New-York tribune., 1906-12-16

Civic Club. In conjunction with the Pennsyi-
vania Child Labor Committee opened here last
week the first of a series of exhibitions 70 be
held in all the large cities of the country.
Realistic scenes showing actual conditions in
many phases OF Industrial life in America were
set UP around the hall with figures painted In
exact imitation of conditions found and photo
graphed in sweat shops tenement workroons
and cellars where children have been discovered
toiling long hours for meagre pay.
One Of the scenes represented night incident
in a glass factory where boys Of fourteen years
work ten hours a day. Another showed the coal
breakers of the Pennsylvania mines, with the
boys bent over their work sorting the black
diamonds.
"Stogie making in PittsbUrg'' was the title
Of scene reproduced from photograph. IN
the dark. dirty cellar of a tenement a thirteen
year-old girl is stripping tobacco for manu-
facturer. The hours are unlimited and she earns
from 50 to S3 a week The streets on the night
before Christmas shown filed with busy
child workers in contrast to a scene in a we'll
to-do home where the children were asleep. the
Christmas tree trimmed and the stockings hung
by the chimney piece filed with presents.
According 70 charts hung around the room
there are 10000 child laborers in the United
States between the ages Of ten and fifteen years,
Of whom 100000 are girls. Another chart shows
that there are more child Iaborers in PennsyI-
vania alone than in North and South Carolina
Georgia and Maryland
To make the conditions as real as possible
actual workers We're shown toiIing in exact
imitation Of the situation in the sweat shops
and cellar workshops. 1t is asserted by those
who are interesting themselves in this exhibi-
ton that in the case Of one woman found at
work preparing rags for carpets she could earn
only from 81 to 10 cents day.
"One million seven hundred thousand children
practically Uneducated. are toiIing over here.
and growing up, darkened. massed and danger
Gus. into the American future" says III. C.
Wells, the writer. I'm Massachusetts, little
naked boys are packing cloth into bleach
ing vats in bath of chemicals that bleaches
their little bodies like the bodies Of Iepers: in
the South there are six times as many children
at work as there were twenty years ago and
each year more little ones are brought in from,
the fields and hills TO live in the degrading
atmosphere of the mill towns; in PennsvIvaDf,
children of ten and eleven stoop over the cbuts
and pick out slate and other impurities from he
coal as it passes them for ten or eleven hours
a day; IN Illinois they stand ankle deer ~
blood, cleaning intestines and trimming r,e,..
altogether. the children between the ages ~
five and fourteen forced TO toll In rar-o-fss
mines and slaughter houses compose nearly
one-sixth OF our entire population These work.
ing children cannot be learnin; to read-thOush
they will presently be having votes; they cannot
grow up fit to bear arms to be IN anv sense
but vile, computing sweaters sense men. 50
miserably they will avenge themselves bv SIM
plying the stuff for vice for crime for vst
more criminal and political manipuIations"