But the young, young children, O, my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly.
They are weeping in the playtime of others.
In the country of the free.
-Anon.
Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday January 19, 1898
In United States of America: Grinding Up Children for Profit
From the Appeal to Reason of January 15, 1898:
IN addition to the above it might also be stated that improved labor-saving machinery is rapidly, and at an increasing ratio, forcing children into the shops and factories, displacing the women who had previously displaced the men. In New England textile papers you will see advertisement after advertisement for help: “Spinners wanted; only those with large families, whose children are old enough to work in the mill.”
Ye who oppose socialism, who uphold our present system of private ownership of the industries. Go among the mines of Pennsylvania or the mills of New England; visit the slums of our big cities. See the little ones; their forms slight and bent, their faces prematurely aged, and their features marked by that selfishness that alone preserves them in the merciless struggle for a mere existence. And do you think a just God will glorify you in upholding a system that dwarfs the minds and bodies and shortens the lives of His little ones?
“Suffer little children to come unto me,” did not mean to hasten them there by crushing out their souls and grinding up their bodies into “profit” for some individual who claims ownership of the opportunities through which the people must live…..
It is for the sake of the little ones, yours and mine, the pale-faced and sickly baby-slaves of Mammon, that Socialism would raise the saving shield of pure homes, loving mothers, and guarantee to the father honest and useful employment and the full and undivided fruits of his labor.
The endless procession of bonded little children, pressed more closely to a debased manhood and the grave, swarming to and fro between the mine, the shop, and the unhealthy tenement, is a procession which will, in the years to come, swell into an ignorant and frenzied army of disinherited that will sweep this country from its center to its seas, and they will answer Greed in the same language it is now teaching them.
“Ye have ears and ye hear not; ye have eyes, but neither do ye see.”
UNCLE SAM.
———-
SOURCE & IMAGES
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Jan 15, 1898
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66970100/
See also:
From Stop Child Labor, The Child Labor Coalition
-Timeline of Child Labor Developments in the United States
http://stopchildlabor.org/?p=1795
Our Toiling Children
-by Florence Kelley
Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publication Association, 1889
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:2574419$1i
Florence Kelley – Speech on Child Labor in America
Babies In The Mill – Joe Glazer
Lyrics by Dorsey Dixon, Photos by Lewis W. Hine