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up to the minimum age of employment. For the enforcement of these laws truancy officers are provided, whose powers and duties vary somewhat in the different states. The laws of Indiana, Illinois and Michigan go no further than to direct the truancy officers to investigate and report violations of the laws to parents and to prosecute those liable. The Illinois laws is in reality stronger than would appear from a reading of the section, because the labor laws vest in the school authorities the power and duty to grant the age and school certificates for employment and sending copies thereof to the factory inspectors. Ohio has vested her truancy officers with police powers and authorizes them to enter factories and other places of employment of children, to discharge the children and place them in the public schools and to prosecute both the parents and the employer for the violation. Wisconsin has not given the powers of factory inspectors in this regard to the truancy officers, but makes up for this partially by giving to the factory inspectors all the powers of truancy officers, thus enabling an inspector to follow up a discharge from employment and place. the child in the control of the school authorities.

It would appear from this review that the future development of child labor legislation is likely to vary somewhat from certain existing provisions. The experience of every state with the affidavit system shows conclusively that other means of enforcement must be adopted. The legislatures must consider that to permit opportunity for evasion means to sanction evasion. In this respect the present Wisconsin and Illinois laws offer some relief in placing the power to grant permits beyond the influence of parents. The difficulty to-day, as ten years ago, is still with the enforcement of the law. Then it was more a matter of error in method; to-day it is insufficiency of means. Every state has placed the duty of enforcing the law upon the factory in

spectors, but no state has a force of inspectors large enough to cover thoroughly the field and give it such consideration as it requires. Prosecutions have been numerous and have succeeded in causing employers to hesitate before they entered upon an agreement for illegal employment. With the great industrial activity of recent years the number of violations of the law has increased to some extent, but the chief remedy for this lies in extending and adding to the inspection force.

Child labor legislation in the Northern Central States to-day occupies a favorable position. This is due largely to the change of opinion by the public and by the employers as a body. Public opinion is not created in a day, nor does it always act promptly even after it has been aroused. The bureaus of labor and factory inspection have, through their persistent work, helped to place this problem in its true light, and this in turn has assisted in creating a general demand for effective child labor laws. Further, the employers who formerly fought every step in the progress of this legislation have since learned that the evils which they feared were largely imaginary, and that industry will not suffer if the law is uniformly enforced. In fact, some of the strongest supporters of child labor laws to-day are employers who formerly opposed them. Another force which tends to alleviate the difficulties is the growing efficiency of the school laws, and the passage of statutes prohibiting the employment of children in violation of the school laws, together with the granting of concurrent powers for the enforcement of these laws to the factory inspectors and the truancy officers. These forces, in their slow but not uncertain way, are bringing together the child labor law and the compulsory educational law into the harmonious relationship of one complete scheme, where each, though thorough, in its narrow sense, must in its broader meaning be a supplement to the other.

CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION IN THE SOUTH.

REV. NEAL L. ANDERSON, D. D., MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA.

A review of the legislation shows that Georgia alone among the manufacturing states of the South has no legal limit for the age at which a child may be employed, and it is an interesting, if not significant fact, that in this state, with perhaps one exception, there is a larger proportion of foreign capital invested in the manufacture of cotton goods than in any other of the textile states of the South.

In this state, where on account of the vast possibilities of the immediate future, owing to the fact that it ranks first in production and ginning of cotton, effective legislation is most to be desired, there are evidences of a healthy and intelligent interest in securing legislation. protecting the child, in the relatively high age limit for factory work, fourteen; in the prohibition of night work for children under fourteen, and the provision that children under sixteen must be able to read and write.

Here, however, as in the laws on the statute books of every state of the group, may be found the marks of the hand of those interested in fastening child labor upon the South, and the law is radically defective in failing to provide for special officers for inspection of the factories and the enforcement of the statute.

In Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee only is there any special provision for the enforcement of the laws prohibiting child labor, and in these states the inquisitorial powers given the grand juries furnish a means of enforcement notoriously inadequate.

The proposed legislation defeated in the Committee on Manufactures in the Legislature of North Carolina recently provided that "No girl under fourteen years should work in a manufacturing establishment. It provided further that no child under fourteen who could not read and write should be hired out to a mill; that the certificate of age and literacy should be issued by a disinterested party, the school principal, instead of a mere statement to the employer by the

very interested party, the parent; that there should be no night work in the factory for children under fourteen, and that there should be systematic factory inspection by the Labor Commissioner."

It was demonstrated in the hearing of this bill before the Legislative Committee that the storm center of the battle for the industrial freedom of the children of the South is not so much in any detail of proposed legislation, as in efforts to make the laws more effective.

So far no textile state in the South has been able to secure legal provision for any official clothed with authority to inspect the factories and enforce the law, and until this is secured all legislation on the subject must be practically inoperative.

