CHILD "SLAVES" IN AMERICA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9545, 17 July 1909, Page 3

CHILD "SLAVES" IN AMERICA.

] Of the extent of child labour in the United States, it is difficult, says i a writer in "Appleton's Magazine," to form an estimate which is not open to challenge. The official figures are easily grasped, but nobody whom the writer has met or corresponded with, and none of the authorities he has consulted, believes for a moment that the official figures reveal any thing like the true facts. But, such as they are, the statistics tell a terrible story. In H>oo there were one million aijd three-quarters of the children of the country employed as breadwinners. . It must be said that a million of them were employed in agricultural Pursuits where, to be sure, the conditions are not so frightful. But nearly threeauarters of a million remained, imprisoned in mines, factories, mills, sweat shops, and the like. During the years 1880-1900 the evil had been increasing. Still folllow/ing the official' figures the populati9h of the United States increased 50.6 per cent, but the ; number of children employed in remunerative toil increased 56.5 per cent. The indications'point to an increase since 1900. An official estimate for 1906 places tne number of working children between .10 and 15 years of age at 1,939.524 as against 1,750,178 in 1900. If the illustration of the one canning factory which had 300 children illegally employed goes tor anything at all, the members actually employed must be terribly in excess of those embraced by the official figure?. From Tennesee and Alabama and Virginia, and Kentucky, from woollen mills, and cigar factories, and glass factories, and silk niill3, and from the mines, from the manufacturing cities of New /England, from the sweat-shops and the tenements and the streets of the proud city of New York, comes the bitter cry of the children. And the churches must have no rest while that cry rises in».their ears day and night. " w ''