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Page 11
The manager in a huge mercantile establishment employing many children
was able to show during a child-labor investigation, that the only
children under fourteen years of age in his employ were prot�g�s who had
been urged upon him by philanthropic ladies, not only acquaintances of
his, but valued patrons of the establishment. It is not that the charity
visitor is less wise than other people, but she has fixed her mind so
long upon the industrial lameness of her family that she is eager to
seize any crutch, however weak, which may enable them to get on.
She has failed to see that the boy who attempts to prematurely support
his widowed mother may lower wages, add an illiterate member to the
community, and arrest the development of a capable workingman. As she
has failed to see that the rules which obtain in regard to the age of
marriage in her own family may not apply to the workingman, so also she
fails to understand that the present conditions of employment
surrounding a factory child are totally unlike those which obtained
during the energetic youth of her father.
The child who is prematurely put to work is constantly oppressed by this
never ending question of the means of subsistence, and even little
children are sometimes almost crushed with the cares of life through
their affectionate sympathy. The writer knows a little Italian lad of
six to whom the problems of food, clothing, and shelter have become so
immediate and pressing that, although an imaginative child, he is unable
to see life from any other standpoint. The goblin or bugaboo, feared by
the more fortunate child, in his mind, has come to be the need of coal
which caused his father hysterical and demonstrative grief when it
carried off his mother's inherited linen, the mosaic of St. Joseph, and,
worst of all, his own rubber boots. He once came to a party at
Hull-House, and was interested in nothing save a gas stove which he saw
in the kitchen. He became excited over the discovery that fire could be
produced without fuel. "I will tell my father of this stove. You buy no
coal, you need only a match. Anybody will give you a match." He was
taken to visit at a country-house and at once inquired how much rent was
paid for it. On being told carelessly by his hostess that they paid no
rent for that house, he came back quite wild with interest that the
problem was solved. "Me and my father will go to the country. You get a
big house, all warm, without rent." Nothing else in the country
interested him but the subject of rent, and he talked of that with an
exclusiveness worthy of a single taxer.
The struggle for existence, which is so much harsher among people near
the edge of pauperism, sometimes leaves ugly marks on character, and the
charity visitor finds these indirect results most mystifying. Parents
who work hard and anticipate an old age when they can no longer earn,
take care that their children shall expect to divide their wages with
them from the very first. Such a parent, when successful, impresses the
immature nervous system of the child thus tyrannically establishing
habits of obedience, so that the nerves and will may not depart from
this control when the child is older. The charity visitor, whose family
relation is lifted quite out of this, does not in the least understand
the industrial foundation for this family tyranny.
The head of a kindergarten training-class once addressed a club of
working women, and spoke of the despotism which is often established
over little children. She said that the so-called determination to break
a child's will many times arose from a lust of dominion, and she urged
the ideal relationship founded upon love and confidence. But many of the
women were puzzled. One of them remarked to the writer as she came out
of the club room, "If you did not keep control over them from the time
they were little, you would never get their wages when they are grown
up." Another one said, "Ah, of course she (meaning the speaker) doesn't
have to depend upon her children's wages. She can afford to be lax with
them, because even if they don't give money to her, she can get along
without it."
There are an impressive number of children who uncomplainingly and
constantly hand over their weekly wages to their parents, sometimes
receiving back ten cents or a quarter for spending-money, but quite as
often nothing at all; and the writer knows one girl of twenty-five who
for six years has received two cents a week from the constantly falling
wages which she earns in a large factory. Is it habit or virtue which
holds her steady in this course? If love and tenderness had been
substituted for parental despotism, would the mother have had enough
affection, enough power of expression to hold her daughter's sense of
money obligation through all these years? This girl who spends her
paltry two cents on chewing-gum and goes plainly clad in clothes of her
mother's choosing, while many of her friends spend their entire wages on
those clothes which factory girls love so well, must be held by some
powerful force.
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