The Children of the Poor Part 5

Unpolitical notaries charged twenty-five cents for each certificate. This one made them out for nothing. All they had to do was to call for them.

The girls laughed scornfully at the idea of there being anything wrong in the transaction. Their parents swore in a good cause. They needed the money. The end conveniently justified the means in their case. Besides "they merely had to touch the pen." Evidently, any argument in favor of education could scarcely be expected to have effect upon parents who thus found in their own ignorance a valid defence against an accusing conscience as well as a source of added revenue.

My experience satisfied me that the factory law has had little effect in prohibiting child labor in the factories of New York City, although it may have had some in stimulating attendance at the night schools. The census figures, when they appear, will be able to throw no valuable light on the subject. The certificate lie naturally obstructs the census as it does the factory law. The one thing that is made perfectly clear by even such limited inquiry as I have been able to make, is that a birth certificate should be subst.i.tuted for the present sworn warrant, if it is intended to make a serious business of the prohibition. In the piles upon piles of these which I saw, I never came across one copy of the birth registry.

There are two obstacles to such a change. One is that our birth returns are at present incomplete; the other, that most of the children are not born here. Concerning the first, the Registrar of Vital Statistics estimates that he is registering nearly or quite a thousand births a month less than actually occur in New York; but even that is a great improvement upon the record of a few years ago. The registered birthrate is increasing year by year, and experience has shown that a determination on the part of the Board of Health to prosecute doctors and midwives who neglect their duty brings it up with a rush many hundreds in a few weeks. A wholesome strictness at the Health Office on this point would in a short time make it a reliable guide for the Factory Inspector in the enforcement of the law. The other objection is less serious than it appears at first sight.

Immigrants might be required to provide birth certificates from their old homes, where their children are sure to be registered under the stringent laws of European governments. But as a matter of fact that would not often be necessary. They all have pa.s.sports in which the name and ages of their children are set down. The claim that they had purposely registered them as younger to cheapen transportation, which they would be sure to make, need not be considered seriously. One lie is as good and as easy as another.

Another lesson we may learn with advantage from some old-country governments, which we are apt to look down upon as "slow," is to punish the parents for the truancy of their children, whether they are found running in the street or working in a shop when they should have been at school. Greed, the natural child of poverty, often has as much to do with it as real need. In the case of the Italians and the Jewish girls it is the inevitable marriage-portion, without which they would stand little chance of getting a husband, that dictates the sacrifice. One little one of twelve in a cla.s.s in the Leonard Street School, who had been working on coats in a sweat-shop nine months, and had become expert enough to earn three dollars a week, told me that she had $200 in bank, and that her sister, also a worker, was as forehanded. Their teacher supported her story. But often a meaner motive than the desire to put money in bank forges the child's fetters. I came across a little girl in an East Side factory who pleaded so pitifully that she had to work, and looked so poor and wan, that I went to her home to see what it was like. It was on the top floor of a towering tenement. The mother, a decent German woman, was sewing at the window, doing her share, while at the table her husband, a big, lazy lout who weighed two hundred pounds if he weighed one, lolled over a game of checkers with another vagabond like himself. A half-empty beer-growler stood between them. The contrast between that pitiful child hard at work in the shop, and the big loafer taking his ease, was enough to make anybody lose patience, and I gave him the piece of my mind he so richly deserved. But it rolled off him as water rolls off a duck. He merely ducked his head, s.h.i.+fted his bare feet under the table, and told his crony to go on with the play.

It is only when the child rebels in desperation against such atrocious cruelty and takes to the street as his only refuge, that his tyrant hands him over to the justice so long denied him. Then the school comes as an avenger, not as a friend, to the friendless lad, and it is scarcely to be wondered at if behind his prison-bars he fails to make sense of the justice of a world that locks him up and lets his persecutor go free--likely enough applauds him for his public spirit in doing what he did. When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not work, and has to be supported, at the odd intervals at least when he comes back from the street, the father surrenders him as a truant and incorrigible. A large number of the children that are every year sent to the Juvenile Asylum are admitted in that way. The real animus of it crops out when it is proposed to put the little prisoner in a way of growing up a useful citizen by sending him to a home out of the reach of his grasping relatives. Then follows a struggle for the possession of the child that would make the uninitiated onlooker think a gross outrage was about to be perpetrated on a fond parent. The experienced Superintendent of the Asylum, who has fought many such fights to a successful end, knows better.

