Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
Many of them could give money for an orphan asylum or a children's hospital, and yet on the same day, vote to kill a bill aimed to prevent child-labor. To pass such a bill as that would "hurt business." The Democratic Party was no better. It was simply weaker, and usually less intelligent. Wherever it was powerful, it, too, was apt to be the servant of corruption.
Hannah O'Day was not one of the quick ones. Her strength had been too early sapped. There was no child-labor law in Illinois when she should have been at school, and at eleven she was already a wage-earner. Along with the rest she also had suffered from the repeated cuts that the pace-making of the ones at the top had brought about. It was evident that something must be done.
Most of the things are directly needed, playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts, kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of child concern.
The immorality of bringing large families into the world is recognized by those who are combatting the child-labor evil.
But when child labor in the factories became such a scandal and such a disgrace that child-labor was finally forbidden by laws that possessed the advantage over our own that they were enforced, the proletariat ceased to supply children. Almost by magic the birth rate among the workers declined.
"For one thing," replied Samuel, "you work little children in your mill, and you named the State senator to beat the child-labor bill. And for another, you make speeches and pose as a political reformer, while you are paying money to Slattery, so that he will give you franchises." There was a silence, while Mr. Wygant got back his breath.
According to the census of 1900, there were over 700,000 children under sixteen years of age at work in the mills, mines, factories, and sweat-shops of the United States. Nearly all of the States had child-labor laws, but they were ordinarily poorly enforced and no State was wholly free from the blight of this child slavery.
"Did you know that it was he who beat the child-labor bill that he named the State senator on purpose to do it?" The doctor was staring at him. "The child-labor bill!" he gasped. "Is THAT what you mean?" "Yes, Dr. Vince," said Samuel. "Surely you didn't know that!" "Why, I know that Mr. Wygant is very much opposed to the bill. He has opposed it openly.
No period of low wages or of idleness with their want among the workers, no peonage or sweatshop, no child-labor factory, ever came into being, save from the same source. Nor have famine and plague been as much "acts of God" as acts of too prolific mothers. They, also, as all students know, have their basic causes in over-population.
Even allowing for the backwardness of the slum, it was clear that a child that had not yet grown its dog-teeth was not "fourteen," for they should have been cut at twelve at the latest. Three years later the Reinhardt Committee reported to the Legislature that the net result of the Factory Law was a mass of perjury and child-labor, and day began to dawn for the little ones, too.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking