United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Shiloh's narrow escape from death had forever settled the child-labor question with him he would starve, "by the Grace of God," as he expressed it, before one of them should ever go into the mill again. He had a bitter quarrel about it with Mrs.
Oregon, 208 U.S. 412. So in Pennsylvania: Commonwealth v. Beatty, 23 Penn. As to children there is, of course, no question. Laws limiting their labor are perfectly constitutional, and some child-labor laws exist already in all States and Territories except Nevada.
"But is nothing being done on this child-labor business?" asked Hamilton. "I tried to find that out from the 'crusader' but he didn't answer." "Yes," said the superintendent heartily, "a great deal is being done.
The age is restricted to twelve years, and every other year they must go to a public school before they may be taken back into the mill. But even with all that, the law is openly violated, as it is in England, where they have been making efforts to throttle the child-labor problem for nearly a century, and after whose law the New England law was patterned."
He pictured accident, disease and death, unemployment and starvation, child-labor, prostitution, war; he was the voice of the dispossessed of the earth, the man beneath the machine, ground up body, mind and soul in this "world-wide mill of economic might". And he showed how this man dragged down with him all society; how the chain that bound the slave was fastened also to the master so that from the poverty and oppression and degradation of this "downmost man" came all the ulcers that festered in the social body.
The enforcement of the child labor laws and the extension of their restrictions are therefore an urgent necessity, not so much, as some of our child-labor authorities believe, to enable these children to go to school, as to prevent the recruiting of our next generation from the least intelligent and most unskilled classes in the community.
Many a child, in spite of the public opposition to child labor, is put to work to help support the family, and department store and bootblack parlor are conspicuous among their places of occupation. Mills and factories employ them for special kinds of labor, and States are lax in the enforcement of child-labor laws after they are on the statute books.
She cannot pay it with palliatives with child-labor laws, prohibition, regulation of prostitution and agitation against war. Political nostrums and social panaceas are but incidentally and superficially useful. They do not touch the source of the social disease. War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap.
No such extended consideration is necessary to indicate from what source the young slaves in the child-labor factories come. They come from large impoverished families from families in which the older children must put their often feeble strength to the task of supporting the younger.
The associations and influences of the street are morally degrading, and in the associations of the workroom and the factory yard the whole tone of the life of individuals is frequently lowered. 56. =Child-Labor Legislation.= Friends of the children have tried to stop abuses. Trade-unions, consumers' leagues, and State bureaus have taken the initiative.
Word Of The Day