"In a majority of these cases," he remarks in his report for last year, "the opposition is due, not to any special interest in the child's welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wis.h.i.+ng to obtain a situation for the boy in order to get his weekly wages."

Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin covers for pocket-flasks--one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible of cla.s.sification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor--with hands so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes, much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running errands and earning a few pennies that way, takes her place at the bench and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has earned sixty cents--"more than mother," she says with a smile. "Mother"

has been finis.h.i.+ng "knee-pants" for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing b.u.t.tons on; but she cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who "does not love work well," in the patient language of the housekeeper, had been out of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not press for the rent long due. That was Susie's doings, too, though he didn't know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.]

Of Susie's hundred little companions in the alley--playmates they could scarcely be called--some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while the boys earned money at "s.h.i.+nin'" or selling newspapers. The smaller girls "minded the baby," so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children's labor in and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them always. In an evening school cla.s.s of nineteen boys and nine girls which I polled once I found twelve boys who "s.h.i.+ned," five who sold papers, one of thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old, and of them one worked for a sweater and "finished twenty-five coats yesterday," she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman's work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to help her mother sew coats when baby slept.

I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the children under age into the stores, where they find employment as "cash"

girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are as rare as angels' visits. I do not believe this is true to any great extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the Working Women's Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger.

Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour spent in going through such a store tires many grown persons more than a whole day's work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their strength.

An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be wanting to smooth the way for them.

There is still another kind of employment that absorbs many of the boys and ought to be prohibited with the utmost rigor of the law. I refer to the messenger service of the District Telegraph Companies especially.

Anyone can see for himself how old some of these boys are who carry messages about the streets every day; but everybody cannot see the kind of houses they have to go to, the kind of people they meet, or the sort of influences that beset them hourly at an age when they are most easily impressed for good or bad. If that were possible, the line would be drawn against their employment rather at eighteen than at sixteen or fourteen.

At present there is none except the fanciful line drawn against truancy, which, to a boy who has learned the tricks of the telegraph messenger, is very elastic indeed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MINDING THE BABY.]

To send the boys to school and see that they stay there until they have learned enough to at least vote intelligently when they grow up, is the bounden duty of the State--celebrated in theory but neglected in practice.

If it did its duty much would have been gained, but even then the real kernel of this question of child labor would remain untouched. The trouble is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more, and therefore less, than when they began, and with the years that should have prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery.

How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor, in denying to our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting foreign workmen in in shoals to crowd our market under the plea of the "solidarity of labor"--a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.

The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of improving the condition of the poor, who said to me, "They are down on the scrub level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to another generation that is so much worse to start off with." She spoke of the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the ma.s.s of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the children.

I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing. The woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train.

But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her hand," reported her first employer, indignantly. The children were sent to good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved; they were simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever received--that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.

I confess I had always laid the blame for this discouraging feature of the problem upon our general industrial development in a more or less vague way--steam, machinery, and all that sort of thing--until the other day I met a man who gave me another view of it altogether. He was a manufacturer of cheap clothing, a very intelligent and successful one at that; a large employer of cheap Hebrew labor and, heaven save the mark!--a Christian.

His sincerity was unquestionable. He had no secrets to keep from me. He was in the business to make money, he said with perfect frankness, and one condition of his making money was, as he had had occasion to learn when he was himself a wage-worker and a union man, to keep his workmen where they were at his mercy. He had some four hundred hands, all Jewish immigrants, all working for the lowest wages for which he could hire them. Among them all there was not one tailor capable of making a whole garment. His policy was to keep them from learning. He saw to it that each one was kept at just one thing--sleeves, pockets, b.u.t.tonholes--some small part of one garment, and never learned anything else.

"This I do," he explained, "to prevent them from going on strike with the hope of getting a job anywhere else. They can't. They don't know enough.

