Aliens or Americans? Part 20
[Sidenote: What Kind of Americans?]
"They are to become Americans, and through them, more than through any other agency, their own parents are being led into a knowledge of American ways and customs. All the statistics available prove that vice and crime are far more common among the children of immigrants than among the children of native parentage, and this is due no less to the yardless tenement and street playground than to widespread poverty. In a ma.s.s of cases the father and mother both work in that feverish, restless way of the new arrival, ambitious to get ahead. To overcome poverty they must neglect their children. Turned out of the small tenement into the street, the child learns the street. Nothing escapes his sharp eyes, and almost in the briefest conceivable time, he is an American ready to make his way by every known means, good and bad. To the child everything American is good and right. There comes a time when the parents cannot guide him or instruct him; he knows more than they; he looks upon their advice as of no value. If ever there was a self-made man, that man is the son of the immigrant. But the street and the street gang have a great responsibility; they are making the children of a hundred various languages from every part of the world into American citizens."
[Sidenote: A Plain Duty]
How long will American Christianity allow this process of degeneracy to go on, before realizing the peril of it, and providing the counteracting agencies of good? That is the question the young people ought to consider and help answer.
[Sidenote: Child Labor]
But far worse than all else, "the nation is engaged in a traffic for the labor of children." In this country over 1,700,000 children under fifteen are compelled to work in the factories, mines, workshops, and fields. These figures may mean little, for as Margaret McMillan has said, "You cannot put tired eyes, pallid cheeks, and languid little limbs into statistics." But we believe that if our Christian people could be brought for one moment to realize what the inhumanity of this child labor is, there would be such an avalanche of public opinion as would put a stop to it. This evil is a new one in America, begotten of greed for money. This greed is shared jointly by the capitalist employer and the parents, but the greater responsibility rests upon the former, who creates the possibility and fosters the evil.
[Sidenote: Alien Victims]
The immigrants furnish the parents willing to sell their children into child slavery in the factory, or the worse mill or mine--prisons all, and for the innocent. Into these prisons gather "tens of thousands of children, strong and happy, or weak, underfed, and miserable. Stop their play once for all, and put them out to labor for so many cents a day or night, and pace them with a tireless, lifeless piece of mechanism, for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, and you will have a present-day picture of child labor." But there is yet one thing which must be added to the picture. Give the child-slave worker a tenement for a home in the filthy streets of an ordinary factory city, with open s.p.a.ces covered with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters running sewers, and the air foul with odors and black with factory smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe "back of the yards" in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the picture would be even darker than the one given.
[Sidenote: The Shame of the Century]
Think of it, young people of Christian America! In the twentieth century, in the country we like to think the most enlightened in the world, after all our boasted advancements in civilization, child slavery--more pitiful in some respects than African slavery ever was--has its grip on the nation's childhood.
[Sidenote: An Appalling Record]
The record is amazing to one who has never thought about this subject.
Easily a hundred thousand children at work in New York, in all sorts of employments unsuitable and injurious. Try to realize these totals, taken from Mr. Hunter, of children under fifteen, compelled to work in employments generally recognized as injurious: Over 7,000 in this country in laundries; nearly 2,000 in bakeshops; 367 in saloons as bartenders and other ways; over 138,000 at work as waiters and servants in hotels and restaurants, with long hours and conditions morally bad; 42,000 employed as messengers, with work hours often unlimited and temptations leading to immorality and vice; 20,000 in stores; 2,500 on the railroads; over 24,000 in mines and quarries; over 5,000 in gla.s.s factories; about 10,000 in sawmills and the wood-working industries; over 7,500 in iron and steel mills; over 11,000 in cigar and tobacco factories; and over 80,000 in the silk and cotton and other textile mills.
[Sidenote: Soul Murder for Money]
Now, all of these industries are physically injurious to childhood. But more than this, schooling has been made impossible, and immorality, disease, and death reap a rich harvest from this seed-sowing. And why are these helpless children thus engaged and enslaved, stunted, crippled, and corrupted, deprived of education and a fair chance in life? Simply because their labor is cheap. Mr. Hunter speaks none too strongly when he calls this "murder, cannibalism, destruction of soul and body." And it is the children of the immigrants who are thus sacrificed to Mammon, the pitiless G.o.d of greed. Shall our Christian young people have no voice in righting this wrong? Within a generation they can put an end to it, if they will. Here is home missionary work at hand, calling for highest endeavors.
QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER VI
AIM: TO SEE CLEARLY THE DANGERS ARISING FROM CONGESTION OF FOREIGNERS IN OUR CITIES, AND THE BEST WAYS OF GUARDING AGAINST THEM
I. _Foreigners in Cities._
1. What are the chief causes of the following: (1) the rapid growth of great cities; (2) the existence of slums; (3) the settling of immigrants in colonies?
2. Is your knowledge of the lives of the poor sufficient to move you to work for their redemption? Are any of those persons, about whom we have studied, your neighbors?
3. Is the prevailing tone of New York and other cities American or Foreign? Give ill.u.s.trations.
4. What is the prevailing tone in city government? Is there any connection between the answers of these last two questions?
II. _Tenement-House Evils._
5. Where do most of the foreigners settle first in the United States? Of what races is the ma.s.s chiefly composed?
6. Describe the conditions under which they live. Do they find them so or make them so?
7. What remedies can be applied to tenement-house conditions? What do the workers among them think of the needs and prospects?
8. What can be done toward improvement by the family? the school?
the city government?
III. _Prevalent Abuses._
9. Do the slum conditions tend to contaminate new arrivals? Do they actually deteriorate?
10. What is the worst industrial feature of the tenement-house districts? Describe its workings. Tell of some typical sweat-shop workers.
11. What political evils flourish in the congested districts?
12. What moral and social evils flourish in the congested districts?
IV. _Effects upon the Poor and the Children._
13. What relation does immigration hold to pauperism and poverty?
To conditions of health?
14. Name some of the princ.i.p.al authorities for the preceding answers? How would you answer those who disputed their statements?
15. Can you give any facts as to child labor? What do you think of the policy of employing children?
16. * Does this chapter convince you that Christians have a duty in these matters, and if so, what is it?
REFERENCES FOR ADVANCED STUDY.--CHAPTER VI
I. _New York Slums and Foreign Quarters._
Study especially the Ghetto, Little Italy, Little Hungary, et al. and find out whether similar conditions exist in cities of your section.
For New York, consult University Settlement Studies, Vol. I, Nos. 3 and 4.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, X, XII.
For Chicago, consult Hull House Papers.
For Boston, consult Wood: Americans in Process, III, IV.
II. _Measures for Relief of Slum Population._
Riis: The Battle With the Slum, V-XV.
Riis: How the Other Half Lives, VI, VII, XXIV.