CHILD LABOR | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 27, 1904

CHILD LABOR.

WRITING in the Union Signal of the terrible evil of child labor in Southern factories, Harriet K. Bell says:—

Children as young as five years of age have been found working all day in cotton factories. Many children, some not more than seven years old, work from 6 P. M. to 6 A. M. Those who change the bobbins in the frame, usually small boys, run sixteen or seventeen miles a day with their necks between frames. Dropsy, pneumonia, and consumption are the diseases which are widespread as the results of the conditions of factory children's lives. Mutilated hands, through the amputation of fingers, are common. In one mill city alone, one doctor has reported that he has personally amputated one hundred babies' fingers, which had been mangled in the mills. Many toil for ten cents a day; twenty-five cents is a common wage; few reach forty cents. Somewhat over eleven hours is the average day of a child worker, tho it is not unusual for many to work fourteen hours. Thirty per cent of the hands in many mills are children; the proportion in some factories fifty per cent. In the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama alone 20,000 children are in the factories and 10,000 of them are under twelve years of age.

Many Southern mills are owned or controlled by Northern capital, attracted by cheap white labor and the chance to escape labor laws. A mild climate and certainty of employment, without strikes, are bringing an increase of Northern children into the rapidly multiplying factories of the South, chiefly from the congested mill centers of great cities.

To this we add an extract from an address by Mrs. Marion H. Dunham:—

The term of life of factory hands is short and the average is growing shorter; if they survive to the brief limit with hope, ambition, and aspiration crushed out of them before they know the meaning of the words, they are prematurely aged and become what is called "spent" men and women, that is, their stock of vitality, which should have served them threescore and ten or more years, if properly conserved, has been so drained and exhausted in their early years that they become unable to care for themselves by labor, and so necessarily become a public charge.

The pity of it, the uselessness of it, the cruelty of it all! "Where shall we fix the responsibility for this iniquity?" do you ask. Sometimes on the worthless, drunken father or mother, who care for the child only for what it can bring in, but they are infrequent exceptions. Thousands of children are held in literal bondage in our great cities by those who make profit from their labor, but the main cause is that many employers refuse to employ men and women, when children can serve their turn, and often employ the father only on the condition that the children shall come also. It is our infamous commercial system, in these lands we call Christian, which grinds up the little ones as no barbarous or pagan country has ever done, and this alone should place upon it eternal condemnation and determine its overthrow.