Not only do we limit them so that a man who has worked three months in my shop and never held a needle before is just as valuable to me as one I have had five years, but we make the different parts of the suit in different places and keep Christians over the hands as cutters so that they shall have no chance to learn."

Where we stood in his shop, a little boy was stacking some coats for removal. The manufacturer pointed him out. "Now," he said, "this boy is not fourteen years old, as you can see as well as I. His father works here and when the Inspector comes I just call him up. He swears that the boy is old enough to work, and there the matter ends. What would you? Is it not better that he should be here than on the street? Bah!" And this successful Christian manufacturer turned upon his heel with a vexed air.

It was curious to hear him, before I left, deliver a homily on the "immorality" of the sweat-shops, arraigning them severely as "a blot on humanity."

CHAPTER VII.

THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS

On my way to the office the other day, I came upon three boys sitting on a beer-keg in the mouth of a narrow alley intent upon a game of cards. They were dirty and "tough." The bare feet of the smallest lad were nearly black with dried mud. His hair bristled, unrestrained by cap or covering of any kind. They paid no attention to me when I stopped to look at them.

It was an hour before noon.

"Why are you not in school?" I asked of the oldest rascal. He might have been thirteen.

"'Cause," he retorted calmly, without taking his eye off his neighbor's cards, "'cause I don't believe in it. Go on, Jim!"

I caught the black-footed one by the collar. "And you," I said, "why don't you go to school? Don't you know you have to?"

The boy thrust one of his bare feet out at me as an argument there was no refuting. "They don't want me; I aint got no shoes." And he took the trick.

I had heard his defence put in a different way to the same purpose more than once on my rounds through the sweat-shops. Every now and then some father, whose boy was working under age, would object, "We send the child to school, as the Inspector says, and there is no room for him. What shall we do?" He spoke the whole truth, likely enough; the boy only half of it.

There was a charity school around the corner from where he sat struggling manfully with his disappointment, where they would have taken him, and fitted him out with shoes in the bargain, if the public school rejected him. If anything worried him, it was probably the fear that I might know of it and drag him around there. I had seen the same thought working in the tailor's mind. Neither had any use for the school; the one that his boy might work, the other that he might loaf and play hookey.

Each had found his own flaw in our compulsory education law and succeeded.

The boy was safe in the street because no truant officer had the right to arrest him at sight for loitering there in school-hours. His only risk was the chance of that functionary's finding him at home, and he was trying to provide against that. The tailor's defence was valid. With a law requiring--compelling is the word, but the compulsion is on the wrong tack--all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to go to school at least one-fourth of the year or a little more; with a costly machinery to enforce it, even more costly to the child who falls under the ban as a truant than to the citizens who foot the bills, we should most illogically be compelled to exclude, by force if they insisted, more than fifty thousand of the children, did they all take it into their heads to obey the law. We have neither schools enough nor seats enough in them. As it is, we are spared that embarra.s.sment. They don't obey it.

This is the way the case stands: Computing the school population upon the basis of the Federal census of 1880 and the State census of 1892, we had in New York, in the summer of 1891, 351,330 children between five and fourteen[10] years. I select these limits because children are admitted to the public schools under the law at the age of five years, and the statistics of the Board of Education show that the average age of the pupils entering the lowest primary grade is six years and five months. The whole number of different pupils taught in that year was 196,307.[11] The Catholic schools, parochial and select, reported a total of 35,055; the corporate schools (Children's Aid Society's, Orphan Asylums, American Female Guardian Society's, etc.), 23,276; evening schools, 29,165; Nautical School, 111; all other private schools (as estimated by Superintendent of Schools Jasper), 15,000; total, 298,914; any possible omissions in this list being more than made up for by the thousands over fourteen who are included. So that by deducting the number of pupils from the school population as given above, more than 50,000 children between the ages of five and fourteen are shown to have received no schooling whatever last year. As the public schools had seats for only 195,592, while the registered attendance exceeded that number, it follows that there was no room for the fifty thousand had they chosen to apply. In fact, the year before, 3,783 children had been refused admission at the opening of the schools after the summer vacation because there were no seats for them. To be told in the same breath that there were more than twenty thousand unoccupied seats in the schools at that time, is like adding insult to injury. Though vacant and inviting pupils they were worthless, for they were in the wrong schools. Where the crowding of the growing population was greatest and the need of schooling for the children most urgent, every seat was taken. Those who could not travel far from home--the poor never can--in search of an education had to go without.

