Page:The American Magazine (1906-1956) - volume 73.pdf/602

 of each kind, those of diseased stock contain about 20 per cent, more children than those of normal stock. Any gardener would thank his stars if he could make his vegetables keep up with the weeds; and in human reproduction, too, apparently the diseased, insane, and degenerate stocks contribute more to the population, relatively, than the normal.

This, then, in brief, is the history of England's difficulty with her birth rate, the reason of the deterioration of her stock. Obviously, too, it shows a state of things that will go straight from bad to worse unless the unmodified economic evil of her child-labor laws is somehow corrected.

Because they penalize parentage, just as ours do. I am not writing this article primarily to tell you England's troubles. I want to show how it will pay us to take heed to these statistical discoveries about the economic bearing of the Factory Acts. Child-labor is a question that is beginning to press upon us. We are framing laws to regulate it or abolish it. Well and good; so we ought. But let us not repeat the mistake of the English laws, as we are doing. Let us shape our treatment of the matter in such a way as to avoid putting an economic penalty on parentage. For otherwise we may be sure that in the long run we will confront consequences as serious as those which menace England now.

The printed page lies open, unresisting to any kind of criticism, just or unjust, that one may choose to put upon it. But I humbly hope no one will say, “Aha, he wants to drive the children back into the mines and mills, the child-bearing woman to the looms.” I do not. I would not put a single scientific shot in the locker of the pitiful wretches who lobby against child-labor laws at Washington and elsewhere. Nor would I supply a pennyworth of moral support to their masters, those infinitely more pitiful and pitiable persons, the mill-owners and manufacturers who find it in their hearts to exploit child-labor for the sake of a dollar or two. But I wish to point out how clearly the foregoing exhibit of Eugenics s hows the evil that arises when one class of men undertakes — even in the fullness of sincerity and pity — to legislate for another class, about whom they know really very little.

Lord Shaftesbury was a good and great man, a humane man, and one who worked tirelessly for the good of the oppressed working class. But, foremost and typical of those who stood behind the Factory Acts, he belonged, like my readers and myself, to the lawmaking class. And he was blind to the economic consequences of the Factory Acts because, to the lawmaking class children are not goods.

No, our children, if we have any, are a luxury. We expect to keep them and pay for them. It does not occur to us, any more than it occurred to Shaftesbury or Sir James Graham, to think of children — anybody's children — in any other way. We do not bring our children into the world because their labor is a marketable asset,; so we do not enter into the consciousness of a large class of persons who will have children if having them can be made to pay, and if not, then not.

But the class exists and exists in large numbers. Their instinct of parentage is as powerful and respectable as anyone's, but it is perforce regulated by the paramount control of poverty — the bitter poverty that forces them to market every available resource they have. Ours is not so regulated. We may be poor, but at least we can keep the infancy of our children in view as a luxury — to be paid for sometimes, it may be, scantily and hardly, but somehow to be paid for and enjoyed.

There are many men and women, however, who can not do this, though they would like to do it quite as well as we. It is by no means of free choice that the poor mother sends her child into the pit-mouth of Cornwall or Pennsylvania, or into the factories of Leeds or Lowell. She sends it there under the tireless, compelling urgency of poverty, a poverty of which our lawmaking class knows nothing, a poverty against which no sentiment or sensibility can endure.

It is for this class that we presume to legislate when we contemplate laws against child-labor. We see the children at work in the factory, we see the mother near her time of childbirth tending a loom — our humanity is outraged, our pity touched, we shudder, agitate, legislate, and drive them out.

What then? Nothing; we are through. We think we have settled the question of child-labor when we have stopped child-labor. But we have not touched the economic side of the matter at all; perhaps it has not occurred to us to think that the matter has an economic side, — one, at all events, that takes issue in such grave and far-reaching consequences as to affect the national life and character of a whole people. But what we have done, in the social and economic view, is to penalize parentage by destroying the economic value of the child. We have contributed no economic assistance to the upkeep of those families, in lieu of the productive power that we have paralyzed. We have handicapped