The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1906-10-10
FREE THE CHILDREN.

Edward Everett Hale has enlisted in
the service of the Anti-Child Slavery
league, an organization for the rescue
of children from the sweatshops and
factories. and he has made most
touching appeal for his cause in the
Woman's Home Companion, which is
the official organ of the league.
To begin with. he declares his belief
that the best and happiest life for a
boy or girl i'm the wide-range, open-aiy
life or the country, where he and his
father and mother are all united in
plan and fact in the daily life of the
nome. He believes this because such
a life gives the child good health, in
sures constant association of parents
and children and develops the social
qualities through the school life of the
neighborhood
With this beginning, the good doc
tor compares the natural. rational life
Of such children with the life of the
child slave Of the factory and work
shop.
Suppose" he says, "a little girl 8
years old is taken into a shirt fac
tory, where she is to spend ten hours
day, or perhaps eleven or twelve.
Sunday is the only day, you might
say, when she can look up at the sky
or look around on Gods world. 1t is
the only day in which for any purpose
worth considering she can run and play
arms and legs with which she was
born. The chances are against her in
the matter of using her tongue or her
ears. The rule of the workshop prob
ably forbids her talking or listening
except to the Instructions for the daily
work
And It is hardly an even chance
whether she knows her father and
mother and her big brothers and sis
tiers by sight. Anything which you and
would call home is gone.
Cor take the boy of 8 or 10 or II
years, who is set TO work in the fac
tory. There are a great many days
in the year when he must be up and
report at the mill before daylight. Sup
pose no law forbids child labor: that
mill may run twelve or more hours
out of the twenty-four. Now look in
your almanac and see how many days
there are when there are not ten hours
between sunrise and sunset. All those
days the little fellow must go in the
dark and come back in the dark to the
mill. He must be I'm the mill as soon
as the power is turned on. If he is
not there he loses the days work, and
he loses the days wages, very likely.
I cannot say precisely what he will
do in the mill. Perhaps his business
is to carry waste. That is. he has to
sweep up the waste from the cotton
which has refused to be spun, to fill
great baskets on wheels with it, and
wheel those baskets from room to
room till he comes to the dumping
room. There he empties the basket
and then he goes back to the place he
started from. He does this for ten
hours of the day, or for eleven hours
or for twelve hours. as may be direct
ed by the laws of the state in which
he lives"
Here in the west so little is known Of
the conditions of which DR.. Hale writes
that few people appreciate the burden
the children bear in the sweatshops Of
the north and the mills of both north
and south. Life in the west is free
from such evils in the main, and those
children who are called upon TO help
support the family are happily safe
from the menace of surroundings
which mean inevitable disease and
eventually death at an early age for
the little ones who fall victims to the
child-labor net.
Because they are free, because they
know the blessings of the open air life,
the men and women Of the west ought
to synpathize with and work for the
release of the nation from the curse of
the system which enslaves children. de-
priyes society of their education and
deprives them OF the opportunities by
which alone they can become good
citizens