely to be dismissed for trifling reasons, and become somewhat more stable in their employment.

Where, however, inspectors fear to prosecute systematically, lest they be removed from office, the provision requiring an affidavit to be produced by the employer, on demand of an inspector, is not rigorously enforced; children soon come to be employed upon their verbal assurance that they are fourteen years of age, and the protection which might be derived from this very useful reinforcing clause is lost for the children under fourteen years of age, as well as for the older ones.

A farther reinforcement of the prohibition of employment of children under fourteen years of age is the authority conferred by the Illinois law upon inspectors to demand a certificate of physical fitness for children who may seem unfit for their work. This provision enforced with energy and discretion can be made, in the case of children conspicuously undersized, largely to counteract the tendency to perjury on the part of parents, besides relieving healthy children from overstrain of many kinds. The difficulties encountered are chiefly two:—physicians grant certificates without visiting the place of employment. This occurs quite uniformly to the disgrace of the profession. Physicians also grant certificates, in many cases, without careful examination of eyes, heart, lungs and spinal column of the child, simply upon the parent’s statement of poverty. To make this reinforcement thoroughly effective, every factory inspection staff should include a physician, preferably two, a man and a woman, appointed expressly to follow up the children and the conditions under which they work.

Educational Tests.

Several states require that children under sixteen years of age must be able to read and write simple sentences in the English language, before being employed. This is of the highest value in those states which receive large streams of immigration from Europe. In New York, every year, numbers of children are dismissed from factories by order of factory inspectors, because the children cannot read; while in Massachusetts, French Canadian children find school attendance at a high premium because of the difficulty of securing employment without it. The influence of the foreign voting constituency has defeated in several states, for several years past, the effort to secure a statutory requirement of ability to read and write English, or a specified attendance at school, as a prerequisite for work on the part of children under sixteen years of age. This is conspicuously true of Illinois, where such a provision was defeated in the legislatures of 1893, 1895 and 1897.

The most powerful reinforcement of the child labor law is a compulsory school attendance law effectively enforced. For want of this, the child labor law of Illinois suffers severely. The school attendance law requires children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to attend school sixteen weeks, of which twelve must be consecutive. Children under ten years of age must enter school in September, children under twelve years must enter school not later than New Year’s. Meagre as these provisions are, they are not uniformly and effectively enforced by the local school boards; and the state factory inspectors are therefore burdened with frequent prosecutions of employers because children under fourteen years of age are sent to work by parents who should be rigorously prosecuted by the school attendance officers.

In Indiana, the reinforcement afforded by the state truancy law is of great value, for children must attend school to the age of fourteen years, throughout the term of the school district in which they live, generous provision being made for truant officers. This difference accounts, perhaps, for the fact that Indiana has but three and one-half thousand children under the age of sixteen years at work, compared with nineteen thousand such children in Illinois; and this despite the rapid development of the “Gas Belt” in Indiana, where the temptation is very great for parents to put excessively young children to work with the help of perjured affidavits. Truant officers, watching young children, from the eighth to the fourteenth birthday, every day of the school term, are the best preventive alike of perjury by parents and of child labor. They constitute the best possible reinforcement of the child labor law.

The contrasted practice of the neighboring states of Indiana and Illinois, in this respect, is so marked that, unless the policy of Illinois be radically changed in the near future, it is reasonable to expect that, despite the excellent child labor law, the number of children at work under the age of sixteen years must continue to double at intervals of five years, as it has done in the past—the recruits being largely drawn from the ranks of the children under the legal age for work.

In Boston, the very enlightened firm of merchants known as Filene’s have long made it a rule to employ no person who is not a graduate of the grammar grades of the public schools. In two cases known to the writer, girls aged respectively eighteen and sixteen years applied for work, but were not engaged because they had not completed the school requirement. They found employment elsewhere while attending the graded evening schools of Boston in preparation for service at Filene’s. It is reasonable to expect that this method of securing efficient help will be increasingly followed by public-spirited employers interested in placing a premium upon school attendance, until at last legislators may feel justified in specifying some one grade of the schools below which the pupil may not leave to begin working.

The Hours of Labor.

Among the most advanced restrictions upon the hours of labor of children is that of New Jersey, which prohibits all persons, men, women and children, alike, from working in manufacturing establishments longer than fifty-five (55) hours in any week, or after one o’clock on Saturday. This provision applies throughout the year. Massachusetts and Rhode Island prohibit the employment of women of any age and of youths under eighteen years, longer than fifty-eight hours in any week, or ten hours in one day, or after nine at night or before six in the morning.

These laws have the advantage of precision. They require that the hours of work of the persons concerned must be posted conspicuously, and that the posted hours shall constitute the working day—work beyond the posted hours constituting a violation of the law—thus rendering the enforcement of the law simple and easy.

The statute of Utah prohibits all persons from working in mines, smelters and factories longer than eight hours in one day and forty-eight hours in one week. This statute has been sustained by the Supreme Court at Washington, in the decision in the case of Holden vs. Hardy, 1896. It does not, at present, affect any considerable number of children, because child labor hardly exists in Utah. But with the development of manufacture, now proceeding with startling rapidity, the value of this enlightened law for the children who must inevitably find employment is quite beyond computation. And as a precedent for similar legislation elsewhere, this statute and the extremely strong decision of the Supreme Court at Washington sustaining the validity of the statute are of epoch-making importance.

Night Work of Children.

The extent to which children are employed at night is not generally recognized. In any state in which such employment is not explicitly prohibited, it is very general in all branches of industry in which children are employed by day. Glassworks, nut and bolt works, tin can factories, furniture factories, cutleries, and scores of miscellaneous industries employ boys regularly at night. Girls are regularly employed in garment and candy factories during the busy season; and in some factories this work continues all through the year, as in the cotton mills of Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas. Wherever the prohibition is not explicit and sweeping, the night work of children is the rule, not the exception. In Illinois and Indiana boys are not prohibited from working at night, and are regularly employed in the glassworks in both states under circumstances of great hardship. In Indiana, girls are forbidden to work after ten o’clock; but Illinois, cruelly belated in this respect, merely restricts the work of children under sixteen years of age to sixty hours in any week, and ten hours in one day, failing to proscribe night work even for girls. It is, accordingly, very common. Even in Boston, where the hours of labor of boys under eighteen years engaged in manufacture and other forms of commerce are strictly limited, a recent attempt to pass an ordinance requiring that newsboys under fourteen years of age shall not sell papers on the streets after eight o’clock at night failed utterly, and small boys are to be seen upon the streets at all hours. The place of honor in the matter of legislation prohibiting night work for children properly belongs to Ohio, which provides that minors under eighteen years of age, may not be employed after seven o’clock at night.

Children Not Yet Protected.

Large numbers of working children remain wholly unprotected by legislation. Not only have the four great cotton manufacturing states, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas, defeated all bills presented to their legislatures for the purpose of protecting young children, but in the North, also, newsboys, bootblacks, peddlers, vendors and the thousands of children employed in the tenement houses of New York and Chicago, and in the sweat-shops of Philadelphia, remain wholly outside of the law’s protection, so far as statutory regulation of the conditions of their work is concerned. The problem of abolishing the overwork of school children in tenement houses, under the sweating system, appears at present insoluble except by a prohibition of all tenement house work.

Enforcement.

To secure the enforcement of child labor legislation, there are needed factory inspectors, both men and women, equipped with ample powers and supplied with adequate funds for traveling and other expenses. These inspectors need good general education, long experience, and vigorous public opinion reinforcing their efforts. Massachusetts enjoys the unique distinction, among the American states, of possessing a large staff of factory inspectors meeting all these requirements; and Massachusetts is, accordingly, the only state of which it may be confidently asserted that its child labor law is uniformly and effectively enforced at all times and in all its provisions. A faithful officer serving a full quarter-century at the head of the department, with subordinates equally assured of permanent tenure of office during good behavior, has been able fearlessly and intelligently to enforce the laws securing to the children of Massachusetts fourteen full years of childhood, with opportunity for school life, followed by safety of life, limb and health after entering upon the years of work.

In all the other states it is extremely difficult for an inspector who faithfully enforces the law to retain his position. The interests which oppose such legislation and object to its enforcement, are enormously powerful and are thoroughly organized. The people who procure the enactment of child labor laws are usually working people unacquainted with the technical details of the work of inspection; busy in the effort to earn their own living; not able to keep vigilant watch upon the work of the inspectors, the creation of whose office they achieve. Thus the officials are subjected to pressure in one direction only. If they are idly passive, they may be allowed to vegetate in office several years. If they are aggressively faithful to the oath of office, enforcing the law by prosecuting offenders against its provisions, the children who profit by this are unable to reward their benefactors; the working people who obtained the creation of the office have no arts of bringing pressure to bear effectively to reward faithfulness in public service by appointed officers; while the offending employers are amply able to punish what they decry as officious overactivity, if they do not go farther and charge persecution and blackmail. For these reasons it may almost be stated as a general proposition that the more lax the officer, the longer his term of office; and the history of the departments of factory inspection, the country over, sadly substantiates the statement.

The recent startling revelations of non-enforcement of the laws intended to protect young children from exhausting overwork in the glass factories in New Jersey merely intimate what will be found true in every state in which there is not a powerfully organized, compact body of public opinion alert to insist upon the retention of competent officers, the removal of incompetent ones, and the uniform, consistent enforcement of all the provisions of the child labor laws.

To form in every state, among the purchasers of the products of manufacture, a body of alert, enlightened public opinion, keen to watch the officers to whom is entrusted the duty of enforcing child labor laws, rewarding with support and appreciation faithful officials and calling attention to derelictions from duty on the part of the mere politicians among them, this is an important part of the duty of the National Consumers’ League.

CHILD LABOR IN THE DEPARTMENT STORE

By FRANKLIN N. BREWER

General Manager Wanamaker Store, Philadelphia

The topic assigned me, “Child Labor in (so called) Department Stores,” interests us, I take it, from but one point of view: that of the education and development of the child into the man or woman who shall contribute and receive a normal share of the world’s good growth in life, liberty and happiness.

I cannot claim comprehensive thought or research, under this topic, and my paper must be the brief and superficial one of a man whose too short days are full of the work of the builder rather than the study of the architect.

If my coming before you is justified at all, it must be by the simple statement I am able to make of how one establishment, a typical one of the class under consideration, is trying to meet its responsibility for its children.

First entrance into the employ of this house is, to the extent possible, with a clear understanding between parent, or guardian, and the employer, that the child’s business career shall continue with the same house, at least until maturity in years and efficiency in some distinct branch of the business shall have been reached.

Following our State law, thirteen years is the minimum age. The smaller boys begin as “cash boys.” Girls are not given this work, positions of less freedom being considered safer for them. The girls up to, usually, seventeen years of age, and the boys, other than cash boys, usually, from sixteen to eighteen, are engaged directly in the general corps of the junior employees—we call it “The Cadet Corps”—and into this corps the cash boys come by promotion. Except at Christmas, the cash boys will average two hundred in number; the cadets four hundred, of whom about one hundred are girls. These six hundred young people are assigned to duty in the various departments and divisions of the business, according to natural aptitude and fitness, and are under the direction of their respective department or section heads; but always, also, and until graduation from the Cadet Corps, they are under the care and discipline of the chief of the corps and a lady assistant. The young people are not lost sight of individually, but are known and studied by the managers with view to advancement according to capacity and natural abilities.

Cultivation of good manners, neatness, elevated personal habits, the general requirements of the store service, lessons from their individual experiences, etc., are considered with them individually and at general meetings, and are emphasized by a system of monthly averages bearing upon questions of promotion and increase of salary. To illustrate: Each of the smaller boys (the cash boys) has his record card which he must carry for a month. It is no small departure from small-boy nature, simply to have and hold this card during a month without a forbidden accumulation of dirt and damage upon it. One of the early signs of progress, after the adoption of this feature of our plan, was an increased average whiteness and remaining area in the cards surrendered at the month’s end. This card epitomizes the boy’s early business life and he reverences it and guards it. On one side are rules to be committed to memory, but this is merely incidental. The other is the serious side, where an array of spaces gradually fill up, like the rising of the tide. Weekly ratings by his section manager for neatness, promptness, truthfulness, etc.; a weekly rating at morning “inspection,” by his general chief; daily strokes of the pencil (if occasion require) for misconduct or neglect of duty—“bluies” the boys call these latter marks and there is no levity or disrespect in the term. Protest against what is felt to be an undeserved “bluie” is made to his chief, or even to the general manager, with all the earnestness of an appeal to the Supreme Court, and, needless to say, such appeals are patiently entertained and decided with honest effort after justice. Upon these cards, also, are entered the monthly figures given for the boys’ school-work. The average of all the ratings is the “store average” and the misconduct marks (“bluies”) reckon so much off. The card goes home for inspection and signing by parent or guardian. Upon the “store average” depend increase of salary and promotion. If advance in salary is not won reasonably soon (six weeks or two months usually bring the first upward step) the conclusion is apt to be reached that the boy is unfitted for our service and he is dropped from the ranks. The simple expedient of these cards, and that which they represent, secures in discipline what the harsh word and impulsive discharge never could secure, and a month or two bring about in the little “raw recruit” a surprising improvement.

I mention these details as illustrative of the spirit, character and thoroughness with which, to the best of our ability, the problems of the discipline and development of our young people are met, along their whole course from first entrance into the business up to graduation into the ranks of men and women. And this line of procedure is simple recognition of the fact that these are children still, whose characters are forming, and that faults and defects, which in man or woman might require discharge, in the child simply demand correction.

The boys above the cash boy grade, and the girls, are placed, as early as wisely possible (depending upon their own developing tendencies and the business conditions), where some distinct branch of the business, or class of merchandise, will be learned thoroughly. Stock boy, salesman, stock-head, buyer’s assistant, is the usual line of advancement in merchandising. Development in clerical lines makes the bookkeeper, the auditor, the office assistant, the stenographer. In trades lines grow up among us, the milliner, the dressmaker, the paper shade and flower worker, the plate engraver and printer, the designer, draughtsman, decorator, show-card painter, the mechanic in repair of bicycles, dolls, and so on. Exceedingly numerous and varied are the paths open, and in so far as possible an early and definite selection and patient reasonable progress along some one of these paths are insisted upon. Meanwhile salaries are advanced systematically according to a minimum scale which is increased as progress above the average and promotion to higher duties may mark the course of the individual.

Does the program, thus far, sound too serious and strict for normal happiness and hopefulness in the children? See our young people and you will find the reverse to be true. Granted a child, normal in body and mind, happily busy and interested in duties of genuine importance to and among other busy people, and the question of training in the business proper answers itself: the child learns, absorbs, grows by the easy process of nature. His capital knowledge, as a business man, becomes to him like the mud on the carpet at Willie’s home: “I didn’t bring it into the house, mamma; it just stuck to my shoes and came in itself.” But the youthful business students of to-day require for normal development more than the round of duty of a succession of business days in a fixed place can supply, and more than the average home and home circle of friends and interests of the working boy or girl do supply.

And so we have found it practicable to bring into the business lives of our young people most of the activities usual in the schools. The smaller boys are organized into school and military companies. Each company assembles in the school-rooms, on the fifth floor of the store building, two mornings in the week, where regular instruction is given in arithmetic, grammar, spelling, writing, composition and singing. On two other mornings they have the setting-up exercises and drill of the school of the soldier, with some other physical culture features. The boys elect their own military officers, save, of course, their chief, and these officers become successful disciplinarians, retaining well the respect and obedience of their companies. A very successful fife, bugle and drum corps, composed of the boys themselves, is a feature of this branch of their organization. As fairly indicating the standard of these special activities, let me mention here that this fife, bugle and drum corps has twice marched at the head of the combined Boys’ Brigades of Philadelphia, and has been pronounced the best junior organization of the sort in the city.

Our girls have their school organization, also, each division having two mornings in the week. The branches taught are those above mentioned and also business correspondence, stenography and typewriting, and bookkeeping. Attention is given to singing and physical culture, while an elocution class and a mandolin club are successful outgrowths of this branch of the store school.

The older boys, in number about three hundred, have supper in the store and remain for their school, two evenings in a week. The branches taught are arithmetic, spelling, writing, commercial correspondence, English, stenography, bookkeeping, metric system, mechanical and free-hand drawing, rapid calculation. Military and gymnastic training are given, and as outgrowths of the school are a club for debate and literary exercises, an orchestra, a field music band, a mandolin club, a glee club, an elocution and dramatic class, and a minstrel troupe. Monthly report of the standing and progress of each pupil is made to the parents.

Each of these three branches of the store school has its separate annual commencement exercises conducted similarly to those of other schools and not falling below the latter in general merit. Association Hall has been used in later years for this purpose, but is now much too small for the gathering of the parents and friends interested. Certificates (they call them diplomas) are given to the graduates, but these papers have double significance. They testify to the attainment of a certain standard in the school-work proper and also to the actual number of years of satisfactory service in the business, with promotion from the Cadet Corps to a position in the regular ranks of some one of the store departments—equivalent to a stepping out of the ranks of the business boy or girl into those of the business man or woman.

These graduates have organized themselves into Alumni and Alumnæ Associations and maintain their fellowship, principally in social, but partly in educative work. The school button or pin and the alumni pin prove that these young folks are quite as human as those of other schools and colleges. The standard of class-work done, while perhaps less in quantity for the same length of time, does not, in quality, seem to fall below the standard of other schools. The business training, the business authority and the fact that excellence in school-work is also an important element in business promotion, all give the teacher an advantage, and the scholar an incentive greater than in ordinary schools, and these substantially offset the disadvantage of shorter class-hours. With justifiable pride we call the schools, collectively, the “J. W. C. I.,” “John Wanamaker Commercial Institute.” The “Junior Savings Fund” is another feature of the young people’s organizations of the store, largely taken advantage of and helpfully stimulating to habits of care with money. A summer camp, the outfit for which is owned by the boys, provides for the vacation of many.

The results are very manifest. Jacob Riis says, “the small boy is a boiler with steam up all the time, and if authority sits on the safety-valve there is bound to be an explosion.” We have but few explosions. There is so much of varied and interesting demand upon his activities that our future business man has but little time to scheme out mischief and practically no surplus steam to explode. The incentive to faithful doing of his best is strong. Participation in the actual work of the business daily is the broadest end of school-work. Beginning early and with awakening interest and ambition, the children are in less danger of developing wrong habits, temptation to dishonesty, a sullen or resistful spirit toward those in control, and many another cause by which a naturally well-equipped child fails to fulfill the promise of his childhood.

