Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that “He’s got his boy to carry round wherever he goes.” . . .
I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid [clear], and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was [spitting up] some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed.
I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day. Some of them had never been inside of a school; few of them could read a child’s primer. True, some of them attended the night schools, but after working ten hours in the breaker the educational results from attending school were practically nil. “We goes fer a good time, an‘ we keeps de guys wot’s dere hoppin’ all de time,” said little Owen Jones, whose work I had been trying to do. . . .
It is not possible for a man who has been working on a farm who is an adult—after the age of 21 years, for instance—to become a skilled employee in a cotton mill. His fingers are knotted and gnarled; he is slow in action, whereas activity is required in working in the cotton mills. Therefore, as a matter of necessity, the adult of the family had to come to the cotton mill as an unskilled employee, and it was the children of the family who became the skilled employees in the cotton mills. For that reason it was the children who had to support the families for the time being. I have seen instances in which a child of 12 years of age, working in the cotton mills, is earning one and one-half times as much as his father of 40 or 50 years of age.
In the absence of schools, the discipline of the mill and its training down to twelve years of age is much better for children than idleness and no discipline or training. . . . It would be far better to have ample school facilities and compel all children to go to school ten months in the year, and give them the other two months for vacations and recreation. But in the absence of such facilities, the discipline and training of the mill is best for the children of working people.
It is the impulsive thing to say that children should never be employed; that they should be kept at home during the tender years, and that their schooling should have priority over the formation of business habits. Theoretically this is right, but the needs of the poor are little known. Many of the children who are employed as helpers, messengers, cash boys and minor laborers in shops, foundries, factories, offices and as venders, are the mainstay of families that live, God knows how, for the one who should be the bread winner is an invalid, a cripple, a paralytic, and would be in the charity hospital or the almshouse were it not that the instinct of family unity is as strong and admirable among the humble as among the rich. If all children are to be released from employment we must immensely widen our charities to care for their parents.
It is easy to say that the employers are to blame for the employment of children in and about the mines. They are, in part; yet since action was begun against violators of the factory law it has appeared that parents are the chief sinners. The ignorant Slavs, Huns and Italians who now people the region lie their offspring into employment, declaring that they are older than they seem to be. . . . A ragged urchin, led by his father into the presence of a justice that the father has helped to elect, will receive permission to work without any inquiry as to whether he knows his alphabet or can add two and two together. . . .The parents are the worst offenders, however. They are a greedy, unclean company. . . . For a few cents a day they sell these children into bondage, whereas, if they could see a little into the future they would realize that the trained child will earn more than the child who has never been to school. . . . The ignorance, perversion, brutality, the dense animalism that prevail in some of the mining districts, must be shaped by force of law to decency and the form of righteousness.