The Department of Education employs twelve truant officers, who in 1891 "found and returned to school" 2,701 truants. There is a timid sort of pretence that this was "enforcing the compulsory education law," though it is coupled with the statement that at least eight more officers are needed to do it properly, and that they should have power to seize the culprits wherever found. Superintendent Jasper tells me that he thinks there are only about 8,000 children in New York who do not go to school at all. But the Department's own records furnish convincing proof that he is wrong, and that the 50,000 estimate is right. That number is just about one-seventh of the whole number of children between five and fourteen years, as stated above. In January of this year a school-census of the Fourth and Fifteenth wards,[12] two widely separated localities, differing greatly as to character of population, gave the following result: Fourth Ward, total number of children between five and fourteen years, 2,016;[13]

of whom 297 did not go to school. Fifteenth Ward, total number of children, 2,276; number of non-attendants, 339. In each case the proportion of non-attendants was nearly one-seventh, curiously corroborating the estimate made by me for the whole city.

Testimony to the same effect is borne by a different set of records, those of the reformatories that receive the truants of the city. The Juvenile Asylum, that takes most of those of the Protestant faith, reports that of 28,745 children of school age committed to its care in thirty-nine years 32 per cent. could not read when received. The proportion during the last five years was 23 per cent. At the Catholic Protectory, of 3,123 boys and girls cared for during the year 1891, 689 were utterly illiterate at the time of their reception and the education of the other 2,434 was cla.s.sified in various degrees between illiterate and "able to read and write" only.[14] The moral status of these last children may be inferred from the statement that 739 of them possessed no religious instruction at all when admitted. The a.n.a.lysis might be extended, doubtless with the same result as to illiteracy, throughout the inst.i.tutions that harbor the city's dependent children, to the State Reformatory, where the final product is set down in 75 per cent. of "grossly ignorant" inmates, in spite of the fact that more than that proportion is recorded as being of "average natural mental capacity." In other words, they could have learned, had they been taught.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "SHOOTING c.r.a.pS" IN THE HALL OF THE NEWSBOYS' LODGING HOUSE.]

How much of this bad showing is due to the system, or the lack of system, of compulsory education, as we know it in New York, I shall not venture to say. In such a system a truant school or home would seem to be a logical necessity. Because a boy does not like to go to school, he is not necessarily bad. It may be the fault of the school and of the teacher as much as of the boy. Indeed, a good many people of sense hold that the boy who has never planned to run away from home or school does not amount to much. At all events, the boy ought not to be cla.s.sed with thieves and vagabonds. But that is what New York does. It has no truant home. Its method of dealing with the truant is little less than downright savagery.

It is thus set forth in a report of a special committee of the Board of Education, made to that body on November 18, 1891. "Under the law the truant agents act upon reports received from the princ.i.p.als of the schools. After exhausting the persuasion that they may be able to exercise to compel the attendance of truant children, and in cases which seem to call for the enforcement of the law, the agent procures the indors.e.m.e.nt of the President of the Board of Education and the Superintendent of Schools upon his requisition for a warrant for the arrest of the truant, which warrant, under the provisions of the law, is then issued by a Police Justice. A policeman is then detailed to make the arrest, and when apprehended the truant is brought to the Police Court, where his parents or guardians are obliged to attend. Should it happen that the latter are not present, the boy is put in a cell to await their appearance. It has sometimes happened that a public-school boy, whose only offence against the law was his refusal to attend school, has been kept in a cell two or three days with old criminals pending the appearance of his parents or guardians.[15] While we fully realize the importance of enforcing the laws relating to compulsory education, we believe that bringing the boys into a.s.sociations with criminals in this way and making it necessary for parents to be present under such circ.u.mstances, is unjust and improper, and that criminal a.s.sociations of this kind in connection with the administration of the truancy laws should not be allowed to continue. The Justice may, after hearing the facts, commit the child, who, in a majority of cases, is between eight and eleven years old, to one of the inst.i.tutions designated by law. We do not think that the enforcement of the laws relating to compulsory education should at any time enforce a.s.sociation with criminal cla.s.ses."