While children here are children still, yet I know not of an equal number of young people gathered together with an equal standard in present character and ability and promise of future success and usefulness. As would be supposed, such care in the early training of the young people necessarily and naturally carries with it the advancing of these people as the years go on, so that what is practically a system of civil service promotion has resulted, and the higher positions are continually filling with those who have grown up in the business from childhood.

To be sure, it often happens that a young man, having made himself fit for a larger position than is open to him at the time in this his business home, goes out with our approval to some other establishment which needs a chief and bids for him, but, on the other hand, it is true that no young man or woman, having won a foothold in the regular store service and continuing faithfully to do his or her best, need look elsewhere for advancement or a business future.

Sometimes these changes to other service are invited before we think the young man or woman fully qualified, and in any case much is risked in the search elsewhere for sudden and uncertain advancement.

From these conditions develop three important features of modern business life: First: A fair equivalent for the apprentice system still so strong in the Old World, and for want of which our young business men and mechanics have suffered in comparison with Old World competitors, in point of thoroughness and detail knowledge; second: civil service promotion; and third: service and disability pension.

May I presume further upon your patience with an additional question or two? Are we prepared to say that better results than these I have tried to indicate are observable in those trained solely in academic courses? It is too large a question for me to attempt to answer. An answer is, however, suggested by R. T. Crane in a pamphlet issued in 1901 in Chicago, entitled “An Investigation as to the Utility of Academic Education for Young Men Who Have to Earn Their Own Living and Who Expect to Pursue a Commercial Life.” Mr. Crane comes, among other conclusions, to this: “The truth of the matter is that, when it comes to considering an applicant for a position, few of these gentlemen (employers in various lines) will be found to pay any attention to the amount of knowledge he may have of Greek, Latin, literature, etc., or care a straw about the mental drill and discipline or the well-rounded character that he may have acquired through a course at college. What they are particularly interested in knowing is whether he understands their business and can promote it. This is all that has any weight with them in the selection of help.”

And further, “The great majority of our strongest and most successful men in the country to-day came from farms and villages and obtained very little education.... In my opinion, few of them would have been anywhere near so successful in business had they gone to college, for their success was largely due to the fact, which was impressed upon them in the early part of their career, that they would have to struggle if they expected to succeed.

“I feel quite sure that if the men who have been successful in business were asked whether they regretted starting in business at the time they did, in place of going to college and taking the chances of afterward being able to gain the success which they have achieved, all would answer in the negative.... I think it can be safely said that the great men at the head of our railroads are the strongest business men the world has ever produced, and so far as I have been able to ascertain, not one of them is a consistent believer in college education.

“Certainly none of them have expressed in their letters any regret on account of not having received such education themselves.

“On the contrary, Mr. Roswell Miller remarks that he spent one year in college, and considers it fortunate that he did not spend more.”

Without depreciating the value of a college course, our business experience tends to the conclusion that men and women trained up from youth in the business are the most successful; that length of service, with its unconscious absorption of and self-adjustment to the principles and needs of the business, will carry a given degree of natural capacity to a higher point of efficiency and success than an originally greater degree of capacity will be likely to reach by the shorter road of business training begun in maturer years.

I am aware that business success is but a partial test of true education, and my mark is missed if I seem to have set up that as my test alone. Perhaps from the unfavorable conditions of child labor in the past, has arisen the assumption that to work for wages in early years is necessarily a misfortune to the child, and, until now at least, the instinctive choice of parents is for long years in the schools. But as time brings to working men and women improved conditions, shortened hours, higher standards of intelligence, increased rate of earnings, may not a proportionate bettering for the child bring conditions so normal, to the best education and development, as that labor in the real world of business or trade will accomplish more, and more desirably, for the child that which is striven for in business and trades courses of the schools?

Modern educational methods have carried much of the shop and counting-house into the school-room, while but little in the reverse order has been accomplished, at least in this country. Pennsylvania State law has done little more for the child than to forbid his being employed in manufacturing or mercantile establishments before the age of thirteen, and thereafter to surround his employment with some safeguards against danger to life or limb. But considerably greater progress has been made in Germany. Some present here will recall a paper read in this room by our Consul at Chemnitz, the Hon. J. C. Monaghan, on “Industrial Education, a German Example.” Mr. Monaghan tells of industrial schools established in manufacturing districts for the benefit of the workers of the factories, where the law requires so many hours in the week to be spent in these schools by the younger employees, who thus combine the practical of their business with the theoretical of their school. I quote from Mr. Monaghan: “I have had exceptional opportunities during three periods, since the war of 1870, of investigating the industrial progress of Germany, and to make what might easily be a long story short, I may say it is due mainly to education. When you are building a house, you begin with the foundations. When you are building up a man, you begin with the child. Germany a century ago, after its exhaustion and humiliation caused by the great wars, fixed the foundation of its new life and development on the rock of education. The country was poor, its people could only exist by hard work, and their education was organized so as to help them with their work.... Germany has a system of further-developing schools, and industrial art schools, so close to the people that they aid the trades and industries in such a way as to commend themselves to all parties concerned therewith. Education in Germany is compulsory. After graduating from the public schools (or leaving the public school, for reference here is to the lower grade schools which boys leave at fourteen or fifteen for work, as they do with us at thirteen) and entering upon an employment, they are not only expected but compelled to attend these further-developing schools for a period of three years. They go two or three times each week, sometimes on Sunday. They are developing the scientific side, if one may put it thus, of the trade or business with which they are connected.” Here, then, is the child at work and yet the school brought to him. But a step further brings to him also those branches of study usually associated with the school alone and suggested more by the liberal than the strictly business and trade view of education. Instead, then, of commercial and mechanical work in the school of the schools, we have school-work in the school of actual commerce and industry, in the store and factory.

And shall we say that this reversal of the older plan may not have a wise and lasting place in educational life?

Is the labor of the store, shop or office more truly educative when imitated in the class-rooms of commercial and trade schools, than when done in course of actual business? Do not the labor and experiences of business life, with their real responsibilities, their unartificial rewards and retributions, their contact with men in real life, do all the former can do and much more? Certainly the real thing done in business or shop, and shaped and regulated to serve the ends of the world’s actual economic life, must have an educative advantage above the like thing theorized over in the school-room; while of unquestionably great value is that further reward which the school of actual business gives to its pupils, namely—a knowledge of men and affairs, confidence, judgment, association with practical workers at the centre of the world’s daily life.

Keep the children young, we are tempted to say as we see them in our own home circles. A dangerous plan! Rather, let the children learn what they must, of the best masters, and as their years are able! So wise and devoted a parent as Lord Chesterfield wrote his young son: “Do not imagine that the knowledge, which I so much commend to you, is confined to books, pleasing, useful, and necessary as that knowledge is; but I comprehend in it the great knowledge of the world, still more necessary than that of books. The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.” “Happy the man who, with a certain fund of parts and knowledge, gets acquainted with the world early enough to make it his bubble, at an age when most people are the bubbles of the world, for that is the common case of youth.”

If, then, the commercial and trades training, the business or manual, or whatever the course be called, can be found in actual commerce and trade; if a sufficient degree of scholastic education can there be added, and if with this the maturing man or woman shall gain a higher degree of technical skill and a safer knowledge of men and affairs, does not the plan of the school in business best meet the educational problem for at least a majority of childkind? Answer as you may for present or future, this is true now—that child labor in the Wanamaker store means education, physical, scholastic, commercial; development in character, fitness for intelligent work, and fitting into a place in the bread-and-butter belt of the world; an open path and a helping hand to the career of the man or woman who shall add a due part to the sum of life and win the crown fashioned by the Great Father for each of us, His children, who finds his duty and does it.

DISCUSSION.

“Q. Has the store any difficulty in keeping out boys under thirteen?

“A. Practically no difficulty. I have no doubt the truth is stretched occasionally and those not yet thirteen brought in, but there must be an affidavit as to age, and few of the class of people from whom our employees are drawn are willing to swear to a lie in order to secure earlier employing of the child.

“Q. Is there a physical examination, a physician in charge?

“A. There is no physical examination other than that which the eye of the employer can give. The first weeks or months of the boy’s service, or girl’s, develop the fact whether physically, mentally and otherwise, the child is suited for the business.

“Q. How long has this system been in operation?

“A. I think it was six years ago that we began with the school for cash boys. It was some two or three years before that the initial step, out of which all the rest has grown, was taken. The plan arose originally from a recognition of the fact that the young people who came into the store were not sufficiently looked after. They were apt to be lost sight of, as distributed in the various departments, and when the busy season passed and some reduction in the force became necessary, the department head was often not far-sighted enough to consider that the small boy now would be his best man in the years to come. It was the recognition of this fact that led to the beginning of the plan of which the first step was merely the placing of the smaller boys of the establishment under one head. All the other steps came one by one, as our experience led to them.

“Q. You referred to the fact that your experience had shown that college training was not useful in business career. Are there many college men in your departments, or are you able to find that out?

“A. I did not give this as our own experience and conclusion, but was quoting that of others as given in the pamphlet of Mr. Crane’s, to which I referred, and which contains my answer to a letter from him. Mr. Crane sent letters to representatives of various establishments, asking that question. So far as I can recall the answer, it was that we were unable to say exactly, but taking such departments as required salesmen, bookkeepers and so on (that is, dropping out the delivery and packing rooms, where the more highly educated would naturally not be found), aggregating some five hundred and fifty men, we found twenty-six who had had either a full or partial college education. It is not our custom to inquire as to the college education. The difference in the success of the college-educated man and the one not so educated has not, in our experience, been sufficiently marked to make that a point of distinction in engaging the rank and file of our men, although in the man of college education we naturally look for quicker progress or brighter mental work.”

THE NECESSITY FOR FACTORY LEGISLATION IN THE SOUTH

By HAYES ROBBINS

Dean, Institute of Social Economics, New York

The keynote that needs to be struck in the child labor matter, South or anywhere, is not “hands off,” but hands on. It is fortunate for social progress that the point of view of modern economic thought has drifted so far away from the old-school doctrine of non-interference that we can take hold of a problem like this to some robust, practical purpose, without becoming intellectually disreputable; and the reason why this is fortunate is that right here factory legislation has met its bitterest opposition, ever since the first child labor act in England, in 1802.

The doctrine that cheapness is the all-sufficient goal of economic progress, the only economic fact of any possible interest or concern to the laborers, has been a corner-stone in political economy. Only within recent years has the idea begun to dawn that an adequate theory of economic welfare must include the interests of the citizen as a producer as well as a consumer; that the conditions under which the man works, and his opportunities of enjoying the fruits of his labor, are quite as vital to his happiness as the price of potatoes or beef or clothing. It is clear, now, however, that cheapness, important as it is, must come, and in the long run can only come, through more effective utilizing of natural forces, by invention and machinery, not through the overworking and social degradation of labor; and the great enlightening circumstance on this point has been the fact that the whole price-cheapening trend of our modern industrial era has come hand in hand with increasing wages, diminishing hours, and restrictions on the labor of women and children.

In respect to child labor alone, the progress of protective legislation has been extraordinary. England has had a half-time factory and school law for children of nine and over since 1844, the half-time age having since been raised to eleven; and a fourteen-year age limit for full-day work since 1874. In Germany the limit for full-day work is fourteen years, and for any factory work at all thirteen; in Holland, Belgium, France, Austria, Norway and Sweden it is twelve; in Russia fifteen, half-time being allowed from twelve up. In Switzerland it is fourteen; in Denmark fourteen, with half-time allowed from ten up; and even in Italy child labor under nine years is absolutely prohibited.

Here in the United States, at the beginning of 1899, when the last complete compilation on the subject was made, there were limitations on child labor in thirty-four states and all the territories. To select for comparison our greatest manufacturing states, as showing most clearly the possibility of prosperity without child labor, the limit under which such labor is prohibited in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Illinois and Indiana is fourteen years; in Georgia no limit. In Rhode Island fifteen and Ohio fourteen, except during school vacations, and no work at all under twelve; in North Carolina no limit. In New Jersey twelve for boys and fourteen for girls; in Alabama no limit, except in mines, twelve years. In Pennsylvania thirteen; in South Carolina no limit. Happily, the tendency is moving Southward; Missouri, Maryland, Tennessee and even Louisiana now have restrictive laws; so that the section specially known as the new industrial South, the home of the Southern cotton and iron manufacturing industries, is the only place in the United States where the idea of protecting the physical, moral and educational opportunities of little children has made practically no impression in statute law.

At the outset, now, of her industrial development, the South has a unique opportunity. She can transfer to her own conditions the results of nearly all Christendom’s experience in humane factory regulation, without having to suffer over again the hardships and struggles this progress has cost. I do not mean to imply that all such legislation has worked to perfection, without evasion or hardship; but the vast improvement over no legislation at all indicates the soundness of the effort and points the line of further reform. Those who have not yet even made a start ought not to be frightened out of a beginning because the others still have something more to do.

The Japanese are a case in point. They are now reported to be sending students abroad to study modern labor legislation, with the object of applying it to their own oncoming factory system at the beginning, recognizing that it is as inevitable as progress itself. Russia, even Russia, has already done this. Surely the new South does not need to go to school in Russia and Japan.

It seems hardly necessary to prove the importance of doing something. Bare statement of the admitted fact that children of eight to twelve, and even younger, are working in the mills through the industrial South tells the story, and ought to be sufficient. Personally, I have seen the child labor system in operation in North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, and gathered some vivid impressions; have seen scores of little people working in the dust and din of the spinning-rooms, seen scores of others on their way to the mills before daylight, who would not come out until after dark, the hours of labor ranging from eleven to twelve; have been in the homes of these people and learned something of how they live and the wages they receive. For example, we brought back from the South some 154 weekly pay envelopes for both adults and children, collected from operatives’ families in one of the best sections, and nearly 100 of them are for less than $1.50 each, per week, the average in most cases ranging from ten to thirty or forty cents a day; only older children earning the latter sums, however.

In other words, low as the wage rates are, the actual earnings, especially of children, are much lower. This is due partly to absences, partly to constant deductions of all sorts, for faulty work, rent, money advanced, car-fare advanced to get them down from the mountains or in from the country to the mills, and what not. In forty-four out of the 154 envelopes, these deductions exactly cancel the entire amount of wages due. Let me cite three or four specimen cases, omitting names. One envelope, repeated two or three times, shows wages for the week $1.00, rent seventy-five cents, balance twenty-five cents; another, wages $1.20, tin cup five cents, transportation $1.15, balance nothing; another, wages $3.00, rent $1.40, loan $1.00, balance paid sixty cents; another, wages $1.50, transportation $1.00, balance fifty cents; and so on.

It is impossible to state with exactness the number of children under a given age, say fourteen years, employed in Southern factories. The Federal census does not cover this point, and only one Southern state of the group under consideration—North Carolina—makes any provision for collecting and publishing industrial and labor statistics. Close approximation to the facts of the general conditions, however, is not very difficult. It appears from the latest report of Commissioner Lacy, of the North Carolina Bureau of Labor, that about 7,600 children under fourteen years of age were employed in 261 mills in that state. The Federal census bulletins on manufactures, now being issued, show the total number of employees in the cotton manufacturing industry in the five Southern states where any important amount of cotton manufacturing exists; and for North Carolina the total in 1900 was 30,273 operatives. In other words, more than one-third of the total number of operatives in the cotton mills of that state are children under fourteen years of age. In South Carolina the total number of operatives in 1900 was 30,201, in Georgia 18,348, in Alabama 8,332, in Mississippi 1,675, the total for the five states being 88,829. Estimating the same proportion of child labor throughout the entire group (and this is entirely legitimate, since North Carolina conditions are even better than in some other manufacturing sections in the South), it would appear that there are more than 22,000 children under fourteen years of age in the cotton mills of these states. On this basis, it is a conservative estimate to say that at least eight or ten thousand of these children are under twelve, while the lower extreme of the age limit is down even to the almost unbelievable point of six years; the fact being well established that children as young as six to eight and nine years are to-day working in some of the Southern mills.

Remember, along with this, the fact just observed in the case of our Northern states and European countries, where legislation on child labor exists, that fourteen years is very nearly the average age under which factory labor is prohibited altogether. In other words, the absence of any restrictions in the South means that fully one-third of all the operatives are younger than the age standard established by the forces of humanitarian opinion and wise statesmanship throughout the larger part of Christendom.

The amounts earned by the children in Southern mills would not be necessary to the support of the families under any proper system of factory regulation. The economics of the situation would inevitably take care of that. If the labor of the children is not available, the mills must employ older help, and in order to get such help must pay wages sufficient to maintain the families, including the children. This is how the matter has adjusted itself wherever child labor has been restricted, and of economic necessity it must be so. The difference in labor expense involved has never yet been sufficient to hamper industrial activity or drive capital away from any industrial section, and, so long as competing groups are not permitted to gain a permanent advantage by the wholesale use of child labor, it never will.

The lack of restrictions on child labor makes possible also that semi-barbarous institution of night work. Where all the family work by turns in the mill, the results are shockingly demoralizing. Just as a side-light on one phase of this system, let me quote a paragraph from a discussion of factory evils in the South, just published this month, by Rev. J. A. Baldwin, of Charlotte, N. C., a special student of these problems. Where part of the family work by day and part by night, he says:

“The mother has to get up at 4:30 in the morning to get breakfast for the day hands, so they can be at the mill at six; then the night hands come and eat about seven. She has to have dinner for the day hands strictly at twelve. The night hands get up and eat from four to five, so as to be ready to go to work for the night at six; she also gives them a lunch to be eaten at midnight. Then the day hands get out at six and have supper about seven. Besides this, there is house-cleaning, washing and ironing, sewing, and often the care of little children.... The mills usually run sixty-six hours per week at night; that is, the operatives work twelve hours from Monday night to Friday night inclusive, and on Saturday get up about two o’clock (before they have had enough sleep) to go to work at three. They then work till nine, at night. As a matter of fact it is usually ten or eleven when they get out.

“Night work is much worse in summer than in the winter. In the winter they go to bed, cover up and sleep soundly. In summer it is difficult to sleep on account of light, heat, flies and noise. In summer, while they usually go to bed, it is a very familiar sight to see them lying across the bed with their work-clothes on, or on a pallet in the passage or on the porch. Their sleep is fitful and unsatisfying, and they never feel bright and fresh from the beginning to the end of the week. They furnish the most favorable conditions for the development of physical, intellectual and spiritual disease germs.”

The children of factory families in the South to-day have no protection against this. Night work for women and children ought to be absolutely prohibited. It is, almost everywhere else, even in Russia. This would practically force either the employment of men only in night work, or else its abolition altogether. I would not deny that there may sometimes be good economic reasons for night work, at least in rush times, but it should be done by men if at all, never by women and children.

