THE EMPLOYMENT OF SCHOOL CHILDREN.
SELDOM has a Bill, or rather a subject on which a Bill is to be founded, received such sudden promotion as that which is shortly, we hope, to regulate the employment of school children. On Monday morning all it had to look to were the doubtful chances of the ballot ; on Monday afternoon it had been taken over by the Government. It is true that Mr. Ritchie only tells us that a Bill is in preparation, and that he hopes to introduce it this Session. But there are cases in which an announcement like this is all that is wanted. A Bill of this kind is not likely to encounter serious opposition. Here and there perhaps a voice willbe raised against it in the Commons, andLordWemyss's opposition may possibly be counted on in the Lords. But these abstract assertions of the right of parents to do what they will with their children have lost much of their force under the stress of recent legislation. For the last thirty years we have disregarded the right of parents to keep their children at home when they ought to be at school, and it is not a very violent extension of the same principle to enact that parents shall not send these same children to work when they ought to be in bed. Putting it on the lowest ground, a law making this provision is the natural sequel of the Education Acts. It has been assumed as a basis of our educational legislation that the State has an immediate interest in seeing that every child is properly instructed in the rudiments of learning. For that end School Boards are constituted,buildings erected, masters and mistresses trained and paid. Between the ages of five and fourteen we keep children at school under a careful and costly system of examination and inspection. We employ officers to see that the parents do not consult their pockets or their convenience by keeping a child at home or sending him out to work during school hours. All this is done on the theory that an uninstructed chili will grow up to be an uninstructed man or woman, and that an uninstructed man or woman is a loss, if not a positive injury, to the community. These ideas have become commonplaces. They are never questioned, except now and again by some unusually reactionary Magistrate. But if it is the interest of the community that a child should be sent to school, is it not equally the interest of the community that he should come to school in a state in which he is physically capable of taking in what he is taught at school ? That is a position which can hardly be contested. There may be reasons against interfering with the liberty of parents in matters educa- tional, but there can be none against interfering, if we inter- fere at all, in a way and to an extent which shall ensure our reaping the benefit of our interference. The degree in which a child can assimilate the instruction he gets at school depends on the condition in which he arrives there. If he comes tired out already he assimilates little or nothing, and so might just as well be away,—better, in fact, because if he were away he would not occupy space and receive attention which the community has to pay for.
That children do come to school utterly unfit to learn what the teachers try to teach them has been placed beyond doubt by the evidence taken by the Employment of School Children Committee. We will take, how- ever, as more accessible, a couple of representa- tive cases described in the Daily News cf Monday. One of these is a " lather boy," — a boy who pre- pares the chins of a barber's customers for the subse- quent operations of the barber himself. He is eleven years old, and only in the Third Standard. This is not wonderful when we learn that on five evenings in the week he comes to the shop at 4 o'clock and stops till 10, and on Saturdays, when there is no school, he comes at 8 in the morning and stops till after midnight. The other boy is twelve, and is in the Fifth Standard. He is an errand boy at a chemist's, and his working hours are from 7 a.m. to 8.30, from 12.45 p.m. to 1.45, and front the time when school is over until 11 p.m. On Saturdays he starts at 7 a.m., and works either in the shop or on errands till midnight. What chance has a boy whose hours out of school are disposed of in this fashion of profiting by what he is supposed to learn at school ? To allow this kind of slave-driving to go on is to pull down with one hand what we build up with the other. Of what use is it to spend money on the education of boys in whose lives five hours or so of school are a mere interlude in a working day of fifteen or sixteen hours ? When the brain is not,in a fit state to receive instruction any money spent on vainly trying to give it is money wasted. Thus a law to regulate the employment of school children is a natural and necessary complement of a law to enforce attendance at school.
It would argue contentment with a very inadequate presentation of the case if we stopped here. The employ- ment of school children ought, no doubt, to be regulated on the ground that without such regulation we do not get a proper return for the cost of their schooling. But it ought equally to be regulated for the reasons which have long ago led us to regulate the hours worked by young people in factories. The law does not allow a boy to work more than a fixed number of hours in a mill, though he has left school, and has no longer any money spent on him by the State. But, as we have seen, he may work in a barber's shop or run errands for a chemist, even while the State is paying for his schooling, for as many hours as his parents may choose or his employer insist. If a boy may not work in a factory except fora strictly prescribed number of hours, why may he work in a shop for any larger number ? Whatever be the reason which justifies the Factory Acts justifies such legislation as is needed to extend the principle of those Acts to the cases we are now considering. These children are at the mercy of their parents. They have to go where they are bidden, and to do whatever their employer orders. Up to a point that is a natural and salutary state of things. There is some work which may be done perfectly well by children before they start for school or after they have come back from it, and it is better that children should be employed in work of this kind than that they should be in the streets for the whole of their time out of school. But to work before school and after school, and to prolong the afternoon employ- ment until the public-houses are shut and the last customer served, and be punctual at school all the same, is putting an intolerable burden on a child's back. Indeed, he has ceased to be a child in his parents' eyes, and become simply a machine for bringing in money,—money, doubtless, that is often sorely needed ; that we do not for a moment question. But this is an argument which has long ceased to be recognised in English legislation. It is the plea con- stantly put forward to justify a child's absence from school. If he were at home he could earn a shilling or two, and so help to fill thefamilyexchequer. Parliamenthas deliberately refused to listen to representations of this kind. It has constituted itself the protector, up to a certain point, of the child's welfare against the parents' needs. To use a child solely for your own purposes, without any regard for his own advantage, is to treat him as a slave. He cannot set himself free, he cannot give his parents notice, he must do whatever they make him do. If Parliament is ever justified in extending its protection to a class which cannot help itself, it is justified in such a case as this.
The Daily News correspondent in narrating his con- versation with the " lather boy " mentions one circum- stance which may seem to some people to invalidate this conclusion. The two shillings the boy gets from the barber pays half the rent of the room in which he lives with his father and mother ; and as his father is a docker and often out of work, to forbid him to work might entail the eviction of the family. This is the argument which has stood in the way of pretty nearly every real improve- ment in the condition of the poor. No large reform can possibly be accomplished except at the cost of individual suffering. Every bad system has those who would lose by its death, and many of these losers may be innocent victims. The housing question would be very much nearer a solution if the laws relating to sanitation and over- crowding were strictly enforced. Why are they not enforced? Why are people allowed to go on living too close together? Why are houses unfit for human habitation allowed to remain inhabited ? Because to carry out the law, to insist on the proper provision of cubic space, to demolish houses which have long forfeited every title to be left standing, would cause inconvenience and suffering to their present inmates. So in the case of the " lather boy." His education is being rendered value- less, his chance of growing up strong and healthy is growing daily smaller, and nothing but an Act of Parlia- ment can save him and thousands of others in the like case. And then some kind-hearted philanthropist inter- poses with : " Ah ! but think of the two shillings a week that pays half the family rent. Would you turn these poor people into the street ? " Yes, we would, just as we would turn into the street the occupants of all the houses that ought long since to have been condemned, and would have been condemned save for the unwil- lingness of the authorities to cause suffering. It is only by carrying, a law into execution that we come to realise the concomitant laws that it necessitates. If there be a class that can only keep a roof over its head by making slaves of its children, that is a class the existence of which demands the best attention that Ministers and legislators can give to it. How to deal with it may be a problem of continuous and exceptional difficulty. But it is a problem that will have to be faced some day, and in the meantime we do not mend matters by allowing other generations to grow up under the conditions, physical and mental, which have made their parents what they are. To do this is not consideration, but cowardice.
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