Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/681

 POPULATION AND WAGES 665

become able to work and add their contingent to the common fund ; and that, in proportion as the number of children is greater, the greater are the probabilities that some of them "will count it a privilege to help their parents."'

Without mentioning the sad but obvious truth that poor parents are seldom supported by their equally poor children, and that where they are so supported their share of the necessaries of life is exceedingly meager, and is subtracted from the little larger portion of their children, we must bear in mind, not only the physical and moral evils arising from the employment of very young children, but also the evident circumstance that one reason why parents need help is just because there are too many children in the market, and that the suffering that children are supposed to alleviate has been greatly caused by their very exist- ence. As to the effects of child labor on the children themselves, Malthus, referring to the habit of early marriages and to the employment of children in some manufacturing parishes of Scotland, says that the evil of the too rapid multiplication "is not very perceptible, though humanity must confess with a sigh that one of the reasons why it is not so perceptible is that room is made for fresh families by the unnatural mortality which takes place among the children so employed."' By paying low wages, another writer remarks,^ capitalists oblige women and children to come to the aid of husbands and fathers, and, as the former work for still lower wages (about two-thirds of the wages of adults), the latter are either thrown out of employment or have to work for very scanty salaries. When capitalists have thus succeeded in lowering the wages of adults (this is the testimony of the inspectors of the English factories), they cease to employ children, whose work is naturally of an inferior kind. In some parts of England the proportion of working children to adults has been as 55, and even 60, to i. At the beginning of the present century about 4,000 children were employed at the

' This argument, which is indeed very old, has of late been adduced by Rev. R. F. Clarke, S. ]., in an article on " Neo-Malthusianism" (North American Review, September, 1896, pp. 350,351).

' Malthus, Essay, Bk. II, chap, x, p. 222.

'F. NiTTi, Population and the Social System, pp. 136-8.