Nobody is urging any step that threatens to destroy Southern mill profits, but it must be insisted that there is another way to secure profits than the way of using child labor. Scientific improvement of industrial methods is the only sure and safe road to permanent prosperity, and it would not seem that the South has much to fear when the great bulk of the most prosperous industry in Christendom is being conducted under more or less advanced forms of factory regulation. Furthermore, nobody need or ought to urge legislation as the remedy on the ground that Southern manufacturers are all indifferent and inhumane. Legislation is urged simply because it is the most uniform and least costly method the South could of its own accord adopt. Southern manufacturers are no more types of hardhearted callousness than are manufacturers anywhere; they have all been opposed to factory legislation at one time or another, under the influence of mistaken economic doctrines. I do not know, but would risk it, that scores of Southern manufacturers would be glad to see these evils abolished in their own mills if they could do it without immediate competitive disadvantage with all the rest. Here comes in the advantage of legislation, that by establishing the same conditions and opportunities for all, it imposes no special relative handicap on any.

Moreover, and here is one of the saddest features of all, the fathers, sometimes even the mothers, are among the worst offenders in this whole matter. I have seen cases, and there are others in abundance, where the wife and children practically earn the family living in the mill, while the father thoughtfully carries in the dinner-pail at noon, perhaps working a little on odd days when he gets tired of loafing. We cannot altogether blame the manufacturers when these people are fairly urging them to take on the children in the mills; and we need to remember also that to most of these unfortunate people factory life is a distinct improvement over the log-cabin, salt pork and peach brandy, white-trash and Georgia-cracker type of life from which many of them were sifted out when the mills came. The manufacturer knows this, and it is not surprising that he should even think himself something of a philanthropist, just in furnishing mill jobs on almost any terms. He does not see as yet that when these people drift down into the factory centres they become industrial, social and political factors in an altogether new and more serious sense than they ever could be while burrowing in the mountain sides.

To have practically all of the next generation of factory operatives growing up stunted in body and mind, and nearly all of them illiterates, in a section of the country where the general average of illiteracy is already appalling, is a matter of the gravest concern. Southern manufacturers sooner or later will have to recognize this fact, and its impending consequences. According to the 1900 census statistics just appearing, the proportion of illiteracy among males of voting age, white and black together, was, in Alabama 33.7 per cent, in Georgia 31.6 per cent, in Mississippi 33.8 per cent, in North Carolina 29.4 per cent, in South Carolina 35.1 per cent; as compared, for instance, with 6.4 per cent in Massachusetts, 6.8 per cent in Connecticut, 9.2 per cent in Rhode Island, 5.9 per cent in New York, 6.9 per cent in New Jersey, 7.7 per cent in Pennsylvania. The South simply cannot afford to permit the processes to go on that are adding fresh groups every year to its grand total of illiterate and unfit citizens. In the face of the present situation, if a new race of degenerates, brought up in exhausting toil, dense ignorance, and exposed to all the temptations of an unprotected environment, is to be developed now in the fast-growing centres of the new South, they are certain to form a social and civic and economic menace to the community.

This will be true not only of the South; the matter is coming to have a national significance. Within the limits of any one interdependent industrial group, like the United States, there must be at least some general approach to uniformity in the working conditions of the laborers, by given lines of industries. Differences in competitive success must come from differences in managing ability, quality of plant, or natural environment, not from different standards of decency in the use of labor. If long hours and child labor become the fixed conditions of success, the whole field of competing industry must eventually come down to that basis. A competitive influence which works for the undermining of higher standards of living, wherever established, is a matter of universal concern. In a democracy, no condition is safe which offers a competitive advantage to anything that leads toward ignorant, inferior citizenship. It is not safe anywhere, whether in Southern mill villages or Northern city slums, because to make degradation profitable in any quarter sets the current of tendency that way, with demoralizing effect.

That is why it is not meddlesome interference for American citizens not of the South to have a concern about this matter, from the broad standpoint of national welfare. The real test-point of permanent progress and prosperity, affecting the nation as well as the South, is not the size of profits in Southern mills in the next five years, large as we hope they may be through all proper means; but it is the quality of Southern citizenship in the next five generations. That citizenship is now in the making, and now is the time of times to safeguard its development. Such action will be good economics, good morals, good humanity. For the South, it is an inspiring opportunity.

CHILD LABOR IN NEW JERSEY

By HUGH F. FOX

President New Jersey State Board of Children’s Guardians

For the discussion of child labor in New Jersey there are no official data in which reliance can be placed. The reports of the State Bureau of Factory Inspection are conclusive evidence of the incompetence of the inspector and his deputies. The State Charities Aid Association has recently analyzed the report of the Bureau for the year ending October 27, 1900, and has published the results in the New Jersey Review of Charities and Corrections, and it is shown that out of a total of 6,014 factories and bakeshops which were discovered by the Bureau, no less than 1,543 were not visited at all, and yet the department reports favorably on 5,862, indicating that 1,391 were reported favorably, but not visited. According to the 1900 census, however, there were in New Jersey 8,308 factories proper (excluding hand trades), and 1,485 clothing establishments, excluding families working in the tenements. The factory inspectors also report on 1,185 bakeries, so that there appears to have been a total of 10,978 establishments which it was the duty of the inspectors to visit.

The factory inspectors found 5,968 children under sixteen in the 6,014 establishments which they reported; an average of about one child to each establishment. Of these they ordered only fifty-nine children discharged during the year. The census reports an average of 8,042 children under sixteen, employed in manufacturing establishments alone, during the year. Attention should be directed, in this connection, to the difference between the duties of a census taker and a factory inspector. The former furnishes a blank schedule to the manufacturer, which he fills out at his own discretion, without any verification on the part of the census taker. In short, the census agent takes what is given him by the employer, and his interest in the matter is entirely perfunctory. The factory inspector is, however, supposed to make his own investigation and get his own evidence, though it is generally believed that in many cases he contents himself with a visit to the office only and a polite exchange of social amenities with the employer. While the factory inspector is expected to take a personal interest in his figures, it involves a lot of extra work for him and serious trouble for the employer, if the latter is so thoughtless as to inconvenience him by entering into embarrassing particulars in regard to children. In some instances it is reported that the inspector apprises the factory owner of his intended visit beforehand, the children being given a holiday in honor of the occasion.

The New Jersey laws prohibit the employment of boys under twelve and girls under fourteen, “in any factory, workshop, mine or establishment where the manufacture of any goods whatever is carried on.” Children between the ages of twelve and fifteen must have attended school for twelve consecutive weeks (or two terms of six consecutive weeks each) within the twelve months immediately preceding their employment. Children under fifteen must procure a certificate from their teachers giving full particulars as to attendance, etc. The report of the Department of Factory Inspection does not indicate how many of the 5,968 children, under sixteen, are over the age of fifteen, but of the total number of children, only 1,343 were required to produce school certificates. It seems hardly possible that 4,625 of the children employed were over fifteen years of age.

The inspectors have the power to prohibit overcrowding in factories and workshops, and to demand a certificate of physical fitness from some regular practicing physician in the case of minors who may seem physically unable to work. Apparently this gives the inspectors power to prohibit the employment of any girl under eighteen, or boy under twenty-one, who cannot obtain such a certificate, but it is evident from the report of 1900 that this power has not been exercised.

The law prohibits the employment of any child under sixteen “at any work dangerous to health, without a certificate of fitness from a reputable physician.” The meaning of this is somewhat ambiguous. Is the physician to certify to the condition of the child or the healthiness of the occupation? Who is to decide as to whether the work is dangerous to health? The questions are, however, entirely speculative, since the factory inspectors have done nothing to indicate any anxiety to put the matter to the test. It does not seem to have occurred to the inspectors that their power to set a standard of physical fitness for children really removes their chief difficulty. At a recent hearing before Governor Murphy, Inspector Ward pleaded that there were many difficulties in the way of enforcing the laws, his department being confronted with sworn affidavits of parents that their children were over the minimum age of twelve years, while the children themselves are taught with threats never to admit that they are under twelve years old. The test of physical fitness is really much more important than that of age, and the power to apply it gives the factory inspector the whip-hand over both the child’s parent and the employer. It seems strange, however, that nothing has been done in this country to define fully the dangerous trades or occupations. The British Parliament appointed a committee some years ago on “Dangerous Trades and Diseases of Occupations.” The report of this committee established the fact that lead poisoning is rampant in the potteries, that phosphorus necrosis is common in the match factories, and that naphtha fumes in rubber-manufacturing results frequently in premature aging and paralysis. Among other specially unhealthy occupations may be mentioned glass-making, printing, cutlery, silk-mills, hats, pearl buttons and tobacco. What Mrs. Kelley said in 1896, at the National Conference of Charities and Correction, is equally true to-day:

“The physical condition of working children has never received attention, so far as I know, in any systematic way. There are some desultory provisions in the New York and Illinois factory laws which show there is a dim consciousness in the law-making mind that children may be put at work beyond their strength, unless there is supervision of them by some state officer. But these provisions are so loosely drawn that they are nugatory. The Illinois inspectors are urging upon the Legislature the necessity of adding to the staff a physician who shall give her whole time to the care of the children. There is, at present, no such material available as such a physician could furnish, upon the condition of the children, except the records of measurements made by two volunteer physicians for the inspectors, in 1893 and 1894, covering about 200 children, taken from the factories and workshops of Chicago. These records, published in the Factory Inspectors’ Report for 1894, are startling in the proportion which they show of undersized, rachitic, consumptive children at work. They are, however, so limited in number that their principal value lies in indicating the wide field open for investigating the working child as compared with the school child. What they show, comparatively, is that the stature of the working child is far less, upon the average, than that of the city school child. The child study of the past ten years bears out the assertion that stature in children is indicative of general development, physical and mental.”

The New Jersey Factory Inspectors have the power to call upon the public authorities to furnish truant officers, who are required to act under their direction. But this law is also a dead letter. So too is another law which was passed to regulate the sweat-shop evil, and provides that “No person, firm or corporation shall hire or employ any person to work in any room or rooms, apartment or apartments, in any tenement or dwelling-house, or building in the area of a tenement or dwelling-house, at making, in whole or in part, any coats, vests, trousers, knee pants, overalls, cloaks, furs, fur trimmings, fur garments, shirts, purses, feathers, artificial flowers or cigars, unless such person, firm or corporation first shall have obtained a written permit from the factory and workshop inspectors, ... which permit may be revoked at any time that the health of the community or of those employed as aforesaid may require it, and that such permit shall not be granted until due and satisfactory inspection of the premises affected shall have been made by the said inspector.” By a recent act, overcrowding in tenements or rented rooms is punishable at a fine of $25.00. Each adult must have 300 cubic feet of air; each child under twelve, 150 feet.

Public authority is thoroughly aroused on the whole question of child labor in New Jersey, and some interesting facts are coming to light. The trades unions are taking the matter up, in several directions, and the searchlight of the press is trained on several of the leading industries—notably the glass factories of South Jersey, the silk and textile mills of Passaic county, and the various tobacco and cigar factories which are scattered over the state. It is stated that each man employed as a glassblower is required to furnish a boy as a “helper,” and that a combination of the padrone system and veritable child slavery exists. Incidentally it has been developed that many boys have been placed in the families of glassblowers by private child-placing societies and orphan asylums of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It furnishes a striking argument for the public oversight of child-caring agencies. Here are a few letters from local cigarmakers’ unions:

NO. 101, ELIZABETH.—“We have Mr. Hilson’s machine cigar manufactory here, employing about 300 or 400 hands, all girls; about one-half of them are under age; our union has from time to time been obliged to see the factory inspector to remedy this evil; we informed him about a week ago that in case he further neglects his duty the Union County Trades Council and Cigar Makers’ Union would be compelled to see the Governor. The leading brand they make is the “Hoffman House,” which is done up in neat boxes, and as you can readily see they are able to undersell all union goods, as the lowest price for union cigars made is $8.00 per M., while they can furnish them with the girls working for them for $2.50 to $3.00.”

NO. 230, MILLVILLE.—“There is no child labor in connection with our trade in this locality. This being a strong union city we have no use for the production of child labor in our trade. This union covers Millville, Vineland, Bridgeton and Salem. No child labor in either city in connection with this trade; you will find most of the children employed are employed by the American Tobacco Company or Trust. They have a factory in Camden, N. J., this being the nearest one to this city.”

NO. 428, TRENTON.—“There is one place that employs 280, mostly children from ten years old. We had a committee last week working on the subject of child labor employed in this place known as the American Cigar Trust; they say it is safe to say that the ages won’t average over fourteen. We know for a fact that their children are not allowed to say a word to one another while at work, if they do they will be discharged. They claimed at one time to have over 300 at work and have room and machinery for over a thousand, but don’t seem to get them as fast as they thought. Our committee reported that some of these little tots when they came out at night actually fell down from weakness, but there seems to be no way to stop such work.

“The work that these children do costs the Trust $2.10 per thousand for making cigars, and the low price for men is $7.50 per thousand; the average cigarmakers will make 1500 a week of this kind of work, and three of these children with machinery make six thousand a week. You can imagine, when the Trust surely get their feet in it, what will become of cigar-making.”

Many of the children in the glass works and in worsted mills are said to have been employed on “night shifts.” If the children in state reformatories were worked half as hard as the children in the factories, there would be a perfect storm of indignation. There is, however, a general awakening, and the leading papers in Newark, Paterson, Passaic, Hoboken, Jersey City, Trenton, Camden and other cities have taken the matter up vigorously. The Governor has announced his determination to make the inspectors devote their entire time to their duties, in accordance with the law just passed, instead of spending their odd moments only in inspecting factories, as has been the case hitherto. Good results are already apparent, and the new inspectors in Essex and Passaic counties are making a strong effort to enforce the laws. The latter has brought suits against several employers for the recovery of the penalty imposed by the state for employing children illegally. There is ample legislation in New Jersey for the regulation of child labor, though the minimum age for boys should be raised to fourteen, and girls to fifteen. Now that the community is informed of the evil, the Legislature may be counted on to make an adequate appropriation for expenses. There ought to be a lawyer on the staff of the Department of Factory Inspection, and an effort should be made to bring the various State Boards into co-operation in the work. It seems curious that no reference has hitherto been made to child labor in any of the reports of the state and local Boards of Health and of Education; nor does the Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industries seem to know anything of the subject. The various departments of the government seem to be so afraid of overlapping, that in this, as in other matters, they studiously ignore each other.

The “Lord bill,” which was passed last session, authorizes the Governor to appoint a woman inspector, and strong pressure is being brought upon Governor Murphy to induce him to do so. The State Federation of Labor has been working for the appointment of a woman inspector since 1897. It is felt that the duties of the office involve personal qualities possessed in an eminent degree by many women, and that a good woman inspector would work a revolution in the department.

The following tables are given for purposes of comparison with other states. The school census of 1900, taken by the state, gave 457,479 children of school age, the enrollment being 322,575. The number of schoolable children is increasing from 7,000 to 10,000 per year. The “persons of school age” in the Federal census cover all from five to twenty years of age, inclusive. The total of them was 572,917 (282,180 males and 290,737 females). The particulars as to parentage are:

Born of American parents 271,827 Born of foreign parents in United States 226,566 Born in foreign lands 54,837 Born of colored parents 19,693

Notes from the Census Bulletins Nos. 88, 89, 135 and 157 for New Jersey (1900):

Total population of New Jersey 1,883,669 This was made up as follows: Born of American parents 825,973 Born of foreign parents in United States 556,294 Born in foreign lands 430,050 Born of colored parents 71,352

The percentage of the New Jersey population living in cities is 70.6. The states of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York are the only ones which have a larger percentage of their population in cities. In this connection it is interesting to note that New Jersey ranks sixth in the United States in the value of its manufactured products.

The average number of wage-earners employed by manufacturing establishments in New Jersey during 1900 was 241,582 (12.8 per cent of the total population), of whom 8,042 were children under sixteen years of age.

The greatest number employed at any one time during the year was 307,933, or 16.3 per cent of the total population.

The total number of manufacturing and mechanical establishments in New Jersey was 15,481. Of these, 11,115, or 71.8 per cent, were located in forty-four cities and towns. The urban establishments employed 196,901 wage-earners, or 81.5 per cent of the total number employed. The list of industries includes “hand trades.” Omitting them, the total number of manufactures proper was 8,308.

The manufacture of textiles is the most important industry in the state. Of these the silk factories employed 24,157 wage-earners out of a total of 46,932 engaged in textile work.

Foundry and machine-shop products are second, with 17,918 wage-earners.

Refining and petroleum third, with 8,288.

Tobacco has 3,595, pottery 8,117, tanning 4,178, chemicals 3,048, rubber 2,609, jewelry 2,779, sewing machines 4,701, glass 5,383.

The fifteen leading industries of the State embraced 1,780 establishments, and employed an average of 117,008 wage-earners during the year 1900.

Average number of children under sixteen years, employed in New Jersey manufactories during the year 1900 (U. S. Census Bulletin No. 157):

Boots and shoes 192 Brass wire 65 Bakeries 64 Buttons 71 Carpets 86 Clothing 191 Cotton goods 641 Dyeing and finishing textiles 70 Fireworks 85 Foundry and machine shops 212 Canning 86 Gas and lamp fixtures 181 Glass 850 Hardware 80 Hosiery and knit goods 152 Iron and steel 65 Linen goods 316 Pocket-books 60 Pottery 193 Printing 174 Roofing 74 Shirts 50 Silk 1,199 Stamped ware 119 Surgical appliances 75 Tobacco 183 Woolen goods 187 Worsted goods 456 ————— 6,177 Miscellaneous industries 1,865 ————— 8,042

Comparison of the reports of the United States Census, and of the New Jersey Factory Inspectors, for the year 1900, in regard to children employed in certain industries in eleven cities in New Jersey:

Census Factory Reports. Inspectors’ Reports. Bayonne—Petroleum 21 0 Camden—Worsted goods 160 113 Elizabeth—Tobacco 0 30 Elizabeth—Clothing and shirts 9 10 Elizabeth—Sewing machines 0 22 Hoboken and Jersey City—Silk 60 60 Hoboken—Clothing 9 0 Jersey City—Clothing 3 0 Jersey City—Electrical apparatus 45 25 Jersey City—Printing 48 16 Jersey City—Soap 42 21 Jersey City—Tobacco 92 87 Jersey City—Boxes 0 44 Newark—Boots and shoes 108 0 Newark—Carpentering 65 0 Newark—Clothing 82 11 Newark—Corsets 34 17 Newark—Foundry and mechanical shops 52 0 Newark—Hardware 75 16 Newark—Jewelry 36 13 Newark—Leather 22 11 Newark—Stamped ware 116 0 Newark—Tobacco 19 35 Newark—Thread 0 100 New Brunswick—Tobacco 29 45 Orange—Hats 27 5 Passaic—Woolen goods 98 15 Paterson—Silk 832 504 Paterson—Foundries 91 0 Trenton—Iron and steel 54 0 Trenton—Potteries 118 204 Trenton—Rubber 28 47 Trenton—Bakeries 19 47

CHILD LABOR IN BELGIUM

By E. DUBOIS

Professor in the University of Ghent

The industrial census of October 31, 1896, of which the complete results have just been published, furnishes the most recent and the most complete information regarding the extent of the industrial labor of children and the general conditions under which it exists.

