Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 285, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 December 1911 — TAKING TOLL of the BABIES [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TAKING TOLL of the BABIES

S 3, whys Today It Is one Of he crying evils of the United States. Recently the National Child Labor committee has been holding a oom prebeußive exhibit in

New York City of the horror* and •Tils that follow the slavery of little children in our mills and mine*. The evidence of the camera, the bald facts of statistics and government reports have told the story only too truly. Few today realize that such things can be. Hundred of thousands of children havp grown old before their time; hundreds of thousands more have been crippled for life at an age when they ought to be running in the woods and fields. Thousands have died before they had even begun to live. And of all the misery and injury and vice and disease and, death —it is fob shocking to be more than hinted at! The exhibit which the public saw in the rooms at Fourth avenue and Twentieth street has been doing its good work all over the country since last autumn —in fact, it has been a traveling exhibit. Miss Elizabeth McM. Dinwiddle, who is In charge of it» has been from one end of the country to the other, showing it where it could do the most good at the psychological moment. It had been intended to show It in New York first, but urgent reasons called it to other places first. It was taken to North Carolina, where the inadequate law' against child labor is more honored In the breach than in the observance, just at the time that a child labor law was pending tn the state legislatures It went to Providence, R. U in order to meet a federation of women's welfare clubs convened there. It went to the state’ capitals* of Alabama Tennessee and Wisconsin tn the hope of influencing the legislators when in-

fluence was badly needed to protect the American child life against the rapacity of money-mad employers. Better than words do the pictures and posters tell their story of the twentieth century crime against child life. The boys In the coal breakers, the girls in the cotton mills, the kiddies in the night shift at the glass works who ought to have been in bed dreaming of baseball and trout brooks, the anaemic, undersized, over-worried, sickly boys and girls who should have been at school Instead of at the machines—they an told their own stories by their faces alone. On to the glass work, the mines, the cotton mUls, the canneries, the tenements—there you shall see them! In some eases the rapacity of the employers is to blame; in others it is the greed of the parents. In some cases It Is both. “She just happened In,** said the burly overseer in a South Carolina cotton mill when an investigator ran across a baby girl of eight tending her “sides" like a veteran. He was lying. The child was just as handy and useful as a grown-up and cost only half as much for her labor. In a Pennsylvania coal-breaker they photographed nine-year-old Leo. He was toiling nine hours a day in grime and dirt for a pitiful wage. And there was found on a musty, dusty school file the sworn affidavit of his parents that he was too sickly to stay in school! - _ "Four yean.” answered a good-look-ing twelve-year-old boy in a South Carolina cotton mill, when asked how long he had been there. He couldn’t tell the letter “A” from the letter “B,”

and didn’t know how to spell his own name! Bob, a boy who worked in the same mill, owned up to fifteen years, and said he had been working there for eight years. He showed it, too, in his overgrown, thin, anaemic frame, and looked fertile ground for the seeds of tuberculosis. His intelligence had stood stationary with the flight of years, and so he was still doing the same thing he had started on—taking off the empty spools from the spindles. Anything more complex was too much for his stunted intelligence. > In the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia they found boys of' twelve masquerading as sixteen. They worked ip the damp end,, darkness alongside of mules and took their lives in their hands every time they went down into the shafts to their daily toil, hundreds of feet down in the bowels of the earth. ■ I' ' ' “I haven’t grown any in five years,” said Charlie, a thin, hollow-chested, anaemic lad of fourteen, with a dull, stupid face. He has been on the night shift for seven years and makes his 60 cents a night. At Fairmont, W. va., at work in the “glory hole" of the glass works, where the temperature ranged as high as the human system can stand, there were more boys than men at work. “The works is cluttered with kids,” remarked a native. One of the saddest cases was that of little Savannah, a frail eleven-year-old. “The boss says she’s a cracker-jack At spinning*,*' declared her gaunt father proudly. “She ain’t satisfied unless she’s in the mill.”

Poor little Savanah owned up that she- had never -had a doll and neverplayed on Sundays because she was too tired. Her tense, drawn face was' that of an old woman. The gruelling labor of the mould boys in the glass works was really awful. Here were tender youngsters down in cellars guiltless of sunlight, sitting in cramped positions and tending moulds all day long and all night. Other boys worked the molten glass at the furnace maws in heat unbearable by those unaccustomed to it. One baby boy of five was found earning his few pennies a day in the mill where his mother worked. He was too young to go to school! And he was

such a golden-haired, blue-eyed, rosycheeked boy that it seemed a shame he was doomed there so qoon in life. Of course, fatalities among child toilers are far more numerous than among adults. Obviously youth is less cautious than experience. .Not a day passes that death does not take its toll of the child workers and passes along many more to the ranks of the crippled and helpless. In Pennsylvania the fatalities and accidents to the boys in breakers picking slate out of coal with their little - fingers is 300 per cent- higher than among adults and minors over sixteen. In Indiana the physical risk to children in factories under sixteen is 250 per cent, greater than among adults. In Michigan it is 450 per cent, against the child. Children who go to school under the most objectionable conditions are confined l.OOOhours annually. InMassachusetts the factory child is confined 3,120 hours a year, and in New York where the eight-hour day prevails, he is still subjected to 2,496 hours of confinement.

All states with important canning industries employ children without restriction. They can do the work just as well as adults and for far less pay. In the chief cities, where clothing, artificial flowers and other articles are made in the tenements, there are no laws to protect little children. Three and four-year-old fingers find plenty to do for a few pennies a day more to the family fund. * This tenement-house-work, done to save rent, carfares and to impress the children, has other dangers besides those of the child. The consumer is just as likely to become the victim. Physicians who will agree to conceal the contagion from the health authorities are the most popular with the tenement-house workers. Agents found women and children working on garments while children were in the same room suffering with contagious diseases. In some of these city tenements where the child is put to work as soon as it can use its hands and before it goes to school —nearly always by compulsion from the authorities —two children die for every one in localities where the chfld is not put to work before its time?