CAPITALIST DESTRUCTION OF HUMANITY.
FROM an article in the Labor Leader, by Jane Adams, we take the following extracts:— Each age has, of course, its own temptations, and, above all, its own peculiar industrial temptations. When we ask why it is that child labor has been given to us to discuss and to rectify, rather than to the people who lived before us, we need only remember that for the first time in industrial history the labor of the little child has, in many industries, become as valuable as that of a man or woman. The old-fashioned weaver was obliged to possess skill and enough strength to pull his beam back and forth. With the invention of machinery the need of skill has been eliminated from many processes, and, with the application of steam and electricity, strength has also been largely eliminated, so that a little child may mend the thread in a textile mill almost as well and, in some respects, better than a strong and clumsy adult. This is true of many other industries, until it has come about that we are tempted as never before to use the labor of little children, and that the temptation to exploit premature labor is peculiar to this industrial epoch. . . . I have taken a Chicago street-car on a winter's night in December at 10 o'clock when dozens of little girls who have worked in the department stores all day are also boarding the cars. I know, as many others do, that these children will not get into their beds much before midnight, and that they will have to be up again early in the morning to go to their daily work. . . . A potent cause of disease is due to the breaking down of the organs which were subjected to abnormal uses before they were ready to bear it. I recall a tailor for whom the residents of Hull House tried to get medical assistance. He died at the age of thirty-three, and his death certificate bore the record of "premature senility," due to the fact that he had run a sewing machine since he was six years old. It is no figment of the imagination to say that the human system breaks down when it is put to monotonous work before it is ready to stand up to that work, and that general debility, and many diseases, may be traced to premature labor. No horse-trainer would permit his colts to be so broken down. . . . When children are thus broken down it means that we do not stand up to the obligations which belong to our own time, but insist upon using up the energy which belongs to the future.