Upon that date, out of a total of 671,596 laborers of all ages and both sexes, employed in the manufactures properly so called, and excluding the domestic workshops, there were 76,147 children less than sixteen years of age working in factories and workshops—that is to say, out of every 100 employees eleven were less than sixteen years of age.

The child labor was found principally:

(1) In the textile industries 11,863.

(2) In the mining industries 10,167, of whom 5,516 are employed in underground labor, and 4,651 in surface labor.

(3) In the manufacture of clothing for men and women 9,674.

(4) In the glass industries 4,429.

Among 4,681 establishments and contractors employing both adults and children, and having at least ten employees: 1,737 (37.1 per cent) employed less than 10 per cent of children along with adults; 1,675 (35.9 Per cent) employed from 11 to 25 per cent of children along with adults; 821 (17.3 per cent) employed from 26 to 50 per cent of children along with adults; 361 (7.9 per cent) employed from 51 to 100 per cent of children along with adults; 87 (1.8 per cent) employed more than 100 per cent of children along with adults.

There are, hence, in eighty-seven establishments more children than adults. These concerns belong chiefly to the textile industries (26), to the tobacco industries (10), books (8), clothing (7), manufacture of chocolate (6). One woolen mill and two dressmakers employ only children.

The statistics of the children according to age is as follows:

Number of children aged less than sixteen, 76,147—50,493 boys, 25,654 girls; number of children from fourteen to sixteen, 54,946—36,431 boys, 18,515 girls; number of children from twelve to fourteen, 20,762—13,814 boys, 6,948 girls; number of children less than twelve, 439–248 boys, 191 girls. About one-half of these children less than twelve years old belong to the manufacture of clothing (dressmakers and cutters).

The census has succeeded in determining the length of actual labor (recess deducted), for 61,652 children employed in the industrial establishments, not including the coal mines. Rather more than one-tenth of them (about 7,000) work nine hours and less. One-third (about 21,000) work about ten hours. One-third (about 19,000) work about ten and a half to eleven hours. One-fourth (about 15,000) work more than twelve hours. The days of more than eleven hours are most frequent in the textile and clothing manufactures.

Under the head of time of labor: 61,314 children (38,414 boys and 22,900 girls) work during the day only (92.99 per cent); thirty-six children (boys) work only at night (0.02 per cent), 4,611 children (4,238 boys and 373 girls) work alternately by day and night (6.99 per cent). The majority of these night laborers are employed in the glass industries, viz.: 3,262. Then comes the iron industry with 657 children, and the confectionery factories with 447.

Regarding the coal mines, the duration of labor has been determined for 9,153 children out of 10,167. Among these 9,153 children, 7,772 work during the day only (5,550 boys and 2,222 girls); 4,482 (3,281 boys and 1,201 girls) work ten hours and less; 2,855 (1,900 boys and 955 girls) work ten to ten and a half hours; 308 (246 boys and 62 girls) work ten and a half to eleven hours; 127 (123 boys and 4 girls) work more than eleven hours; 4,827 boys and 9 girls work underground. Working only at night are 1,357 boys (no girls); and in gangs 24 boys. Almost the whole number of the “underground” boys work about ten hours or less, between the descent and the ascent.

One of the great merits of the Belgian industrial census of 1896 is the particular care which was taken in gathering exact statistics regarding the individual wages of the whole of the working population. The statistics of the wages of the Belgian workmen, by their completeness and exactness, are certainly of the best existing to-day. They have succeeded in ascertaining the wages of 70,688 young workpeople (45,577 boys and 25,111 girls).

Number of children working by the day: with wages less than 0.50 fr., 17,229 = 24.37 per cent; 7,511 boys (of which 2,844 receive no pay); 9,718 girls (of which 6,141 receive no pay); from 0.50 to 1.00 fr., 21,192 = 29.98 percent; 12,748 boys and 8,444 girls; from 1 to 1.50 fr., 19,723 = 27.91 percent; 15,090 boys and 4,633 girls; 1.50 fr. and over, 12,544 = 17.74 per cent; 10,228 boys and 2,316 girls.

In round figures one may say that one-fourth of these young employees earn nothing or less than 0.50 fr.; a little more than half earn from 0.50 to 1.50 fr.; and less than one-fifth earn more than 1.50 fr. In fact about two-thirds of the latter earn from 1.50 to 2 fr., and one-third from 2 to 2.50 fr. These percentages relate to the entire number of children, and would be modified somewhat if the boys and girls were considered separately. The figures also show that smaller wages are paid for female than for male labor.

The Law of December 13, 1889

The statutes affecting child labor in industrial establishments have been under consideration in Belgium since 1843. At that time an investigation conducted by the government unveiled the unfortunate and often abusive conditions under which child labor was conducted, and a scheme of very remarkable legislation was drawn up by M. Ducpetiaux, chairman of the Investigation Commission.

But this project was premature. Manchesterian ideas were still the prevalent ones in the country and with the government. Reform was still to be waited for, for almost a half century longer, in spite of the repeated efforts of divers groups of enlightened manufacturers, of physicians, of philanthropists. All these united efforts succeeded simply in causing to be introduced into the royal decree of April 28, 1884, containing regulations concerning the working of mines, an article, No. 69, which forbade boys aged less than twelve, and girls less than fourteen, to be allowed to labor in the mines.

The industrial troubles of 1886, and the efforts of the Labor Commission instituted the same year, prepared at last the solution to the question, and led to the law of December 13, 1889, upon the labor of women, of youths and of children in industrial establishments.

This law placed under restrictive measures the labor of children:

(1) In mines (coal and metal), quarries, stoneyards.

(2) In works, mills and factories.

(3) In establishments classified as dangerous, unhealthy or unsuitable; as well as in those where steam boilers or machine motors were used.

(4) In harbors, terminals and stations.

(5) In transportation by land or water.

It applied both to public and private establishments, even when they were of an educational or benevolent character. By virtue of this provision the law regulated, for example, the labor performed by children in the reform schools, in the lace-making schools, etc.

The law did not affect the family workshops, where only the members of a family are employed, under the authority of either the father, the mother, or the guardian; providing, however, that these workshops were not classed as dangerous, unhealthy or unsuitable, or that work therein was not performed with the aid of steam boilers or machine motors.

It also did not affect, according to the admitted official interpretation, other workshops which could not be regarded as mills or factories, or which are not classed among the dangerous, unhealthy or unsuitable establishments. Hence, the greatest portion of the clothing factories, which employ a great deal of child labor, escaped the application of the law.

The principal legal provisions applying to children and youths of less than sixteen years are the following:

(1) Prohibition to employ at labor children under twelve years of age (Art. 2).

(2) The King can prohibit, or only authorize under certain conditions, the employment of children and youths under sixteen, at labor that is beyond their strength, dangerous or unhealthful (Art. 3).

(3) The length of the working day is twelve hours at the most, divided by recesses, the total of which shall not be less than one and a half hours.

The King has the authority to regulate the length of the working day, as well as the length and the conditions of recess, in accordance with the nature of the occupations in which the children are employed, and the needs of the industries, professions or trades. (Art. 4).

(4) Night labor, that is to say, labor after nine o’clock in the evening and before five in the morning, is prohibited to children and youths under sixteen (Art. 6).

Exceptions. (a) The King can authorize the employment of children at night, at occupations which, by reason of their nature, cannot be interrupted or retarded, or which cannot be accomplished except within a definite period.

(b) As relating to labor in mines, the King can authorize night labor by a certain class of workmen more than fourteen years of age, also by male children fully twelve years old, to begin their labor at four a. m. (c) The governors of provinces, acting upon the report of the inspectors of suitable labor, can authorize night labor for children and youths, in all industries or trades, in cases of delay resulting from unavoidable necessity, or in exceptional circumstances. This authorization cannot be granted for more than two months at most; but it can be renewed. It must be approved by the Minister.

(5) Children and youths under sixteen cannot be employed at labor more than six days in the week (Art. 7). This regulation provides for the Sunday holiday, but the legislation of 1889 did not intend expressly to forbid Sunday labor. Indeed in 1889 the point was discussed whether the Belgian Constitution (Art. 15) did not oppose the legal prohibition of Sunday labor. Even to-day the question is still in controversy. Hence the law of 1889 solved the difficulty by merely forbidding children to labor more than six days in the week. In fact Sunday, the seventh day, is the day of rest. There are, however, certain Exceptions: (a) As regards the industries in which labor, by reason of its nature, cannot stand either interruption or delay, the King can authorize the employment of children over fourteen, during seven days in the week, whether permanently or temporarily, or conditionally. They must, however, be granted, in every case, the necessary time to devote to their religious duties once a week, as well as one complete day of rest in fourteen.

(b) In case of unavoidable necessity, the inspectors, burgomasters and governors can, with respect to the industries, authorize the employment on the seventh day of children and youths under sixteen.

(6) In order to facilitate the enforcement of these legal provisions, children and youths over sixteen must carry a memorandum book, which is to be given them gratis by the parish administration; and which must contain their Christian and surnames, date and place of their birth, their residence, and the full names with residence either of their parents or guardians. Likewise the heads of the industries, chiefs or managers, must keep a registry of the same information that appears in the memorandum books (Art. 10).

The Belgian laws, in their principal provisions which we have just examined, resemble for the most part the laws regulating child labor in other countries. But there is a gap which must have struck the reader, viz.: the absence of provisions for the education of children. Foreign laws, and notably the German, English and French laws, require that the children, whose industrial labor is effectively regulated, should devote to attendance at school the time which they do not spend in the factory or workshop. This is done in the interests of their welfare and for their intellectual and moral development. The legislator only imperfectly fulfills his mission when he confines himself to preventing and repressing the abuses of industrial labor.

This defect in the Belgian law is due to the opposition that compulsory education has met with and still meets among a notable part of the population and among the majority in Parliament.

In order that the statement of legislation may be complete, the author has collected in a table the provisions of the royal decrees which have resulted from Articles 4, 6 and 7 of the law, and which concern the determination of the duration of daily labor and the conditions of recess in a number of industries (Art. 4); the exceptions to the prohibitions of night labor (Art. 6), and the authorizations of work on the seventh day (Art. 7). (See page 210.)

Art. 3 of the law gives the King the power to prohibit or to regulate the labor of children or youths under sixteen, in certain industries particularly unhealthful or dangerous.

The royal decrees of February 19, 1895, August 5, 1895, and April 5, 1898, have applied this legal provision in the following manner:

(1) Prohibition of labor of children and youths under sixteen in sixty-five industries, enumerated in Articles 1 and 2 of the decree of February 19, 1895. These industries are, for the most part, the chemical ones, or those which manufacture injurious products.

(2) In the lucifer-match factories:

(a) The labor of children and youths under sixteen is prohibited where paste containing white phosphorus is made, or in the factories where matches dipped in such paste are dried. Such labor is also prohibited where matches are dipped in white phosphorus.

(b) Children under fourteen may not be employed in filling boxes with white phosphorus matches (Article 3 of the royal decree of February 19, 1895).

(3) In factories where india-rubber is treated with carbon sulphuret, the presence and the labor of children and youths under sixteen are prohibited (Art. 4 of the same decree).

(4) Art. 6 enumerated a series of industries in which certain places are closed to children and youths under sixteen, because of the injurious and unhygienic character of the labor performed there. Art. 7 prohibits the admission into certain places and labor therein of children under fourteen.

(5) The royal decree of August 5, 1895, regulates the employment of children in rag-shops.

(6) Finally, by force of a royal decree of April 5, 1898 (intercalated into the decree of February 19, 1895, Art. 5) it is forbidden to employ children and youths under sixteen in all places where the treatment of hare and rabbit skins is performed; in all places where the hare and rabbit skins are prepared before the treatment; also in all processes which the skins undergo after the treatment, carrying, brushing, cutting.

INDUSTRIES. LENGTH OF LABOR NIGHT LABOR. LABOR ON THE AND CONDITIONS OF SEVENTH DAY. RECESS.

(Art. 4 of the (Authorization (Authorization law.) provided by Art. provided by Art. 6 of the law.) 7 of the law.)

I. Spinning and For children and weaving of youths of 13 to flax, cotton, 16 years: 11½ hemp and jute hours a day, 3 (royal decree recesses of a of December 26, total of 1½ 1892). hours at least. The recess at mid-day to be at least 1 hour. For children of 12 to 13 years, 6 hours a day; recess, ¼ hour.

II. Woolen For children and industry (royal youths under decree of 16: 11¼ hours a December 26, day. Recess as 1892). in No. 1.

III. Newspaper For children and printing (royal youths under decree of 16: 10 hours a December 26, day. Several 1892). recesses with a total of 1½ hours at least.

IV. Art As for No. III; industries but for type (royal decree foundries, the of December 26, labor of 1892). children under 16 is limited to 8 hours a day.

V. Manufacture of For youths of 14 Authorization for paper, (royal to 16: 10 hours young men of 14 decree of a day. Length to 16. The December 26, of recess: 3 length of night 1892). recesses with a labor and total of 1½ recesses is the hours at least. same as for day For children of labor. 12 to 14: 6 hours a day. Recesses: one or more with a total of ½ hour at least.

VI. Tobacco and For youths of 14 cigars (royal to 16: 10 hours decree of a day. December 26, Recesses: 3 1892). with a total of 1½ hours at least. For children of 12 to 14: 6 hours a day. Recesses: one or more with a total of ½ hour at least.

VII. Manufacture For children and Authorization for of sugar (royal youths of less youths of 14 to decree of than 16: 10½ 16. The same December 26, hours a day. conditions of 1892). Recesses: 3 labor and with a total of recess as for 1½ hours at day labor. least.

VIII. Furniture For children and and industries youths under pertaining to 16: 9 hours a ship-building day during the (royal decree months of of December 26, October to 1892). March, and 10 hours a day during the rest of the year. Recesses: 3 with total of 1½ hours at least. The recess at mid-day shall be 1 hour at least.

IX. Pottery and For children and crockeryware youths under (royal decree 16: 10 hours a of December 26, day. Recess as 1892). No. VIII.

X. Refractory As for No. IX. products (royal decree of December 26, 1892).

XI. Glass As for Nos. IX Authorization of One week in every industry (royal and X. night labor, two, the boys decree of for the of 14 to 16 can December 26, glass-tapping, be employed a 1892). to boys of 14 seventh day at to 16. The same the conditions of glass-tapping. labor and On that day the recess as by actual labor day. must not exceed 6 hours, with a recess of ½ hour for rest, and the time necessary for their spiritual devotions.

XII. Lucifer For children and „ „ matches (royal youths under decree of 16: 10½ hours a December 26, day. Recesses: 1892). 3 with a total of 1½ hours at least. One hour at mid-day. During these recesses the workmen leave the premises.

XIII. For children and Ship-building youths under industry (royal 16: 8 hours a decree of day during the December 26, months of 1892). November to February, and 10 hours the rest of the year. Recess: 1 hour during the first months, and 1½ hours during the others.

XIV. Zinc rolling Children from 12 Authorization for mills (royal to 14: 5 hours youths of 14 to decree of a day. Recess 16. The same December 26, of ½ hour at conditions of 1892). least. Youths labor and of 14 to 16: 10 recess as by hours. Recesses day. with a total of 1½ hours; noon recess at least 1 hour.

XV. Crystal and For children and Authorization for One week in every goblet youths under youths of 14 to two, the youths factories 16, who work at 16. The same of 14 to 16 may (royal decree glass-making: conditions of be employed a of December 26, 10 hours and 20 labor and seventh day at 1892) minutes. recess as by the manufacture Recesses: 3, day. of glass tiles one of 20 and other minutes at analogous least, in the labor, which morning; one of settled glass ½ hour at demands. On least, at noon; that day the a third of 20 actual labor minutes at shall not least, in the exceed 6 hours, afternoon. with a recess of ½ hour at least, and the time necessary for their spiritual devotions shall be provided for.

XVI. Industries For children and „ pertaining to youths under clothing (1st 16: 11 hours. category: Recesses: 3 hosiery, lace, with total of embroidery, not less than tulles and 1½ hours. The blond lace, mid-day rest wool-braid, shall be at etc.), (royal least 1 hour. decree of December 26, 1892).

XVII. Industries For children and pertaining to youths under clothing (2d 16, it must not category: exceed 10 hours tanning, a day. Recesses currying, with a total of tawing, at least 1 cord-waining, hour. During hat-making, these recesses fine linen, the workmen toilet and shall be at millinery, liberty to etc., in so far leave the as the law of premises. December 13, 1889, applies to the establishments where these industries are performed), (royal decree of December 26, 1892).

XVIII. Bulky Children of 12 to mechanical 14: 10 hours. construction Youths of 14 to (royal decree 16: 11 hours. of December 26, Recesses with a 1892). total of 1 hour at least.

XIX. Small In a first group mechanical of industries construction in this branch (royal decree (Table A), the of December 26, length of labor 1892). of children 12 to 14 shall not exceed 10 hours. For youths of 14 to 16: 11 hours. In the trades enumerated in Tables B, C, D, children and youths of less than 16: 10 hours. Recesses with total of 1½ hours at least. One hour at noon. Free exit from the premises.

XX. Bricks and Children and tiles youths under “hand-made,” 16: 12 hours a and other day. Recesses: similar if the actual employments day’s labor (royal decree exceeds 8 of September hours: 3 22, 1896). recesses with total of 1½ hours at least, at noon. If actual labor exceeds 6, but not 8 hours: 1 or more recesses with total of 1 hour at least. A recess of ¼ hour at least is obligatory after each 4 hours of labor.

