Plainfield High School - Milestone Yearbook (Plainfield, NJ)

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TAS OR ACTER. II work as boys, and, as they often have not learned enough to take a man’s place and earn men’s wages, they are discarded. Then they are lost in the tide of humanity or are next heard of in the criminal courts. This “slaughter of the innocents” is going on day after day and year after year in civilized America! What are these children? Without educa- tion, with broken health and a moral nature corrupted, these boys are to be our future citizens. These girls, with their bent, misshapen bodies and mental incapacity, are to be the mothers of a new generation of other citizens, who are to build the nation on the foundations our study forefathers laid. How shall a race of industrial slaves maintain the national greatness and welfare of America? Here then is the industrial situation. What is to be done about it? We are justly proud that our own state of New Jersey is at least in the vanguard of reform. We have a law which provides that no children under fourteen years of age shall be employed in the mills and factories. This law is fairly enforced. Inspectors go thru the state guarding against the infringement of it. Another statute, moreover, re-inforces and strengthens the child labor law; that which provides that children must attend school until fourteen years of age or, if they have not completed the grammar school course, until they are fifteen. We can indeed be proud of our state, which is far ahead of many others whose laws are lax and even at that loosely enforced. Yet we need a still better law and especially one prohibiting night work for boys from fourteen to eighteen. And we must have more than law. Law without public sentiment back of it is useless. We must educate the community, therefore, to see that the law is enforced. Conditions in Southern New Jersey are largely due to the selfishness and indifference of the workingmen, whose own industrial future, if they but knew it, depends on this reform. Conditions there and elsewhere are due, again, to the greed, or more often to the ignorance of parents who aid in the evasion of the law. And indeed, is there not need that we should be aroused to our own share in the problem? “Back of the manufacturer filling his factory with cheap labor of children is the wholesaler, saying he must buy cheap or he will buy elsewhere. Back of him is the retailer. Back of him is the eager, careless, bargain hunting public.” Can we not do a little to change this? Should not every woman at least know the facts, as she can readily learn them from the Consumers’ League or some like source? This problem is

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10 TELE ORAGIEE: Owen Lovejoy says, “For nine hours a day these little fellows toil in the breaker, bending over a stream of coal which pours out a cloud of dust so thick that the light cannot penetrate. They are responsible for the exact separation of all slate and rock—depending often entirely on the sense of touch. They endure the incessant rattle of deafening, gigantic machinery. They suffer the stifling heat of summer at one season and the bitter blasts that sweep those mountain tops at another. They are conscious that the “boss” stands behind them with his stick to prompt to duty if the natural exuberance of childhood breaks out in playfulness, or if backache induces a moment of forgetfulness. They must learn to control the nausea caused by swallowing quantities of coal dust and by the feeling that one’s throat and lungs are never clean!” These are experiences which men, perhaps, must endure in order that we may be supplied with this necessity of life, but to expose a child to such hardships is a crime that makes one wonder if we are living in a Christian country! But let us come nearer home, to our own State. Excellent as New Jersey's Child Labor law is, it 1s defective in not forbidding the employ- ment of boys at night work. A visit to the glass works of Southern New Jersey reveals the need of more stringent legislation. During the long hours of the night, in a low, badly ventilated shack, before the blast furnace, in the blistering heat, stands a glass blower. At his feet crouches a little boy busily employed in opening and shutting the hot molds. Near him stands another boy quickly breaking off the hot glass from the blow- pipe. Then another boy takes the glass from the mold and heats it so that it can be shaped by still another weary youth, who in turn gives it to another, who carries it out to be packed. All is hurry, bustle and confusion, with five boys doing this tiresome work, which simple machinery could ac- complish in less than half the time. What a life! With not a moment for rest; cursed by their masters for the slightest fault; with body wearied by the continuous toil and nerves strained as they hurry to avoid the cruel blows and no less cruel curses, these little chaps wear out their lives in unceasing toil. After being exposed for hours to the excessive and un- natural heat, they go home in the chill damp of early morning to rest—no, not to rest, but to fall into a stupor from sheer exhaustion, only,to be rudely awakened by the noise and confusion which the early morning always brings in the working sections. So their life drags on, until they are too old to

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12 THE ORAGCIE: one of many that touch the individual conscience. Surely we do not want to buy clothes, however good the bargain, if the cloth is spun by children whose very lives are woven into the web; if the garments are made by girls and women in a factory or sweat shop, at starvation wages; if the goods are sold by women whose salaries are so meagre that an easier but infinitely degrading life stands ever before them as an alluring promise of relief. Child labor is but one form of the great social problem of the day ; and however we regard it, in the end we find it as a question in whose solution we must bear our share. Music for the Flames Rome was in flames. “Hear the people groan,” cried Nero, gleefully, as the agonized shrieks of the people below reached his ears. “They are suffering?’ he asked expectantly. “Yes, my lord, intensely so.” A pleased expression stole over the emperor’s masterful features. “The poisoned spears,” he asked, growing interested,—“‘have they been applied?” “Not yet, my lord.” A look of mystification settled over his face, then he brightened. “The flames are crisping their gory bodies, charring them into beauti- fully shaded nut brown corpses, to the rythmical melody of their heart- rendering cries?’ he volunteered, in the tone of conviction of one who is acute enough to solve almost any problem and who is clever enough to ex- press it in polished language. HNOts yet, sive lords A puzzled expression again settled over his features. “Ah”, he finally said to himself in a relieved voice, and a look of supreme satisfaction settled over his face. Turning to an attendant he said, in a self satisfied tone, “Sara Sander- son is reciting Paradise Lost?” His eyes lit up with pleasure and he smiled contentedly, “Boy, bring me my fiddle.”