Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/508

 494 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

whom we issued gratuitous affidavits. This is the more necessary because there is no trustworthy registration of the births of the children in the immigrant colonies ; and passports give only approximate statements of the ages of the children, the exchange of a younger for an older child in the list being a perfectly simple device, easy to carry out, but impossible of verification by the inspector. Public opinion distinctly sustained this rule of the office.

In the two months, July I to September I, 1897, following the extension (by the passage of the new child-labor law) of the provisions of the Factory Law to children engaged in mercantile occupations, we found in such establishments about 2000 children between fourteen and sixteen years of age who had previously been exempt from all state supervision. These children were found chiefly in the first ward of Chicago, and employed by less than a dozen corporations. The single errand boy, office boy, and store boy in retail trade formed but a trifling total after two months' search. But the telegraph and messenger boys employed by the three great companies numbered several hundred, while in five department stores are more children under sixteen years of age than fill the largest high school in the state. In July and August, the dullest months in the year, there were more than 1200 boys and girls between fourteen and sixteen years of age in these five establishments, one of them being the largest employer of children in the state, with 461 affidavits on file.

The result of the extension was not sensational ; we were slow to prosecute, and avoided making known to the press the convictions which we obtained. We have at the present time, in the office, evidence which we deem sufficient for the conviction of the managers of four out of five of these stores ; and one has already pleaded guilty in three cases. The wish of these man- agers is to avoid fostering the hostility to department stores carefully kept alive by the competing retail dealers, one of whose stock arguments for legislation against the department stores is the excessive employment of children by them. The managers are, therefore, not contumacious. But the numbers of children