XXI. Window-glass For children and Authorization for One week in every industry; basin youths under youths of 14 to two, youths of kilns; drying 16: 10½ hours. 16. The same 14 to 16 can be ground; pot Recesses with conditions of employed the kilns (royal total of 1½ recess and seventh day. decree of hours. Each labor as by December 31, period of labor day. 1892). shall be followed by a complete rest of a duration double that of the labor itself.

XXII. Mining and In underground Authorization of quarrying labor, the night labor for (royal decree length of stay, male youths of of March 15, descent and 14 to 16 1893). N. ascent occupied in B.—For the coal comprises, cutting out and mines of among children maintaining the Mariemont, and male youths roads and where the under 16, 10½ filling up the organization of hours. Recess: dumps. Length labor is at least ⅛ of of labor 10 different from the stay hours, and that of other underground. recess as by coal mines, the Male children day. royal decree of 12 years old March 15, 1893, may be employed provides a underground special after 4 a. m., regulation. under the same conditions of labor and recess. For surface labor, the length of labor for children and youths under 16 is 10½ hours. Recess, 1½ hours at least.

XXIII. Manufacture of coke (royal decree of March 15, 1893).

A. Ovens for Children and A. One week in common coke. youths under every two, 16: 10½ hours. authorization Recess not less to work a than 1½ hours. seventh day, The principal for male youths recess 1 hour. of 14 to 16. Day’s work 8 hours, less the recess of 1 hour and time for religious devotions.

B. Coke ovens Children and For male youths B. Same for the youths under over 14, authorization recovery of 16: 10½ hours a authorization as for No. by-products. day. Recesses for night work. XXIII A. with total of Same length and 1½ hours. recess as by Principal day. recess 1 hour.

XXIV. Factories Children and for the youths under agglomeration 16: 10½ hours. of coal Recesses: a (briquette total of at factories), least 1½ hours. (royal decree Principal of March 15, recess 1 hour. 1893).

XXV. Quarries and For underground works connected labor, the same with them conditions as (royal decree for No. XXII. of March 15, 1893).

„ For surface labor: 10 hours. In the tool repair shops: 10½ hours. Total recess 1½ hours.

„ In the works for cutting and carving the rough products of the quarry: for children and youths from 12 to 16: 8 hours a day, in order to give time for professional instruction.

XXVI. Metallurgic Length of labor: Male youths of 14 One week in every works governed 10½ hours a to 16 years may two, male under the law day. Total work at night, youths of 14 to of April 21, recess: 1½ under the same 16 may work a 1810. (Blast hours. conditions of seventh day, in furnaces, iron Principal labor and order to feed and steel recess: ½ hour recess as the the blast mills, rolling between 11 and day labor. furnaces and mills, 2 o’clock for attend to the foundries, the furnace zinc foundries. etc.), (royal men; 1 hour for Time allowed decree of March the other for religious 15, 1893). workmen. devotions.

XXVII. Preserving Children and Authorization for and pickling of youths under youths of 14 to fish (royal 16: 11 hours. 16 to work from decree of Recesses: 3 9 p. m. until November 3, with total of midnight, 1898). 1½ hours when during a number actual labor of days which exceeds 8 shall not hours. When it exceed thirty a exceeds 6, but year. Actual not 8 hours, labor may never one or several exceed 12 recesses with a hours. Recesses total of 1 as by day. hour. A recess of ¼ hour is compulsory after each period of 4 hours’ labor.

XXVIII. Factories Boys of 14 to 16 for enamel may be employed products (royal at night, one decree of week out of November 29, every two, in 1898). the work of the enamel cooking ovens. Length of labor and recess as for No. XIX.

In order to give a full account of the extent of the regulation of child labor in Belgium, it was necessary to consider in detail the law of 1889 and the provisions of the various decrees of which we have just spoken. Let us see now how the law and the regulations are applied:

The Application of the Law.

In order to insure the application of the law and to watch its execution, Article 12 prescribes the appointment of officials by the government, whose powers shall be determined by royal decree.

At first the inspection of labor was vested in officers already charged with other powers. This system, condemned by experience in other lands, did not give good results, and a special body of labor inspectors was organized by a royal decree of October 22, 1895.

According to this decree, the inspection of labor and the observance of the execution of the law of 1889 in the mines, quarries and metallurgic works is committed to the engineers of the mines. For all other industries, the service of labor inspection is attached to the Labor Bureau.

This service comprises:

(1) Inspectors of labor in the central administration, residing at Brussels. These officers are six in number: two inspectors-general, three labor inspectors and one female inspector.

(2) Inspectors and deputies residing in the country. There are actually eight labor inspectors in the provincial service and six deputies. The country is divided into nine districts, and the departments of inspection have, on the last occasion, been defined by a ministerial decree of December 16, 1899.

(3) Finally, a certain number of medical inspectors are charged specially with watching over the application of the rules with reference to the healthfulness and safety of the workshops.

The labor inspectors not only have charge of the execution of the law of 1889, but also of the laws on the payment of wages, the regulations of factories, etc. They make an annual report, and their reports have been published regularly since 1895, and from them information must be secured concerning the law’s execution, even though the reports are often incomplete and unmethodical.

I will refer here particularly to the last report published, that of 1900:

The law of 1889 was not applied seriously until 1895, following the reorganization of inspection. Since then progress has been made, but it is incontestable that in several of its provisions the law is not applied as it should be in all parts of the country. The press and Parliament have several times pointed out this unsatisfactory situation.

The inspectors certainly perform their complicated and delicate work with fidelity. But they are too few in number to fitly discharge their numerous duties. The opposition or the ill-will of the manufacturers is still too frequent; and when the inspectors wish to apply the law and enforce its respect, they do not always find the support which they should have among their superior officers.

In certain industries, e. g., glass and hand-made brick, which employ a considerable number of children, the application of the law is particularly to be desired. It is true these industries have peculiar economic characteristics. There has already been introduced a regulation less severe for the brick-works, and certain mitigations are being asked for the glass industry.

Too many children are still permitted to labor before having reached the legal age of twelve years. The inspector for the district of East Flanders (Ghent) announces that the number of children under twelve found in the industrial establishments was particularly numerous in 1900. He found seventy-five such in his district in ten hosiery factories, two tobacco factories, one lace-making school, one mechanical weaving mill, one jute mill, one sugar refinery. (Report 1900, pp. 88, 89.) In some other districts the situation is better, according to this report, but almost everywhere violations are still observed, as well as the complicity of parents. “Families in need often make all efforts and use all sorts of devices to cause their children under age to be admitted to labor.” (Report, p. 143.) It happens that the regulation note-books requiring the entry of the child’s age contain false declarations, or they are delivered to the children under age by the civic authority. (Report, p. 127.) Moreover, these note-books are often missing, and the registries which the masters should keep do not always come up to the demands of the law.

A royal decree of December 26, 1892, as we have said, organizes the system of half-time—six hours of work—for children of twelve to thirteen, employed in the textile industries other than the woolen industry. This system has not given good results. The manufacturers prefer to do without children under thirteen, rather than adopt this special organization. In the works which have adopted this system, the child does not benefit from it at all. “After having worked six hours in the morning at the spinning or weaving of linen, the parents send that child to complete the day’s labor at a chairmaker’s, at picking rags, or in a preserved fruit and vegetable factory, where the law does not protect him any longer within the same limits. Moreover, if he does not work in the afternoon, he roams around the streets and becomes vicious, the school refusing to admit as pupil a child who can only attend half the time.” (Report, p. 65.)

This confirms what was said above, concerning the defect in the Belgian law, which contains no regulations for the instruction of children whose labor it limits.

On several occasions the labor inspectors have called attention to the necessity of extending the application of the law to the workshops which are not included, and especially to the clothing and millinery shops, which freely employ numerous children. They ask, in every case, that the legislator should state more clearly and precisely than the actual interpretation of the law does, the distinction between the workshops subject to the law and those that are not. (Report, pp. 3, 66.)

Finally, the inspectors think that it is necessary to revise and to simplify the royal decrees, the complications of which give rise to many difficulties. This revision is, by the way, at present under consideration. (Report, pp. 3, 44.)

From what precedes, we may conclude that, except certain desirable ameliorations and simplifications, Belgium possesses a law comprising what is needed for the protection of children employed in the industries, and a law regardful of the many interests of industry. The most important present problem is to secure general, strict and complete execution of the legal provisions. Nothing is more demoralizing, from the social point of view, than to possess laws to which officials either cannot or will not compel obedience.

MACHINERY AND LABOR

By HENRY WHITE

General Secretary, United Garment Workers of America

This subject is one which involves the whole industrial problem. It is the complexity of conditions due to the introduction of machinery which has caused the wide differences of opinion upon the question of wealth distribution. Under the simpler methods of industry the manner in which the proceeds of labor were divided was readily understood; to-day, however, the system is so highly organized that there is much confusion as to its operations. The perplexity is so great that many who see in labor-saving inventions some malign purpose, and others again who discern that any means which enhances the productiveness of labor must benefit mankind, are unable to comprehend the manner by which that result is effected. The habit of judging the operations of so complex a system by the effect upon special interests instead of viewing it as a whole, accounts for the common misconception regarding the function of machinery.

If people were to consider how meagre would be the rewards of toil without the aid of machinery, how costly the necessities of life, and how small the purchasing power of the laborer, its uses would soon become apparent. The confusion is heightened by the dual relation which a person occupies as a producer and as a consumer. As a consumer he benefits almost at once by every saving in effort, while as a producer his means of a livelihood may in consequence be threatened. The laborers thrown out of work by a machine or even the merchant forced out of business through some combination cannot be expected to appreciate the beneficence of such economy. In both cases their horizon is limited to their own means of a livelihood. When a person finds his occupation suddenly gone, it outweighs all other considerations; and unmindful of the benefits he may have received from similar economies in other trades, inventions to him seem a curse. The rewards of the particular invention which distresses him go to the body of consumers and he only shares indirectly as one of them. In the case of the wage-workers the gain is not evident as it is with the manufacturer who first utilizes an invention, and consequently their views on the subject will differ correspondingly. It is regrettable that even the temporary disadvantages of industrial progress should fall heavily upon some to the advantage of others, but it is as unavoidable as friction is to motion. The suffering can be mitigated only in proportion as our knowledge of the methods of industry increases, by recognizing the inevitableness of the changes and preparing to meet them.

Economic laws, like the laws of nature, admit of no exceptions. Were discriminations possible the consequences would make the present hardships seem nothing in comparison. In fact, society would quickly disintegrate and revert to its primitive state. If society had to wait for the sanction of every person before a forward step could be taken it would never start. In the process of adjustment and readjustment which progress implies, it is unavoidable that some have to be forced out of old grooves and made to fit into new ones. It is this adaptability to change which characterizes modern enterprise; this willingness to suffer immediate discomforts for the achievement of larger ends.

The general confusion as to the service rendered by machinery is not strange considering the absurd notions which are rife regarding the rudiments of social economy. No distinction is usually made between useful and useless labor. There is supposed to be only a given amount of work to be done, and hence the less each one does the more jobs there will be to go around. If wealth be wasted or destroyed, it will in some mysterious manner be replaced. The destruction of property by fire or flood is regarded with complacency by those not directly affected, upon the supposition that more work is thereby provided, without taking into account that the wealth required to replace it must be diverted from some productive use. The spending or circulating of money is equivalent to creating wealth. Luxury is looked upon with more favor than frugality, and it is even thought that gambling benefits a community as much as industry because the fortunate ones spend freely, and the misery which it begets is lost sight of in contemplation of the profits of a few. With such erroneous ideas entertained even by educated people, it is apparent why the complex operations of our industrial system are so slightly understood. The expansion of industry which follows labor-saving devices, the creation of new industries and the consequent replacing of those displaced is unintelligible to all save those that comprehend economic principles. In addition to the popular misconceptions of the subject, there are historic causes which have created this antipathy to machinery. During the transition from the domestic to the factory system in England, machinery became a club to subjugate the laborer. Untutored, unorganized, without any resisting power, the former independent artisan, now a factory hand, was placed in brutal competition with his fellows, and every invention only served to add to his helplessness. The plight of the English laborers at that time abundantly shows that there are circumstances in which the wealth of a nation may increase tremendously, the productive power of labor multiply many-fold, while the workers on the other hand become impoverished and brutalized. Mill was of the opinion that machinery had not benefited the working class, but happily, since the time in which he wrote, education and organization, two indispensable factors in their advancement, have come to their aid. An upward trend has in consequence taken place, and the stimulus which it has given will make a relapse, owing to the advances in sanitary science, as improbable as another visitation of a plague. Where the workers have succeeded in acquiring some independence, in raising their standard of living, machinery, despite the drawbacks described, has undoubtedly become a potent factor in the elevation of their class.

Under a collective system the immediate benefits which would be derived by each individual through labor-saving inventions are its chief merit, but to compare the good features of an imaginary social system with the disadvantages of the existing one is not an easy task. It can, however, be shown that this desired co-operative principle actually does work out at the present time in a rough way by the distribution of the benefits of inventions throughout society and that there are possibilities for a more perfect application of it.

As to the workers’ share in production, Karl Marx in his incisive analysis comes to the conclusion that the value of commodities is based upon the labor cost plus the profits of the capitalist and in that he is in accord with the authorities upon social science since Adam Smith. He deduces from that, that labor alone represents the actual wealth which is exploited for profit by the capitalist and that the very capital invested was previously appropriated from the laborer. Granting this conclusion, Marx should have made allowance for the competition between capitalists by which the price of commodities is kept within certain limits and the benefits of cheaper production are given to the consumers. In the cases Marx deals with, cheaper production unfortunately did not only mean more economical methods, but lower wages and long hours and the sacrifice of the worker, while the consumer represented some one else than the operative, who barely subsisted on his pittance. Without the ability to purchase the goods he produced, England had to dispose of in foreign markets that which should have been consumed at home, always the best market. Her chief dependence being upon outside markets, everything had to be subordinated to cheaper production, no matter how obtained.

Concerning the attitude of trades unions upon the question of machinery, the membership being composed of men with the usual abilities, their views do not materially differ from others. Having, however, the benefits of an education derived from a close study of economic problems and an experience which has helped them form broader opinions, they are gradually reconciling themselves to machinery. As for example the action taken at the late convention of the American Federation of Labor held at Scranton. In a resolution introduced by the delegates of the Cigar Makers’ International Union requesting that a certain firm be declared unfair, there was reference to a cigar-making machine used in the shop of this employer. Although the machine was mentioned as an evidence only of the inferiority of the product of the concern, a vigorous objection was at once raised by the delegates against any mention of the use of machinery by the firm. In the debate which followed, it was argued that the convention could not afford to go on record as against labor-saving devices and that any attempt to oppose them would prove futile. The objectionable words were stricken out by a decisive vote. As to what action the convention would have taken if the delegates had thought it possible to suppress the machine is a question. The decision of the convention, however, has brought the movement to a point in which the members will be enabled to take a more liberal and complete view of the subject, and realize that the limitation of work is not only impolitic, but that by increasing their capacities the opportunity is afforded for them to insist upon a fair share in the larger product. The British unions have not advanced in that respect as far as the American unions because the habits of the working people there are more set, but circumstances have also changed very much their attitude toward machinery.

The Typographical Union is a notable example of a union which accepted a revolutionizing invention as being inevitable and thus succeeded in securing a rate of wages for the operators considerably in excess of that received by the hand compositors An officer of the New York Union estimates that each linotype machine introduced into the newspaper offices displaced three men, and that within three years, owing to the increase in the size of the newspapers and the larger demand for printed matter which it encouraged, the men laid off have been re-employed, and that to-day the pay-rolls even exceed the former figure. This machine has also had the effect of elevating the standards of the craft, owing to the higher skill and education required. The competition among the employers is such that profits are reduced to a minimum the public therefore receiving the full benefit of the improvement.

In the building trades, similar results are also noted. Improved methods have led to a prodigious expansion in building operations. The laborer’s work is now largely done by mechanical means, and parts of a structure, such as the trimmings, are made in factories and are only fitted together upon the premises. The subdividing of the work is carried on to an extent that a number of contractors, each performing a distinct function, co-operate in the completion of a single building. When this specializing began and the ingenious hod-hoisting device made it unnecessary for men to make beasts of burden of themselves, a general alarm was created over the prospect of great numbers of workmen being thrown out of employment. To-day a far greater number of men are steadily employed in this fundamental industry than at any time in its history.

Examples of this kind can be cited indefinitely to demonstrate the larger results which flow from greater economy in effort. Allowances are seldom made for the enterprises which could not be carried on at all were it not for labor-saving methods.

The lowering of the cost of commodities enables the average person to indulge in what were formerly considered luxuries, and by this encourages the development of new industries. The tendency under the influence of machinery is for industry to spread out fan-shape, ever widening as the distance from the starting point increases. Were it not for the limitations set by the purchasing capacity of the people and the periodical disarrangements or panics which occur as a result of what is conveniently termed over-production, there would be no check. To fear a surfeit of wealth seems absurd considering the needs of the average person. What is meant by over-production is the inability to buy what has been produced.

Russia with her immense population is unable to consume the products of her few mills, while in the United States, where the efficiency of labor is higher than anywhere else and is being increased at a marvelous rate, not to speak of the half-million aliens absorbed every year, the percentage of unemployed is lower than it has been for years, and even less than during the earlier part of our history when manufacturing was in its infancy.

To increase the purchasing capacity of the people either by higher wages or cheaper products is to reduce the surplus and maintain an equilibrium, hence the economic value of higher standards of living. Production cannot be greater than the ability of the average person to consume, any more than water can rise higher than its source, therefore increased production must be accompanied by the same increase in consumption, if normal conditions are to be maintained. No matter to what extent machinery, division of labor or economy in management may be perfected theoretically, the demand for labor ought not to be diminished. The eight-hour work is advocated by many, not because of the personal benefit to the workman, but upon the same grounds that they would favor the curtailment of production, in the belief that it would increase the number of the employed. By decreasing the average amount of work done in order that it may be distributed more evenly may accomplish that object temporarily, but if generally practiced would decrease the demand for work through the increase of the price of the commodity.

It is doubtful if workmen in a particular craft have ever succeeded for a length of time in erecting a wall around themselves and preventing as many extra men as could be employed from getting in if the emoluments were sufficient. So even if it were possible to so restrict work as to create a scarcity of workmen, this pressure from without would prove irresistible and the normal level would be maintained. If on the contrary a lack of work would make a number of workmen superfluous, there would be a tendency for them to find their way into growing occupations. Union regulations, such as apprenticeship rules, can and do prevent undue crowding into a trade owing to a sudden and temporary demand which would prove highly injurious unless checked, for it would serve to break down standards upheld by the union. Through such means an assimilation of those entering the trade is gradually accomplished.