But it does, all the way through. The "inst.i.tutions designated by law" for the reception of truants are chiefly the Protectory and the Juvenile Asylum. In the thirty-nine years of its existence the latter has harbored 11,636 children committed to it for disobedience and truancy. And this was the company they mingled with there on a common footing: "Unfortunate children," 8,806; young thieves, 3,097; vagrants, 3,173; generally bad boys and girls, 1,390; beggars, 542; children committed for peddling, 51; as witnesses, 50. Of the whole lot barely a hundred, comprised within the last two items, might be supposed to be harmless, though there is no a.s.surance that they were. Of the Protectory children I have already spoken. It will serve further to place them to say that nearly one-third of the 941 received last year were homeless, while fully 35 per cent. of all the boys suffered when entering from the contagious eye disease that is the scourge of the poorest tenements as of the public inst.i.tutions that admit their children. I do not here take into account the House of Refuge, though that is also one of the inst.i.tutions designated by law for the reception of truants, for the reason that only about one-fifth of those admitted to it last year came from New York City. Their number was 55. The rest came from other counties in the State. But even there the percentage of truants to those committed for stealing or other crimes was as 53 to 47.

This is the "system," or one end of it--the one where the waste goes on.

The Committee spoken of reported that the city paid in 1890, $63,690 for the maintenance of the truants committed by magistrates, at the rate of $110 for every child, and that two truant schools and a home for incorrigible truants could be established and maintained at less cost, since it would probably not be necessary to send to the home for incorrigibles more than 25 per cent. of all. It further advised the creation of the special office of Truant Commissioner, to avoid dragging the children into the police courts. In his report for the present year Superintendent Jasper renews in substance these recommendations. But nothing has been done.

The situation is this, then, that a vast horde of fifty thousand children is growing up in this city whom our public school does not and cannot reach; if it reaches them at all it is with the threat of the jail. The ma.s.s of them is no doubt to be found in the shops and factories, as I have shown. A large number peddle newspapers or black boots. Still another contingent, much too large, does nothing but idle, in training for the penitentiary. I stopped one of that kind at the corner of Baxter and Grand Streets one day to catechise him. It was in the middle of the afternoon when the schools were in session, but while I purposely detained him with a long talk to give the neighborhood time to turn out, thirteen other lads of his age, all of them under fourteen, gathered to listen to my business with Graccho. When they had become convinced that I was not an officer they frankly owned that they were all playing hookey. All of them lived in the block. How many more of their kind it sheltered I do not know. They were not exactly a nice lot, but not one of them would I have committed to the chance of contact with thieves with a clear conscience. I should have feared especial danger from such contact in their case.

As a matter of fact the record of average attendance (136,413) shows that the public school _per se_ reaches little more than a third of all the children. And even those it does not hold long enough to do them the good that was intended. The Superintendent of Schools declares that the average age at which the children leave school is twelve or a little over. It must needs be, then, that very many quit much earlier, and the statement that in New York, as in Chicago, St. Louis, Brooklyn, New Orleans, and other American cities, half or more than half the school-boys leave school at the age of eleven (the source of the statement is unknown to me) seems credible enough. I am not going to discuss here the value of school education as a preventive of crime. That it is, so far as it goes, a positive influence for good I suppose few thinking people doubt nowadays.

Dr. William T. Harris, Federal Commissioner of Education, in an address delivered before the National Prison a.s.sociation in 1890, stated that an investigation of the returns of seventeen States that kept a record of the educational status of their criminals showed the number of criminals to be eight times as large from the illiterate stratum as from an equal number of the population that could read and write. That census was taken in 1870. Ten years later a canva.s.s of the jails of Michigan, a State that had an illiterate population of less than five per cent., showed exactly the same ratio, so that I presume that may safely be accepted.