It will be noted by the student familiar with the history of child labor legislation that with the exception of Louisiana and Arkansas the statutes in the South are practically a dead letter in another most important particular, namely, the requirements concerning the proof of the age of the child. In those states which require proof of age and even where such proof is to be publicly posted, the affidavits as to age are made out by the parent or legal guardian, the very parties against whose shiftlessness and heartlessness society has found it everywhere necessary to legislate for the protection of the children.

In Tennessee and Kentucky this defect is remedied (sic) by a proviso that such certificate shall not be required where the age of the child is known to the employer! It is against such alliance of greed and thriftlessness that we seek to deliver the children of the land.

AN ILLUSTRATION.

In company with several strangers, curious to see the wonders of the manufacture of cotton, I recently had the opportunity of passing behind the carefully guarded portals of two factories in Alabama, where my interest in the protection of the children was unknown.

In spite of the practical immunity of the mill men from danger of prosecution due to the inadequacy of the law, it was interesting to note the care with which the children had been taught to answer any inquiries that might be made concerning their ages.

Out of at least a score of children, evidently under the legal age limit, twelve, in a mill employing some three hundred operatives, only one child was found who was not "over twelve." This child confided to a little girl who was in my party the information that she was ten years old, and she looked younger still. I asked a little boy, who could not have been over nine or ten years old, how old he was. He replied with a wink and a roguish laugh that he was "most fourteen," and then ran off to tell the other children that the stranger wanted to know his age.

In another mill employing some two hundred hands the proportion of children under legal age was even larger, and there was a larger percentage of girls, but not a child was found who was not "over twelve." The conclusion was irresistible either that all these children had been taught to lie concerning their ages or that here was a most striking illustration of the effect of child labor in stunting physical development.

These two mills may fairly be taken as typical of the average suburban cotton factory in the South. In the rear of one of the factories the houses of the operatives were built around three sides of an open square or plaza, some two hundred and fifty feet wide, with a beautiful woodland crowning the bluff of the river in the rear and great open fields on either side. The houses are fairly comfortable, and neat in appearance, though needing paint. Here no one need dread the much advertised peril of the streets and slums for the children out of the mill. The children playing in this open square and on these streets would be under the restrictions of the mill authorities and could have no other companions than those very children with whom they are constantly thrown in the mill.

Two conclusions must be reached by the careful observer of such conditions:

(1) That the surroundings of these families are better than those of the same class of people in the rural districts, and (2) that the condition of the children now found at work eleven hours a day, many of them under legal age limit, would be vastly improved, and the chances of their becoming effective in the civic life of the state increased a thousand fold, if they might spend their childhood in the fresh air of the playground of the open square, instead of imprisoned in the unhealthy atmosphere of the factory.

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF SECURING

EFFECTIVE LEGISLATION.

In spite of the fact that the laws prohibiting child labor in this group of states fail to meet many of the requirements of adequate legislation upon the subject, the effort to secure their enactment has in every instance met with tremendous opposition on the part of the mill men.

In Alabama the opponents of legislation again and again succeeded in stifling in committee the bills aimed at improving the condition of the children in the factories, and it required the united efforts of the press, the ministers' unions of the leading cities, the women's clubs and other civic organizations to arouse public opinion to such an extent as to make its voice heard in the walls of the capitol.

An outline of the difficulties encountered in this state, it is believed, will present with some fullness the difficulties that have attended the attempt to secure effective legislation in the other Southern States.

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died are of such comparatively recent growth that the most striking evils of child labor have not had time to develop themselves so as to attract the attention of the community at large. It is always a more difficult matter to create healthy public sentiment for the enactment of a law that provides against a future peril than it is to arouse a storm of indignant protest against an evil that has become flagrant and notorious and constantly flaunts itself in the face of every citizen. There are hundreds of thousands of our people who have never seen a cotton mill, and many hundred thousand more who have never been inside a factory gate.

Another serious difficulty in arousing public opinion is the fact that many of the mills are managed by men of a humane and just spirit, and actuated by high convictions of duty. Mills controlled by such men have been brought to the front in every public discussion of the evils of child labor, so that in view of the conditions shown to exist in these mills many of the best citizens have concluded that the picture of the evils of child labor has been largely overdrawn, forgetting that the law is never made for the righteous, but the law-breaker.

Terrible as are the evils of child labor, and for one I would not minimize them for one moment, or turn a deaf ear to the cry of one of God's oppressed little ones, the textile industry at the South is yet in its infancy, and the true peril of the situation is in the danger that the evil should so root itself in this new industry as to prevent for many years the enactment of efficient laws on the subject, or that the factories should have been so built up on the shoulders of the children that their removal would prove disastrous to the industry itself.