Unions have been frequently charged with trying to restrict output. The same accusation has also with equal effect been made against industrial combinations for seeking to create an artificial scarcity. In many cases where unions endeavor to prevent rush or driving work injurious to the worker, they have been accused of limiting work. Such restrictions can be easily defended. That labor organizations have in some instances attempted to prevent the use of labor-saving appliances there can be no question considering the prevailing ideas on the subject, and organized workmen can give force to their opposition, but that such is the policy of labor movement is far from fact as I have just illustrated. The opposition to labor-saving methods is not confined to workmen alone, for employers will rail against competitors able to give better service for less cost. The same resentment at being forced out of a settled occupation is entertained by all.

The actual injury done by machinery is caused by the suddenness of the changes that result. Since there could be no way of regulating inventive genius, and the incentives for using improvements will remain as great, the rational and the only way to meet them is by preparation. The working class suffers most because it is less able to accommodate itself to new situations. The rising generation should be better equipped with a general knowledge of mechanics, and taught how to handle tools with skill. Such a training would undoubtedly relieve the difficulty and it could only be adequately supplied by the public schools. The results would be to increase the independence of workmen, as they would not then rely upon a small division of a trade or upon a single employer. Independence and higher wages go together. Unskilled laborers in some cases learn more than skilled mechanics for the reason that workmen trained only in one craft are usually unfitted for other work, while those accustomed to being thrown upon their own resources are more adaptable.

In the case of the aged workman the situation is specially hard, as he cannot find any place in an industrial system in which alertness counts for more than skill. He cannot profit by accumulated experiences as others do. It is the tragic side of the question, this grievous predicament of the worker who has spent his energies adding to the nation’s wealth. It can and ought to be overcome, not by any system of alms-giving which must always prove inadequate, not by retiring him to idleness, but by keeping him employed at such work as his long training and peculiar abilities fit him for. As his earning power declines at a certain period, some system of insurance could supply the deficiency.

In respect to the material advantages of machinery, it surely has enlarged the capacities of the people and multiplied their opportunities. The possibilities are such as to make the mind tremble in anticipation. It is the agency which alone can raise wages, reduce the working time and enhance the buying power of money—a threefold gain.

The feeling against machinery will not cease until the workman profits more directly as a producer as well as a consumer, until he is treated as a human being and not as a mere animated tool, until he becomes more than a tender, an incident in production. The human element must become more evident and the toiler made to feel his partnership. The true mission of machinery, would then be revealed to all as the only means which liberate man from drudgery, increase his control over nature and provide the leisure essential to a higher culture.

One of the acknowledged evils of machinery is the exploitation of child labor which usually follows its introduction. Such was the case in England, and we find it repeated to-day in the new industrial districts of the South. In such industries where the repetition of a small mechanical process enables child labor to be employed, the temptation to take advantage of the opportunity is great; for children have no rights to assert, no wage scale to uphold or working time to protect. In that respect child labor is akin to slave labor. It must be added for fairness that the capitalists utilizing such opportunities are not alone to blame, for shortsighted and grasping parents often drive their children into the mills because of the paltry sum which can be added to the family income, and in time they get into the habit of depending upon the pittance purchased at so terrible a price.

The inducement of a “plentiful supply of cheap labor” is also held out to capitalists by small communities as a means of persuading them to locate factories in their neighborhood. These are the two chief obstacles in the way of reform. In course of time, however, as the consequences become more evident and the exultation over the establishment of a new factory wears off, the public conscience revolts against this debasement of the helpless children and the law is eventually evoked to suppress the evil. The strenuous efforts being made in the South upon the part of the labor organizations and sympathizers to enact protective laws lead us to hope that we will at least be spared the dreadful experiences of England during the first half century of the factory system.

V. Tendencies of Factory Legislation and Inspection in the United States

By SARAH S. WHITTELSEY, Ph.D., New Haven, Conn.

TENDENCIES OF FACTORY LEGISLATION AND INSPECTION IN THE UNITED STATES

By SARAH S. WHITTELSEY, Ph.D.

The introduction of the factory system in American industry acted in this country, as it had in England, to develop certain abnormal conditions of labor that in the end required government interference. Thus in the manufacturing states, chiefly in the North and East, there has come into existence a very considerable body of factory law. The enactment of such regulative statutes is the prerogative of each of the several states acting independently and according to the discretion of its own legislature; in consequence there is great variety in these laws and in their scope,—from the comparatively complete codes of Massachusetts and New York to absolutely no regulation whatever.

Present Factory Laws of the United States.

“In all, about half the states have so far passed what may be called a factory act; that is, laws for the regulation, mainly sanitary, of conditions in factories and workshops. These include ... the New England states generally, New York and the Northern Central and Northwestern states following their legislation. There are almost no factory acts in the South nor in the purely agricultural states of the West, but these statutes are being passed rapidly and moreover, in states where they have already been enacted, are being amended every year.

“The most usual statutes are those making provision for proper fire-escapes, or against use of explosive oils, etc.; for the removal of noxious vapors or dust by fans or other contrivances; requiring guards to be placed about dangerous machinery, belting, elevators, wells, air-shafts, crucibles, vats, etc.; providing that doors shall open outward; prohibiting the machinery from being cleaned while in motion; laws to prevent overcrowding and to secure sanitary conditions generally.” Building laws also reinforce these measures.

Antedating such factory acts proper, the same states have very generally passed statutes regulating child labor and forbidding employment to those under a stated age. In eleven states this age limit is fourteen years, in nine over twelve, and in four,—New Hampshire, Vermont, Nebraska, and California,—ten years; eleven also make educational provision for older children and illiterate minors.

The majority of states have further legislated upon the hours of labor of minors, while fifteen limit the working time of women as well, generally to sixty hours per week, but in Massachusetts to fifty-eight hours, in New Jersey to fifty-five, and in Wisconsin to forty-eight. Eight also provide for time for meals, and five prohibit night work. This limitation of hours for women and children, considered “wards of the state,” very generally necessitates a similar working day for the adult male laborer in the factory, while it in a measure avoids the serious question of constitutionality that a broader statute could not fail to raise.

“There is absolutely no limitation for persons of any age or sex only in Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Kentucky, Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia.”

Besides these statutes, other laws that must be mentioned, as immediately affecting the interests of factory labor, are those which regulate wage payment and fines, also the employers’ liability acts which allow recovery of damages for bodily injury sustained in service. Thirteen states have passed laws regulating the period of payment by individuals and corporations, and nine others stipulate weekly or fortnightly payments by corporations. Only Massachusetts, Indiana and Ohio have attempted to “prevent the withholding of wages or the imposition of a fine by factory employers for imperfect work.”

Outside of the New England states “anti-truck acts,” similar to the English statute and stipulating a money payment, have been passed in sixteen states, five of which, however, limit its application to corporations. It may be noted in passing that several of these wage-regulating laws have already fallen under the ban of the courts.

Employers’ liability statutes supplement the factory acts by affording additional reason for care on the part of the employer in guarding dangerous machinery and otherwise providing for the safety of those in his employ. Twenty-two states have legislated upon the “fellow-servant” question, and ten make employers liable for injury caused by defective machinery. Of these, however, only six apply in full to factory labor.

The states that have passed factory acts and regulated hours of labor “have usually created one or more factory inspectors, charged with the duty of seeing that the statutes are carried out generally with powers to enter personally or by deputy and to inspect all factories at any time.”

The child labor laws are variously entrusted for enforcement to the factory inspectors, school committee or board of education, commissioners of labor, or left to the care of the police.

Historical Development.

It may seem perhaps that such a sketch fails to show the underlying or directive principle of this legislation, but a detailed study of the laws adds confusion rather than enlightenment. Studnitz considered that he had seized upon the real causal force and summed up the situation in the statement that American labor legislation has been determined by the political and social strength of the laborers demanding it, rather than in accordance with the natural needs and varied conditions of industry within the states.

Allowing this explanation at least as to the immediate agency, we must nevertheless recognize the fact that other forces are at work and that there are traceable tendencies of a natural growth even when arbitrary human action is so apparent. The most casual acquaintance with the history of labor legislation must convince us that the action of economic law has inevitably necessitated the legal regulation of labor; and this really in spite of human opposition and in the face of extreme doctrines of non-interference. Industrial labor unregulated has everywhere developed the same symptoms. Competition between producers tends to encourage all possible reductions of costs, to reduce wages, to increase the use of cheap child labor, to perpetuate long hours of labor, etc., and to range the interests of the employing class against those of the operative class. In the struggle which results from this antagonism the employer has the advantage of position to force his own terms of contract upon the laborer, for he has in his hands an accumulated capital which is equivalent in power to effective organization. Such conditions left to work themselves out have invariably acted to degrade the social status of labor, the heaviest pressure falling upon those who could least resist it. This was the experience of England first, then felt on the Continent and in this country in the New England states and other centres of manufacture, and to-day we are becoming aware of like tendencies in the cotton-goods industry of the South.

It was almost universally the evils attending child labor that evoked the first acts of regulation. But although abuses were very serious, legal remedies were most timidly applied. Even with the example of the successful issue of the English laws the New England legislatures contented themselves with the passage of most inadequate measures, measures that could hardly have been looked upon as anything more than unenforcible threats. We realize how complete a change of attitude toward this “intermeddling legislation” has been brought about during the course of the past sixty years when we compare a few of these old laws with those to-day in force. Contrast, for example, the detailed and exacting requirements of the present law concerning child labor in Massachusetts with the older Vermont statute, which is quite typical of the earlier order and “merely requires the selectmen of towns to inquire into the treatment of minors employed in manufacturing establishments; and if a minor’s education, morals, etc., are unreasonably neglected, or he is treated with improper severity or compelled to labor unreasonable hours, they may, if he has no parent or guardian, discharge him from such employment and bind him out as apprentice with the minor’s consent.” (Vt. 2518.)

Early measures were certainly neither severe in the regulation imposed nor exact in defining the parties held to be responsible. They generally involved a question of volition, making “willful” transgression alone punishable, and thus unenforcible in the letter, were given into the hands of town officials who had neither the power nor the effective desire to investigate or to bring suit.

Such enactments stood for little more than a public recognition of abuses which they in no wise checked, but the increasing menace of the situation, the threat, not to be scorned, of a future sickly and illiterate labor population, forced the passage of more adequate measures and the resort to a better mechanism of enforcement than that of town officials and the general police. In such reforms Massachusetts took the lead, enacted and repealed several contradictory statutes, and finally by the slow process of continued amendment evolved the present really enforcible law.

We feel in studying the halting stages of this development not only that there was a pardonable ignorance of ways and means in attacking a new problem, but also the influence of a more or less skeptical public opinion concerning this policy of interference which reflected itself in hedging clauses that weakened and sometimes vitiated what would otherwise have been good measures.

In spite of many drawbacks to advance, however, there was no retrograde motion, but a continued development of strictness and detail in exactions, of clearer definition and placement of responsibility and of more adequate provision for inspection. As these laws gradually demonstrated their practical usefulness and convinced the public of benefit instead of harm, the former attitude of timidity gave place to a decided peremptoriness, the former indiscriminate omnibus ad quos hae litteræ pervenerint to placed responsibility.

Meantime the way was opened for more wide-reaching regulations concerning hours of labor, workroom conditions, etc., and a broader conception of the province of such legislation and of that which might be considered proper subject of legal interference. Whereas the first attempts to protect even little children from conditions that imperiled their health and life were bitterly opposed in England upon grounds of national policy, to-day we find statutes that regulate not only child labor, hours of labor, factory constructions and the use of machinery, but also others that stipulate times and manner of wage payment, and forbid fines in dealings with adult male employees. And this has come to pass in America where “freedom of contract” is the constitutional right of every individual citizen.

Our laws have indeed very steadily progressed from measures of simple protection to detailed regulation of conditions, and even to the securing of special benefits to labor.

This broader application of the legal remedy has been accompanied also by marked territorial extension, following the growth and spread of manufactures. Other states have felt the necessity of adopting a labor code and have naturally, in a general way, followed the forms of New England and New York. They range, however, through all stages of incompleteness. A curious phenomenon constantly appears in this imitative legislation. When a state legislature passes a new labor law, or revises an old one, it does not necessarily adopt the latest form nor that which has proved to work most satisfactorily in another state, nor yet a combination of choice clippings from several. A state legislature is generally perfectly content with a law that is about as poor as the average and looks forward most placidly to the inevitable train of amendments that must follow in its wake. By this I do not mean to criticise in the least the enactment of less strict regulations as a lower age limit or longer hours of labor, which may be proper under given local conditions, but alone the continued repetition of blunders and faults of construction that have elsewhere proved their character and their power to nullify the intent of the law. Fortunately experience proves in the end an effective, if dear, teacher and one of the lessons that it ultimately drives home is that even a state legislature cannot legislate the laws of nature out of the world arena. As Jevons said, “The state is the least of the powers that govern us.” But as the physician through his knowledge of medicine and physiology, and by his diagnosis of the symptoms of disease, is able to pit law against law, and to restore health where he found abnormal conditions; so the statesman who understands the social order and the tendencies of economic forces is often able to control their action. In either case, a knowledge of the active agencies is absolutely necessary to the solution of the problem. The recent organization of bureaus of labor statistics is certainly significant in this connection. To-day, when a question of labor legislation is presented, there is, in many states, such a qualified advisory body to whom the whole matter may be referred for investigation and study, and whose regular duty it is to inquire into and report upon labor and industrial conditions within the state. This indicates a growing appreciation of the necessity of accurate information and of the exercise of due care in passing acts of regulation.

Enforcement by Inspection.

The problem of enforcement of these laws has proved even more serious than that of their enactment. Labor laws, however good, cannot enforce themselves. It may appear to be for the laborer’s own interest to report violations and seek the legal remedy, but the indisputable fact is that he does not do it. Moreover, not only is the individual laborer often not in a position to do so safely, but even the labor union shrinks from the task. The whole history of the movement for the regulation of labor shows the absolute necessity of efficient inspection, a fact which has unfortunately been most clearly demonstrated in the general lack of such inspection. In nothing do the states differ more widely than in their provision for inspection. There are such specifically differentiated departments as that of Massachusetts or New York; there are such combinations as that of Connecticut, where a single inspector with two or three assistants enforces the factory, workshop and bake-shop acts, while the Board of Education is charged with the child labor laws; and there is dependence alone upon the general police force.

Inspection always lags too far behind legislation and has given some ground of credit to the often-repeated criticism that this labor legislation is not in fact intended seriously, but has been entered upon the statute books rather to still the clamor of agitators for reform than to effect any real change in conditions. It is certain at least that the serious effectiveness of these laws develops in exact proportion with the inspecting power,—with the organization, number and qualification of inspectors. If the charge of insincerity, however, had been true, we might expect to find that the better the laws became, the stronger the pressure that would be brought against the development of costly inspection. The legal remedy being given, is it not the privilege of the individual to avail himself of it, rather than the duty of the state to force it upon him? On the contrary, however, the history of inspection runs parallel and in the same direction with that of the legislation just reviewed. The same economic and social forces that were the raison d’être of these laws have quite as distinctly and steadily, though more slowly, created the supplementary machinery of enforcement. The unreliable and haphazard inspection of town officials has passed entirely, superseded by the inspector whose sole duty is inspection, in which duty he is aided by assistants immediately under his own command, or by members of other departments of government. The tendency towards the development of distinct inspection departments is quite unmistakable though the exact form of their future organization is less easily predicted. There are two toward which present forms lean, one exemplified in Massachusetts, the other in New York.

In Massachusetts the inspectors are organized as a division of police, under the chief of police as chief inspector, exactly as the detective division, for instance. That of New York is a separate and distinct body under a chief appointed by the governor to hold that single office.

The question is therefore raised as to whether organic connection with the police department or separate and distinct autonomy is the more practical and advantageous form. It is conceded that Massachusetts has developed the most efficient corps of inspectors in this country, but this cannot at present be taken as conclusive proof of policy, because Massachusetts was earlier in the field, and because opposing obstacles were hardly so serious as those met in New York. Further, such connection with the police department in Massachusetts seems to have been largely due to local conditions and to have grown out of measures dictated by immediate convenience at the time of the passage of the early child labor laws, rather than a deliberately chosen system of administration. A clipping from the history of the department will make this clear.

“At first the unreliable mechanism of truant officers and local town or city officials was solely depended upon for inspection. Then, under new child labor statutes, a single deputy was in each case detailed by the police department to aid enforcement (1866, c. 273; 1867, c. 285). The law of 1877 (c. 214), increasing the duties of factory inspection by regulations looking to the safety of employees, provided that members of the State Detective Department should act as inspectors of factories and public buildings, to report and prosecute violations of this act as well as of other measures relative to the employment of women and minors.... In 1879 (c. 305), the governor was authorized to appoint two regular inspectors from the police department....

“Better administration was finally secured in 1888 (c. 113), by separating the detective and inspecting forces.... With the enactment of stringent steam-boiler inspection laws, a new department of boiler inspectors ... was created.”

While in some ways this affiliation with the police has been helpful, there are also drawbacks in the combination under one head of work in fields that are so large and so distinctly marked off from one another not only in object, but most essentially in methods of work. It would seem that a due co-operation between district departments could be made to afford all of the advantages of the closer relationship, while it would insure the whole time and energy of the chief to a task that is quite enough to occupy his entire attention. Indeed, with the increasing number and detail of regulations, the many technicalities that arise in the application of labor laws and the rapid growth of the factory system of industry, another specialist will soon be demanded to fill such an office. The necessary increase in numbers alone must make the police connection awkward.

In framing many of these laws, for example the factory acts, much has necessarily been left to the discretion of inspectors in the decision of what is “adequate” provision. Especially where appliances not contemplated in the ordinary law are offered, very careful judgment is called for. Such powers cannot be entrusted to untrained and inexperienced persons, however well intentioned, nor is the training of police duty any sufficient preparation. It would not be considered appropriate to appoint a policeman inspector of stationary steam boilers or examiner of engineers, yet under present factory laws, technical knowledge of industrial processes, machinery, etc., is sometimes equally demanded. In Massachusetts the original method of detailing police as inspectors when occasion demanded, or even permanently installing them in these positions, has been abandoned for the stricter and more adequate tests of civil service examinations open to all applicants. And again her example indicates a general trend.

The tendency in inspection already is, and in the future must be more markedly, toward the growth of a distinct and specialized department, in which the chief and his assistants are trained for their work. Such a department, while it would not stand in the relationship which some at present hold to the police, would come into closer touch with other departments, as the Board of Education and Bureau of Labor.

