Rensselaer Union, Volume 3, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1871 — Factory Children. [ARTICLE]

Factory Children.

The New York Timet states that the experience gained in the. six new night schools opened by the Children’s Aid Society in that city, has still further developed the fact of the great number of children of tender years in New York employed in factories, shops, trades and other regular occupations. A child put at hard work in this way, it says, is, as is well known, stunted' in growth, or enfeebled in health. He fails also to get what is considered as indispensable in this country for the safety of the State, a common school education. Neither the benevolence of th£ manufacturer nor the conscience of the parent will prevent the steady employment of children of tender years in factories, provided sufficient wages be offered: consequently masses of little ones are growing up mere machines of labor. The Timet has discovered that there are from 1,500 to 2,000 children, under fifteen years of age, employed in a single branch —the manufacture of paper collars—while between fifteen and twenty years, the number reaches 8,000. In tobacco facto ries in New York, Brooklyn, and the neighborhood (the editor says), our agents found children only four years of age—sometimes half a dozen ip a single room. Others were eight yeirs of age, and ranged front that age up to fifteen years. Girls and boys of twelve and fourteen years of age earn from $4 to f 5 per week.

One little girl attending a machine was no ■mail that she bad to stand unon a box eighteen iuchcs high to enable her to reach her work. In one room tnev found fifty childrensome little girls, only eight years of age, earning $8 per week. In another there were children of eight and old women of sixty, working together. In the “ unbinding cellar,” they found fifteen hoys under fifteen years. In twine factories, ink factories, feather, pocket-book, and artificial flower manufacture,!, and hundreds of other occupations, it is said, the same state of things is revealed.