Taking the statistics of the last census, there were at work in the mills of the South in 1900 only 24,170 children under sixteen years of age-a number smaller than in the factories of the single state of Pennsylvania, yet during the decade ending in 1900 while the number of children at work in other sections of the country under sixteen years of age

decreased about 50 per cent., in the Southern states the number of such children increased to an alarming ex

tent.

In Georgia during the decade 18901900 the number of children under sixteen at work in the mills increased from 2,400 to 4,500; in Alabama from 501 to 2,438 (386 per cent.); in South Carolina from 2,153 to 8,110; in North Carolina from 2,071 to 7,129. The report of the Commissioner of Labor for this lastnamed state indicates that in the last four years this number has been increased to something like 15,000.

The above statistics must be qualified by the statement that the number of factories built in these states in the period under consideration has increased in about the same proportion as the increase in the number of children employed. This, however, is the real peril of our situation, the enormous growth of the factories in the rural districts, demanding every year more and more of the children of the land.

The statistics given, it should be noted, are for children "under sixteen," and, as the legal age limit in textile states is twelve, they do not show the number of children employed contrary to law.

Legislation in these states must also not be estimated merely by certain technical requirements for an effective law. Public opinion in the South is somewhat slow to respond, but when once awakened is resistless in its power, and there has been in many parts of the Carolinas and Alabama a response to this awakened power more far-reaching in its effects upon the children than have been the technically far more stringent statutes in such states, for example, as Pennsylvania.

In Alabama and North Carolina the laws against child labor were adopted as the result of an agreement entered into by the mill men with the friends of the measure, and were based upon their solemn pledge that they would faithfully comply with the letter of the law. That in numerous instances they have failed to do so is undoubtedly true, but that the statutes have resulted in the freeing of many children from the im

prisonment of the factory and protecting many others is borne out by ample proofs.

In North Carolina the mill men have pleaded successfully their compliance with the law as a bar to more effective legislation. Such a plea does not meet the needs of the situation, but that it could be made and partially sustained is proof that the law is more effective than would be indicated by a mere reading of its provisions.

PREJUDICE IN THE SOUTH AGAINST OR

GANIZED LABOR.

One of the inducements offered to investors of capital in the southern mills is the practical immunity of these mills from interference by labor agitations by the labor unions, which in some sections have proved disastrous to the industry. So far the cotton factories of the South have been largely unhampered by strikes.

In some instances I think it is possible that opposition to efforts looking to a permanent betterment of the condition of the operatives has been due to recognition of the well-known relation between the elevation of a laboring class financially and intellectually, and the introduction of the forces of organized labor.

In Alabama the apprehension of the mill men that the child labor law was but the entering wedge of unionism was used as an argument to convince them of the importance of agreeing to the proposed legislation and of faithfully complying with the law. It was pointed out that nothing could so strengthen the cause of organized labor in the South as its alliance with the cause of innocent, helpless and wronged childhood against the oppression of the capitalist.

ANTIPATHY TO PATERNALISM.

In a section where local self-government has been most jealously guarded for generations at the cost of blood and treasure it is to be expected that there should obtain also a high theory of the rights of the individual. It cannot surprise the student therefore to find this individualism running to an extreme in the denial of the right of the state to interfere between employer and employe

in the interests of the commonwealth and the child.

The most stubborn opposition to child labor legislation has been met in this traditional antipathy of the South to everything that savors of paternalism, and the significance of the legislation so far secured is undoubtedly to be found not so much in the scope and efficiency of the laws themselves, as in the establishment of the principle that the rights of the state in and over the child are paramount even to the rights of the parent where the welfare of the child is at stake. To those who appreciate the true condition of affairs in the South this has been an enormous gain that can scarcely be overestimated.

INABILITY OF THE SOUTH TO PROVIDE FOR

COMPULSORY EDUCATION.

It has been universally recognized by those who realize the difficulties inherent in laws that attempt to protect the child by certificates concerning age, that one of the best methods of securing the object aimed at in the legislation is a compulsory educational law.

When it is recalled that of the 579,947 children in the United States between the ages of ten and fourteen who cannot read and write, 479,000 of the number are in the Southern states, and 232,127 (40 per cent.) in the four textile statesGeorgia, Alabama and the two Carolinas -it will be at once seen that here is the largest opportunity afforded anywhere in the country for the elevation of the standard of life by education, as well as the greatest temptation to capital to impose upon the child, in addition to the burden of illiteracy, an enfeebled and dwarfed body.

The South has been fearfully handicapped in her efforts to meet the problems created by the illiteracy of her people. "A double system of public education has been with all its burdens and with its varied difficulties, the inevitable and unchanging issue of our problem of population. With the gravest problems of our civilization challenging her existence and her peace, the South has been expected to assume the task of the edu

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