Uniform Labor Legislation.

The influence of state boundary lines upon the course of legislation in this country is an interesting question, and one upon which entirely diverse opinions are held. Some go so far as to claim that there never can be really successful legislation so long as such boundaries hold; that if a good labor law is passed in one state and enforced there, the benefit that may result to the few operatives is balanced by the restriction which it puts upon the producer and the consequent discrimination against capital in that state as compared with its neighbors. Capital therefore seeks investment in those sister states instead of in the law-trammeled one, thus reacting against the interests of the labor market there; while states that so profit in their freedom are the more loath to give over their advantage by enacting similar measures. Thus legislation in one state becomes at once detrimental to its own industrial interests, and a check upon legislation elsewhere. Loud protests of this tenor were heard, for example, in Massachusetts a few years ago, when at a time of business depression the cotton mills suffered from the competition of Southern rivals. A somewhat extended study of the situation at that crisis, however, failed to show that these detrimental consequences had followed in actual life, or that the stress felt by the mills could have been removed by a suspension of the laws complained of.

On the other hand, when we begin to reckon with the difficulties that must be encountered in any attempt to legislate upon labor conditions in this country treated as a whole (even disregarding entirely the present constitutional impediment), we find arguments showing that local self-government has probably furthered the development of labor legislation. In the first place, it is much more difficult to persuade a body with such wide jurisdiction to pass what must often be experimental measures and may endanger national interests. Suppose, however, that this legislation was undertaken, it would be well-nigh impossible to frame a measure that would apply with justice throughout and in communities where industrial occupations differ entirely in kind, or, if of like order, range through many stages of development. It would mean that such legislation must conform to a very low margin of production in order to avoid injury to states where conditions are backward, and that would leave unregulated much that has clearly shown need of regulation in states where there is higher organization of industry. Would it not, in fact, be absolutely necessary to mark out territorial divisions that might not of course follow state boundaries, but would not in the end differ essentially from them in character? Again, such divisions mapped, what an impossible labor is put upon the central body if it would legislate wisely for the several sections! Would it not be necessary at least to appoint some advisory body to study the local needs of each section and to report recommending appropriate measures? In the end, what would we have in the least better than the present system?

Within a single state the labor interest is united, the pros and cons of the situation can be more easily investigated, effects more easily watched and even more accurately predicted. Jevons might indeed have considered it a well-fitted laboratory for his scientific experimentation in legislation. The success of a local experiment acts often as an incentive to labor elsewhere to demand like privileges, and as against the argument of an insignificant tax upon production, the political power of the labor party has very generally won the day. The second state feels itself at no greater disadvantage than that which took the initiative in the movement, and may easily take the precaution of passing restrictions that are a trifle under those of its neighbor.

This discussion, however, leaves us still face to face with a confusion of local regulations, among which there is total lack of any uniformity. The situation has for some time attracted public comment, and there is a growing desire for uniformity especially in the protection of child labor and in the curtailment of the hours of labor, which are the regulations that particularly affect the interests of capitalists. Quixotic attempts to force an amendment of the Constitution, and to secure the passage of a national eight-hourday law, have been chronicled in the movement, which nevertheless, with more moderate aims, has steadily gathered strength. At last, under the Industrial Commission of 1898, the problem of uniform legislation has been clearly recognized and carefully studied, “in order,” the act reads, “to harmonize conflicting interests and to be equitable to the laborer, the employer, the producer and the consumer” (Sec. 3). Empowered to report with recommendations either directly to Congress or to the several state legislatures, the Commission addressed itself in this “matter of domestic law” to the state legislatures. The report submitted is of such interest and importance that I quote in full its recommendations so far as they apply to factory labor:

“Perhaps the subject of greatest public interest to-day is that of the regulation of the hours of labor permitted in industrial occupations, and especially in factories.... Obviously Congress has no power, without a constitutional amendment, to legislate upon this subject. The Commission are of the opinion that a uniform law upon this subject may wisely be recommended for adoption by all the states. We believe that such legislation cannot, under the federal and state constitutions, be recommended as to persons, male or female, above the age of twenty-one, except, of course, in some special industries, where employment for too many hours becomes positively a menace to the health, safety, or well-being of the community; but minors, not yet clothed with all the rights of citizens, are peculiarly the subject of state protection, and still more so, young children.

“The Commission are of the opinion, therefore, that a simple statute ought to be enacted by all the states, to regulate the length of the working day for young persons in factories (meaning by ‘young persons’ those between the age of majority and fourteen); and in view of the entire absence of protection now accorded by the laws of many states to children of tender years, we think that employment in any capacity or for any time, under the age of fourteen, should be prohibited. The question of shops and mercantile establishments generally appears even more subject to local conditions than that of factories; therefore the Commission see no need for even recommending to the states any uniform legislation upon this subject. But child labor should be universally protected by educational restrictions, providing in substance that no child may be employed in either factories, shops, or in stores in large cities, who cannot read and write, and except during vacation, unless he has attended school for at least twelve weeks in each year.”

These are certainly conservative recommendations and illustrate again the difficulty of finding any common ground of action even in the fundamental requirements of health and education. The exception made with reference to shops and mercantile establishments upon the ground of local differences in conditions is interesting. So much evidence has been brought of abuse of child labor in the mercantile houses of many large cities, especially in respect to these two matters of overwork through long hours and of interference with common-school education (above recognized) that several states have voluntarily extended provisions of the factory laws concerning minors to cover such establishments. These conditions appear to reproduce themselves with remarkable similarity in various locations, and it is not altogether clear what local conditions could intervene to make the universal application of the measure proposed for factories undesirable.

Notwithstanding all moderation and the exceptions allowed, two of the commissioners still recorded themselves as considering it “unjust and impracticable to attempt any uniform laws regulating labor in all the states,” and a third concurring with these adds that, “the conditions to be dealt with will work themselves out better under local self-government than under any iron-clad rule adopted by or suggested from a central power.”

The protestors are from the Southern states and their protest seems peculiarly pertinent at this time, when the prevailing conditions of child labor in these states are attracting so much attention. Not to digress into a discussion that would lead us too far afield, let it suffice to sum up the evident facts of the situation in a single paragraph.

Whatever their previous condition of freedom, barbarism or poverty, there are to-day, in the cotton mills of the South, large numbers of little children, some under ten years of age, who can be and are employed sometimes eleven and more hours a day, sometimes eleven hours of the night. Indeed conditions parallel the times of Shaftesbury in England! Attempts to pass bills that can hardly be deemed extravagant in the protection demanded, and even compulsory education measures, have been opposed and frustrated. The reasons given for such resistance of legal interference may be summarized about as follows, at least in Alabama, which has been the field of a recent encounter: That the bill presented by the Alabama Child Labor Committee is “outside interference” and “only the entering wedge”; that “Georgia (facing the more difficult task in) having double the number of spindles, should act first”; that against the expressed desires of mill officers, parents insist upon the employment of their children or “take their families to other mills where no objection is made” (and this the law would make impossible); that the prodigiously early development of this particular class of Southern children together with “the length and heat of the day” which “are prime factors respecting the hours that may be appropriated to labor” make it inadvisable to limit the hours of labor of children to ten out of a possible twenty-four, or to require that they should sleep and not work at night. We cannot say that the movement for uniform legislation or even for labor legislation “under local self-government” is unopposed.

The recommendations of the Commission also include the following:

“Further regulations, especially in the line of bringing states which now have no factory acts up to a higher standard, is earnestly recommended.

“In states which have many factories the well-known factory act of Massachusetts or New York, based upon the English act which served as a model to all such, is recommended for adoption.

“The sweat-shop law also, which is now practically identical in the important states of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio, is recommended for general adoption.

“A simple and liberal law regulating the payment of labor should be adopted in all the states, providing that laborers shall be paid, for all labor performed, in cash or cash orders, without discount, not in goods or due bills, and that no compulsion, direct or indirect, shall be used to make them purchase supplies at any particular store.”

The report refers also to other statutes which reinforce certain common law doctrines, such as those concerning intimidation, strikes, boycotts and black-listing, to those protecting the political rights and legal rights in suit of labor and to the recognition accorded to trade unions in provisions for incorporation and protection of labels, making however no special recommendation concerning them to the states.

We see, therefore, that beyond the elementary regulation of child labor and hours of labor for minors, the Commission would have the states establish a standard of good sanitation and of safe conditions in factories everywhere, and above this, especially suggests a scientific and well-tested law for adoption in states having large manufactures. The restriction of hours is always looked upon chiefly as a health measure, but it is certain that the general bodily vigor of the worker has been more markedly affected by modern improvements in ventilation, lighting and sanitation than by any of the shorter day statutes. Factory acts assist materially in forcing this advance and have received a due recognition of their usefulness. In recommending the universal passage of a sweat-shop act, the Commission endorses the old saying, that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As a matter of fact, such laws have been passed, and in an incredibly short time (since 1892, when New York passed the first of this series), in those states in which the evil is important. Attempts to extirpate the evil in these states threaten to drive it into neighboring sections. Connecticut, for example, lying between Massachusetts and New York, in both of which quarters the anti-sweat-shop war is being vigorously pushed, has enacted a similar statute simply as a protective measure.

It is clear that the ultimate effect of uniform labor legislation will not be one law applying throughout the length and breadth of this great land, but rather a graded system. It will determine a minimum standard of regulations, a basal plane, of competition for American industry. Above this it will still be necessary for the local government in many places to impose stricter requirements where there is complexity of organization, but in that which is fundamentally essential to the common well-being of the community there will be one limit approved for all that may not be transgressed.

The suggestion made in the Industrial Commission’s report as to how this standard may be determined is especially well considered:

“In conclusion the Commission would recommend the establishment by all the states of labor bureaus or commissioners, who shall, besides their local duties as now defined, be charged with that of exchanging their statistics and reports, and of convening at least once in a year in national conference for general consultation, which national conference shall have power to submit directly to Congress its recommendations for such federal legislation as a majority of the state commissioners may deem advisable, and shall also submit to all the states, through the commissioners of each separate state, their recommendations for such uniform state statutes upon labor subjects as may seem wise and desirable.”

If we rightly interpreted the action of local governments in establishing these bureaus of labor, as a step towards more scientific legislation in those states, surely this plan of a national conference of state commissioners of labor stands for a still more important extension of the scientific method in questions of labor legislation. It also illustrates a tendency that is becoming more and more evident, namely, the fuller reliance that is being placed upon “intelligence as a social regulator” and “publicity for controlling industry and commerce.” Make known the actual conditions that prevail, point out the appropriate remedy, and the weight of an informed public opinion will go far to force reform whether through an act of legislation or through the influence which may be exerted by consumers upon producers. Indeed the battle cry of the day is, “Give us but an enlightened public opinion and our fight is three-quarters won.”

The suggestion of regulating business relations through the pressure of public sentiment has been seized upon with almost too great avidity by some who would apply it as the immediate and sufficient solution of all labor difficulties and as an argument against the enactment of any statutory regulations whatever. Such a proposition appears, however, of doubtful value at present under the conditions of unenlightenment that unfortunately prevail, and it may be feared, does not proceed from the best friends of labor.

Constitutionality.

Recurring to this fact of opposition, already earlier noted, it has been questioned whether this counter-movement does not offer a real menace to the future growth of the labor laws, and indeed to the continued existence of the present body of legislation. In a number of instances where labor laws have been brought to the test of a court decision they have been pronounced unconstitutional and annulled upon the ground that they “contravene freedom of contract,” are “class legislation” and so forth. This has been the fate of statutes regulating the hours of labor for women over twenty-one years of age in Nebraska, California and Illinois; of weekly payment laws in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, West Virginia and Indiana; of anti-truck acts in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and West Virginia; and of those prohibiting company stores or coercion of purchase in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Tennessee.

In Massachusetts, on the contrary, the regulation of hours was sustained “as a health or police regulation.” Also at the time when the bill for the extension of the act concerning weekly payments was before the legislature the justices returned as their opinion to the House of Representatives that such an act was within the constitutional power of the General Court to pass. It is also worthy of notice, that in spite of the decision by the Supreme Court of Nebraska in 1894, a new law defining hours of labor for women was passed in 1899, and to-day applies not only in factories, but in restaurants and hotels as well. Again, in the report just reviewed, the commissioners have recommended the general enactment of an anti-truck and freedom of purchase act in spite of the decisions of Pennsylvania, Illinois and Tennessee courts.

Verdicts of unconstitutionality have therefore hardly affected more than the very border of the factory laws; the regulation of child labor, of workroom conditions, of hours of labor for minors, have never even been questioned. It hardly seems likely that any of these laws will ever be put to the court test at all. Both in England and in this country, they have proven generally beneficial to public interest, they have been pretty cheerfully accepted and obeyed; they have gained public approval; they have the political support of a large labor party. Perhaps the apparently adverse action of the courts ought rather to be looked upon as a healthfully conservative influence against possible evil results of hasty and ill-considered legislation or attempts to interpose legislation where the object could be better obtained by the effective organization of labor and should be left to the initiative of the unions.

Factory legislation has been inevitably necessitated by the action of economic and social forces, and may, in fact, be regarded as a natural phenomenon accompanying the growth of the factory system of manufacture. It has developed against the opposition of extreme doctrines of free contract, and having demonstrated itself in the facts of actual life has also created a new theory of the relation of the state to labor and industry.

“The state may determine the plane of competition; it may equalize the conditions of contract as between employer and employee; it may intervene to protect the standard of living of the workers. The only limits that theory places upon these lines of interference are considerations of the general good.”

In the historical development of factory laws, well-marked tendencies are traceable. The early attitude of timidity has given place to that of peremptory command. Progress has been steadily toward increased severity in the regulations imposed, increased exactness in detail and definition, towards distinctly placed responsibility and towards more adequate inspection.

The expansion of industry in this country has of course been accompanied by a like territorial extension of the labor laws. Accomplished through the independent action of the several state legislatures, the result has been an unfortunate confusion of unrelated and non-uniform measures. One of the recent and most important tendencies of this legislation is the movement for greater uniformity, made especially prominent by the attention given to it as a part of the study of the Industrial Commission. It indeed seems probable that these efforts will eventually issue in the determination of a minimum standard of labor legislation for the country as a whole, above which common basis the states will rise in grade according to the development of industrial organization and consequent increase of regulation demanded. This is necessarily a matter of voluntary conformity on the part of the separate state legislatures and therefore a fulfillment to be awaited with all patience.

VI. Juvenile Courts

PROBATION AND JUVENILE COURTS

By MRS. EMILY E. WILLIAMSON, ELIZABETH, N. J. President New Jersey State Conference of Charities and Corrections

Perhaps the most practical movement in penal reform is probation, putting a stop as it does to the source from which crime is recruited. The principle involved in probation is prevention and, where properly applied, has resulted in a very large diminution of crime. Massachusetts reports a falling off of 75 per cent in juvenile crime, owing to probation. Juvenile and first offenders should never be dealt with as real criminals under the law except in special cases of depravity. Penological science lays down general rules for the treatment of juveniles and first offenders, absolutely prohibiting imprisonment except for those convicted of flagrant crimes, as it breaks down self-respect, placing a stigma on character that is never removed. Its deterrent power is destroyed with its relief from care and comfortable support and it hurts the physical, mental and moral health of the prisoner. The main object in the sentence of the convicted juvenile or first offender should be his rescue from a criminal life; therefore a complete investigation should be made of his character, home and environment before trial. In Massachusetts the probation act requires a probation officer to inquire into the nature of every criminal case brought before the court, and he may recommend that any person committed by the court be placed on probation. The question for the court, upon the information of the probation officer, is to decide whether it is safe for society to allow the prisoner to go at large. It has become an established fact among the people of Massachusetts, after several years of trial, that in the administration of justice the probation system has been wise and beneficial.

The probation law enacted by the legislature of Illinois in 1899 declares the purpose of the law to be as follows: “This act shall be liberally construed to the purpose that its end may be carried out, to wit: that the care, custody and discipline of a child shall approximate as nearly as may be that which should be given by its parents; and in all cases where it can be properly done, the child be placed in an approved family home and become a member of the family by legal adoption or otherwise.” The Illinois juvenile court in its instructions to probation officers states that it will be the endeavor of the court to carry out both the letter and the spirit of the foregoing act, and to this end the court will have in mind the following considerations: The Welfare and Interests of the Child.—To save the child from neglect and cruelty and from the danger of becoming a criminal or dependent. The Welfare of the Community.—Lessening the burdens of taxation and loss of property through the ravages of the criminal class and by preventing pauperism and crime. Temporary Care.—The law forbidding the keeping of any child in a jail or station-house, a place of detention is provided under the care of the court. Whenever practicable the child is to be left with his parents or with some suitable family. Supervision After Action of the Court.—The probation officer is expected to keep a special oversight of the child by frequent visits at regular intervals and by reports from parents or custodians.

In Pennsylvania the law requires that the probation officer shall be notified when any juvenile offender is brought before the court, that he shall make such investigation as shall be directed by the court, be present to represent the interests of the child when the case is heard, furnish such information and assistance as the judge may require and take such charge of any child before or after trial as may be ordered.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and New Jersey have state probation laws. San Francisco and Washington, D. C., have probation officers for the cities alone. New York has at last provided for probation and also for children’s courts, but the plans are not yet completed.

Voluntary probation officers in many cases in the large cities assist the paid officer, and in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New York the child-saving societies of all denominations have placed officers—appointed by them for this purpose—at the disposal of the court. Their services have always been accepted. In New Jersey the State Board of Children’s Guardians greatly assists the county probation officers. Wise child-saving work can be done with this mutual co-operation.

In March, 1900, a bill prepared by Justice Franklin T. Fort, of the Supreme Court, was passed by the New Jersey legislature, providing for the appointment of probation officers and authorizing judges of the Courts of Quarter Sessions to appoint one probation officer and, with the consent of the board of county freeholders, as many other probation officers, not exceeding three, one of whom may be a woman, as the judge deems wise. The classes of offenders who may be probated, i. e., respecting age, etc., is left entirely to the discretion of the judge. Seven counties in New Jersey have probation officers—Hudson, Essex, Morris, Union, Middlesex, Mercer and Atlantic.

In February, 1902 at my request, I was appointed, by the court, probation officer for Union county, New Jersey, to serve without salary, the court granting fifty dollars a month for a clerk and allowing necessary expenses—in all not to exceed eight hundred dollars annually. The following are the descriptive blanks and rules prepared by me and allowed by the court. In addition, case cards are kept in which all records in detail are entered. A synopsis of each case is also entered in a history book which is easily referred to by an index kept on the Dewey plan. Each probationer is visited by the probation officer or her clerk once a month and in special cases oftener. The probationer reports regularly at the office, either in person or by letter, at such times as directed.

UNION COUNTY PROBATION OFFICER. RECORD.

No. Name Address Age Height Weight White or colored Color of eyes Hair Complexion Special marks Religion Church School Teacher Nationality Married or single Number of children, names and ages Occupation Employer’s name and address Father’s name and address Occupation

Mother’s name and address Occupation Other members of family Previous offense Present offense Date committed to Probation Officer Years expire Fine, $ Costs, $ Re-arrested Cause of Re-arrest REMARKS:

Ledger number

UNION COUNTY COURT OF QUARTER SESSIONS. RULES GOVERNING PROBATION.

THE PROBATIONER is required by the Court,

FIRST.—To furnish promptly, by letter or in person, such information as the Probation Officer may require.

SECOND.—To mail on the first of each month a letter, stating his present residence and occupation, place of employment and the name of his employer; also the number of days employed during the previous month, the place or places of employment and the names of his employers. If the Probationer is of school age, the number of days of school attendance must be given. The truth of these facts must be certified by parent, employer, school teacher or some other person satisfactory to the Probation Officer.

THIRD.—Evil companions and bad associations must be avoided. Strict temperance must be observed. The Probationer must in every way conduct himself as an upright and law-abiding citizen.

FOURTH.—To report promptly to the Probation Officer every change of residence. To consult the Probation Officer before moving out of the State of New Jersey or out of Union County.

FIFTH.—If the Probationer undertakes to pay fines or costs at stated periods these payments must be prompt. If unable to meet the obligation promptly he will send advance notice to the Probation Officer.

The probation period is three years. If during this period of trial the Probationer fails to observe strictly each of the above rules, he is liable to be taken into custody at any time by the Probation Officer to serve the full term of his suspended sentence. Liberty depends entirely on the good conduct of the Probationer.

During the three months that I have held this office twenty-six cases have been probated to me by the judge of the county court and forty-six by the police justices of the county. The ages of the probationers and the character of the charges made against them are as follows:

───────┬───────┬──────┬──────┬─────────┬───────────┬────┬──────┬────── │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ Total │ │ │ │ │ │County│Police │number.│White.│Black.│Catholic.│Protestant.│Jew.│Court.│Court. ───────┼───────┼──────┼──────┼─────────┼───────────┼────┼──────┼────── Males │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ over │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ 31│ 25│ 6│ 12│ 18│ 1│ 14│ 17 Males │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ under│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ 28│ 28│ │ 20│ 6│ 2│ 6│ 22 Females│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ over │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ 6│ 4│ 2│ 3│ 3│ │ 2│ 4 Females│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ under│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ 7│ 6│ 1│ 6│ 1│ │ 1│ 2 ───────┼───────┼──────┼──────┼─────────┼───────────┼────┼──────┼────── │ 72│ 63│ 9│ 41│ 28│ 3│ 23│ 45 ───────┴───────┴──────┴──────┴─────────┴───────────┴────┴──────┴──────

───────┬─────────────┬────────┬──────────┬────────┬─────────┬───────── │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │Disorderly│ │Malicious│ │Embezzlement.│Larceny.│ conduct. │Assault.│mischief.│Mischief. ───────┼─────────────┼────────┼──────────┼────────┼─────────┼───────── Males │ │ │ │ │ │ over │ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ 1│ 11│ 16│ 2│ 1│ Males │ │ │ │ │ │ under│ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ │ 7│ 9│ 1│ 5│ 1 Females│ │ │ │ │ │ over │ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ │ │ 4│ │ 2│ Females│ │ │ │ │ │ under│ │ │ │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ │ │ │ yrs. │ │ 6│ 1│ │ │ ───────┼─────────────┼────────┼──────────┼────────┼─────────┼───────── │ 1│ 24│ 30│ 3│ 8│ 1 ───────┴─────────────┴────────┴──────────┴────────┴─────────┴─────────

───────┬────────┬──────────┬───────── │ │ │Probated │ │ Previous │ without │Truancy.│Offenders.│ trial. ───────┼────────┼──────────┼───────── Males │ │ │ over │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ yrs. │ │ 12│ Males │ │ │ under│ │ │ 16 │ │ │ yrs. │ 5│ 13│ Females│ │ │ over │ │ │ 16 │ │ │ yrs. │ │ 4│ Females│ │ │ under│ │ │ 16 │ │ │ yrs. │ │ │ 4 ───────┼────────┼──────────┼───────── │ 5│ 29│ 4 ───────┴────────┴──────────┴─────────

The secretary of the New Jersey State Charities Aid Association in his report says: “It is easier in Union than in most counties to learn whether such an officer is needed by the court, by the prisoner and by society, for the records of the Union County Jail are exceptionally complete. The Warden’s report contains statistics on two most important points—the ages of the prisoners and the number of the commitments. These two points are most important because the probation system presumes that all persons who are inexperienced in crime, whatever their actual age, can be better treated under supervision outside of jail than in idleness within jail.

“The New Jersey law was made broad enough to include both children of 7 years and adults of 83, except where safety demands the prisoner’s incarceration. From the Warden’s report it appears that 591 persons were sent to the county jail last year for terms averaging twenty-nine days. Of this number only 181, or 30 per cent, had served previous sentences. The great majority, 70 per cent, or 410, had never been previously committed. Among these first commitments are found persons of every age from 7 to 70 excepting 52, 56, 58, 62 and 69, while the years 71, 77 and 83 have one representative each. Take what age we will, public sentiment would approve another chance outside of jail, for every first offender, provided the dignity of the law and the welfare of society would be in no way jeopardized by suspending sentence. Our probation law provides for failures to reform outside of jail and gives to the probation officer and the court power to inflict the original but suspended sentence at any time within three years from the date of conviction. It is manifest that every successful case of probation nips in the bud a potential and probable career of crime.”

The oversight of adult first offenders by a probation officer is of immense value in reforming the offender and also results in a great saving of expense to the taxpayer. The first is the primary object and probably I cannot do better than cite some cases which are under my care: J. E., aged 22, a bright Irishman, not intoxicated, in a quarrel which took place in a saloon, interfered and used too much strength in separating the combatants; charged with malicious assault, court would have committed him to county jail for six months had there been no probation officer. Probation officer returned the man to his home, helped him to secure employment, visited his accuser and warned him not to molest J. E. Young man’s weekly calls to report have become friendly visits; he is always well dressed and is entirely self-respecting.

N. M.; American; aged 59; painter; married; offence—grand larceny; never arrested before; while drunk, stole mayor’s horse and buggy from hitching-post on main street; man not an habitual drunkard, character good, provided comfortable home for his family, always industrious and kind. Had there been no probation officer N. M. would have been sent to state prison. He is now doing well and reporting regularly.

Two boys, 9 and 12 years, arrested on charge of disorderly conduct (threw a fish-head at an old woman); belonged to the “gang;” had fairly good homes; did not attend school regularly; found upon investigation to be mischievous and truants only. Probation officer handed boys to truant officer, who immediately placed them in school. Boys report each week, come to office in Sunday clothes and evidently enjoy these visits. One lad has been employed on Saturdays, by probation officer’s clerk, doing odd jobs and is very proud of this evidence of favor. There has been a great improvement in the whole family owing to pressure through this little fellow.

In cases of non-support which are always tried before police justices, probation has proved of inestimable value. The following is an example: Mr. B. drank occasionally, earned eighteen dollars a week and failed to support his family; was arrested and handed to the probation officer. After a thorough investigation, including conditions in the home, the man was ordered to request his employer to hand Mrs. B. ten and one-half dollars every week—one and one-half dollars for each of the five children and three dollars for Mr. B.’s own board. Besides this the man was required to pay the house rent, eight dollars a month. After the first month, at the request of the wife, he was allowed to give her the money himself. Each week the man reports the payment. Had Mr. B. been sent to jail, he would have lost his self-respect and his situation, he would have become an expense to the taxpayer and his family dependent on the charity of the community.

Three little Polish girls, aged 9, 10 and 11 years, arrested and indicted by the Grand Jury for grand larceny; on investigation found parents, who could not speak English, were not implicated; homes above the average. Children had stolen ribbons, lace and other articles for personal adornment, saying some had been presents; others were hidden between two old mattresses in a garret; parents terribly frightened when discoveries were made. Upon arrest of children and after bail had been secured, I began to take supervision of them; examined each one separately at my office; sent for priest, and arranged for daily instructions by the Sisters—little girls had been regular attendants at school. Later, without trial, they were probated to me by the court for an indefinite period.

The police magistrates of Hudson and Union counties avail themselves of the services of the probation officers and it is in these courts that good preventive work can be done by seeing the accused as soon as a charge is made and by investigating the case before trial, and also, in many instances, preventing the charge being entered by talking the matter over and promising to see the accused. In Elizabeth, the largest city of Union county, arrests and commitments have fallen off 40 per cent since the work of the probation officer has become known.

Three Italians appeared at my office, one to complain of two boys and the others the fathers of the boys. These men had come to ask me to take charge of the little fellows, who were mischievous and annoyed the complainant. All three were satisfied with my decision.

A Jew, who was in the habit of making charges of disorderly conduct against mischievous boys, after a talk with me, promised to bring no more children before the court until I had investigated each case for him. He had not realized the serious harm inflicted upon the boys’ characters by their being brought into court. At the end of an hour he was fully convinced. The railway detectives also report cases to me before making charges and abide by my decisions.

There is great danger of perfunctory work on the part of the probation officer and very grave danger from the uneducated officer. Public opinion has still to be aroused; therefore the need of the best work along these lines. Where good work has been done, the public has recognized that the practice of inflicting short terms of imprisonment for minor offences is useless and harmful. The need of men and women of sound judgment and high character for this work is great, and in the development of the system it is hoped that many specialists will devote some time to the installation of the work and help to bring about the proper administration of the law.

Boston was the first city to set apart special hours for the trial of juvenile offenders, and the excellent way in which these trials are managed is an object lesson worth studying. Persons not connected with the trial are required to leave the court room, the officer who made the arrest tells his story, the complainant his, and the witnesses are examined. The child is called to the judge’s desk and tells his story in a quiet voice. Confidential relations are at once established between the child and the judge. The probation officer then makes his report upon the case, after which the judge announces his decision.

The same methods are employed in Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis and will be in New York. In Chicago, a judge has been appointed who only tries children’s cases; in New York, a judge is to be chosen from time to time. The value of this way of conducting juvenile trials cannot be overestimated, as it robs the trial of all the sensational element. It also makes it easy for the various child-saving societies, such as the St. Vincent de Paul, Children’s Aid and Prevention of Cruelty to Children and for truant officers to co-operate with the court.

The following is a pen-picture of a trial held before the court in which I am probation officer: Court room crowded, twenty-two lawyers present; prosecutor reads the indictment. Boy eleven years old arrested for stealing brass worth eighty dollars, from railroad, and selling it to a junk man for twenty cents; had been bailed by kind neighbor, who delivered the boy. Court officer calls witnesses; boy brought; so small that his eyes are just on a line with the rail; boy weeping; prosecutor exclaims, and says boy should be in day-nursery; audience in back of room rises and presses forward to look at boy; lawyers inside of rail jump to their feet; court raps for order; boy realizes that he has become an object of pity and curiosity, cries louder and calls for his mother, who comes forward with a baby in her arms; judge and prosecutor confer, boy is handed over to probation officer to be produced to stand trial when called, virtually ending the matter.

THE JUVENILE COURT IN PHILADELPHIA

By JUDGE ABRAHAM M. BEITLER

Court of Common Pleas No. 1, Philadelphia

At its session in 1901 the legislature of our state passed an act, with a rather lengthy title, which has become known as the Juvenile Court Act. It passed the Senate by unanimous vote and in the House there were but three votes against it and one hundred and forty-seven for it. The act commits to a Judge of the Court of Quarter Sessions some new powers, and imposes upon him some new duties.

The scope of these powers and duties is, I am sure, understood by but few. That there may be a wider acquaintance with the new law and a clearer appreciation of the benefits possible to· be secured by its enforcement, I have tried to condense into a brief article a statement of its salient features, and, besides, to give some data as to the work done since the act was put into operation in Philadelphia.

The act deals only with juveniles, and only with those under sixteen years of age, and of juveniles under sixteen only with the unfortunate and the erring. By its terms it applies to “dependent or neglected” children, and “delinquent” children. The first class, the act says, shall include any child who is destitute or homeless or abandoned or dependent upon the public for support, or who has not the proper parental care or guardianship, or who habitually begs or receives alms, or whose home, by reason of neglect or cruelty or depravity of the parents, is an unfit place for such a child, or any child under eight years of age found peddling on the streets.

A “delinquent” child is one who “violates any law of this state, or any city or borough ordinance.”

The Court’s jurisdiction may be invoked by a petition, which must be verified by affidavit, stating that the child therein referred to is either dependent or neglected or delinquent.

Upon the filing of the petition, the Judge may issue either a summons or a warrant. The former requires the party having the custody of the child to produce it in court. The latter imposes the duty of bringing the child into court upon the officer armed with the warrant. Pending the final disposition of any case, the child may be retained in the possession of the person having it in charge, or in some suitable place provided by any association having for one of its objects the care of delinquent or neglected children.

As a matter of fact, very few cases are brought into court upon either summons or warrant. The Judge holding the court finds, upon the day fixed for the hearing of juvenile cases, that he has, perhaps, twenty-five cases on his docket, and to him they are all new cases. Most of them originated in the magistrates’ courts or in the station-houses.

The parent or parents of a child or children, for instance, may have been arrested for drunkenness or vagrancy. The magistrate hearing the case sends the parents perhaps to the House of Correction, and then something must be done for the immediate care of the children. They are turned over to the Children’s Aid Society or the Society to Protect Children from Cruelty. On the day for the hearing of juvenile cases, the children will be brought in by the Society’s agents, and a petition will be filed setting forth briefly the facts.

Sometimes the children are abandoned or homeless waifs turned over to the Society by the police.

The Judge sitting in the Juvenile Court proceeds to inquire carefully into each case. He has the assistance of the prior examination into the facts of each case by the Society’s agents. Sometimes the power of the Court is invoked to compel the attendance of relatives, or even of parents. After a careful hearing, the case of each child is decided, and a decree made. The testimony heard is taken down in a short narrative form by a stenographer, and then typewritten and filed for future reference. If the Judge is satisfied that the parent or parents of a child ought not to have the custody of the child, but are able to contribute to its support, he may make an order requiring the payment of such sum as the circumstances warrant. Children are sometimes turned over to relatives, and sometimes to a charitable society, regard being had always to the religion of the child in selecting the society.

Delinquents generally come into court from the magistrates’ courts; sometimes directly, sometimes from prison.

Now that the act is being better understood, and its benefits more generally appreciated by the magistrates and the police, a probation officer is usually advised when a “delinquent” is taken into custody. The hearings are generally held by the magistrate at the station-house, and in a large number of cases, perhaps in a majority of cases, a probation officer is present to hear the testimony against the child and to set on foot an investigation not only of the charge on which the child is held, but as to his or her previous record and home life and surroundings. It is earnestly to be hoped that all our police lieutenants and police magistrates will speedily come to appreciate how greatly the probation officer can assist them and the Court, and will let no case be heard without having previously notified the nearest probation officer.

It is in the handling of these “delinquent” cases that the Judge has the most delicate and difficult tasks imposed on him. Sometimes the boy or girl is charged with some trifling offence, and the investigation made by the probation officer shows that the child is not really bad. The probation officer goes to the child’s home; if he attends school she calls on his school teacher; if he attends Sunday school she communicates with the Sunday school teacher; if he works, she goes to his employer, and endeavors in every way to ascertain what the child’s previous life has been and what his home surroundings are.

Sometimes it is apparent that even where the child is not depraved or incorrigible, it is best for his sake that he shall not be returned to his home. A single case will serve as an illustration.

Recently, a boy of thirteen was arrested for larceny. He was guilty. His father was a drunken brute. His mother was a hardworking, honest woman, but in the household she was a mere drudge, without voice or influence. The father sent the boy upon the street to steal. The Judge before whom the case came, heard the father and mother. The father promised to behave himself. The mother begged to have the boy returned to her. He was sent home, and a probation officer appointed in his case. Two months later, the boy was again arrested for larceny. The case against him was clear. This time the Court refused to listen to the pleadings or the promises of the parents, and committed the boy to the House of Refuge. The first time the boy was in the Juvenile Court was perhaps not the first time he had offended. Had we had a Juvenile Court into which he could have been taken when he made his first departure from the path of rectitude he would have been perhaps committed to the Children’s Aid Society, and that Society would have found him a home with some Christian family and his whole life would have been changed for the better. As it is, he has been committed to an institution whose splendid work in reclaiming incorrigibles gives every hope that the boy will yet turn out a good citizen.

What to do with a bad boy is a problem as old as time. If the wisdom of the past had given us one formula to follow, the task imposed on the Judge dealing with “delinquents” would be simple, but the question every time it arises is as new and as difficult as when it was first presented. That some boys would be better off if severely punished, the first time they lie or steal, is undoubtedly true. That the way of the transgressor is hard ought to be taught both as a moral precept and an actual fact. Still, the question in every case is, how shall this boy be handled? With the best motives and after the most careful and patient inquiry, the Judge can at best but guess. To send the boy home from Court after his guilt had been confessed or established, and do nothing more, as was frequently the old way, was often to give rise to the belief on the part of the boy that the law is not stern but lenient, and that after all, to steal, to be caught, to be convicted and to face a Court is not a serious but a trifling matter. To his companions the released boy was often a sort of a hero. The bad effect on him reached to all who were of his age and class and knew of his lucky escape. On the other hand, to refuse to send the boy home left but one alternative, to commit him to prison or to the House of Refuge.

Whether committed or sent home, the boy was given but little chance in comparison to that which the Court can, under the Juvenile Court Act, now extend to him.

This brings us to consider the probation officer.

The act says, Section 6:

“The Court shall appoint or designate one or more discreet persons, of good character, to serve as probation officers during the pleasure of the Court; said probation officers to receive no compensation from the public treasury. In case a probation officer shall be appointed by any Court, it shall be the duty of the Clerk of the Court, if practicable, to notify the said probation officer in advance when any child is to be brought before the said Court; it shall be the duty of the said probation officer to make such investigation as may be required by the Court, to be present in order to represent the interests of the child when the case is heard, to furnish to the Court such information and assistance as the Judge may require, and to take such charge of any child before and after trial as may be directed by the Court.”