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Show I Children in -the; Mines. j The Hopeless Life of Youthful Slaves in 0 Anthracite. . , (F. H- Nichols, in the Christian Her- ; aid.) , Cm the railroad track near the min- . town I met a child carrying a sack filled with coal screenings, that he had : fln, n from a .company's pile, for use I in his mother's cook stove. The child : I certainly did not' look a day over 11 . j years t'ld. . His fa-ce was pale and his j cheeks were hollow. He was very 1 round-shouldered for a child of his age j 1 1 and he showed the stunting and with- 1 ering effects pf . a. . struggle for exist- I enc-e against tremendous odds. J "How old are you?" I asked. 1 I -Thirteen, groin' on fourteen," was i J the reply. V 'And you work in the breaker?" j "Sure, and so does all the other lads . I jn the town, when they're not striking ; I Ton haven't got it in for me?" he asked 1 jn a seared tone. "I s'pose you is some . 1 kiiei of a company's detective, ain't I ! you . I ' I succeeded in allaying his fears bv i telling him that I was merely a visitor t . i" the town, and that I was living in , ' a miner's boarding house. "Tell me a little about your work in I the breaker," I said, i '"Well, that's it over there," and he , rented to a tall, black structure out-! out-! I lined against the sky. "Four hundred (lads works in that building. There's Fix breakers in this town, so that all The lads is working. We go to work at 7 in the mornin' and stay until 6. We have half an hour at noon for eatin'. jf We sort over the coal as it comes out of the sieves. We pick out the slate and slag. That's all we do see?" "Rather hard work." 1 suggested. "Yes, it is, until you get used to it. :- The coal dust's pretty uad. Sometimes it pets into your eyes and makes you kind of blind. The breaker isn't heated in winter, so you got to get used to Kin cold all day. Rut," he added, proudly, "I don't mind it no longer. The only thing I kick about is the way the coal cuts my ringers. Pickin' over the coal will once in a while wear a I feller's nails' off and wear the skin I down to the bone, so- he has to lay (off for a week until they heals up. Say. isn't it too bad that they can't invent I a way of keepin' the coal from wearln' ! a feller's fingers off'n his hands'" ; $ 4 I ' How much do you receive?" I; "Sixty cents a day. The most you can make in the breaker is 80 cents a 1; day. I'll be makin' that in two years II from now. I started on 40 cents. I H 8m gettin' there." "How long have you worked in the II breaker?" II "ix years. Ever since me f adder was y burned in a gas explosion in the mine. f He's par-lyzed for life, you know." I "Then you must have been 7 years I old when you began picking coal?" I The child hesitated. "Well," he said I slowly, "it makes no difference how y old 1 was. Me papers and alffydavits t was O. Tv. The comp'ny has got 'em I row. They says I was 13 when I I started to work. arA ttiat'o -n-l-iat t was." "Are many in the breakers younger than you?" "Why, sure. I'm one of the oldest. I am makin' 60 cents. Most of 'em is 8 and 9 years old, but their papers is all ' rent, though." he added earnestly. "The papers say they're all 13, goin' on 21" "Did you ever go to chool?' 'For the first time in our talk the child laughed; not with the innocent, rippling laugh of childhood, but with i the hard cynicism of a man of 50. "School:" he echoed. "Say, mister, you must be a green hand. Why, lads in Anthracite doesn't go to no school; I they work in the breaker." As he trudged off along the railroad track with the heavy sack of coal on his little lit-tle stooping shoulders, he looked back at me quizzically, as though he wondered won-dered what stange manner of man this might be, who could suppose for a minute that a child born under the coal dust cloud could ever receive the light of an education. The child spoke the simple truth. Boys do not go to school in Anthracite. Anthra-cite. They work in the breakers, and the intellectual and physical stunting of childhood is the saddest part of life t the mines. k 8 The coal that is brought up in cars from the base of the shaft is in large lumps, just as it has been blasted or hewn out of the vein. From the cars it is dumped into crushing machines, whirh grind it into the various sized lumps in which it is sold to the consumer. con-sumer. These machines are in the cu-J'Ola cu-J'Ola at the top of the breaker, and ( from This process the breaker takes its name. The broken coal falls into enormous revolving sieves on the floor me crusner. f rom ine sieve it passes through chutes that wind th-ouhout the building to the ground u i-'';'r, when it is loaded on freight cars. J';x'-d with the coal is more or less i te. rock and dirt, and to nick this out ,f the unceasing river of coal is the -.rk 0f tne boys and old men em-plover em-plover jn the breakers. j Fastened to the edges of the chutes little seats, where the workers sit from morning till night, forever picking pick-ing over the black stream that flows I'.'ist them. n ordinary breaker em-J'loys em-J'loys from 400 to 600 boys and men. Over every eang of fifty is a foreman. The interior of Ihe breaker is as heerless as its outside. Nothing is painted, but over everything is a heavy coating ,f ,oal dust. The sieves make su.-h delist- and continuous clouds of dust that it is sometimes difficult to 'r-e within the breaker. Strung along the wall are a few steam pipes that connect with the mine engines. These 8 re supposed to heat the building in Zh winter. But as all the steam is needed I i:i the mine, y-ry ijttle is ever allowed I percolate through the breaker. Min- I ':- say that the temperature of the I bvaker is always the same as out- I coirs. I The company insists that on file in its office it has an affidavit sworn be-i be-i fore a justice of the peace, for every boy who receives from 40 to fcO cents for ten hours' work in the breaker. The affidavit declares the boy's age to he 12 vears or over. Therefore, "there is no such thing as child labor In the i:i:ris." In name, though not in fact, ' every breaker boy is of the legal age j Inscribed by the law of the state of Jvnnsylvania for work in the mine, j That means that almost every break- I tr boy's father must have committed j l'ffjury in order to place his sons in a I life employment that shuts out all hope of an education, not only from books, hut also from contact with the refinements refine-ments or amenities of civilized life; i' that so limits his field of opportunity that he Is of necessity condemned to a hfe that shrivels his intellect, begrimes his soul and tends to make of him a hrute. , Men like Mitchell, who champion the miners' cause on general principles, , I without always going into the merits of l the case assign the miners small pay i , as the onlv reason which induces him I to deprive his offspring of an education and the rights of every child born un-W un-W the American flag, but my obsem-J obsem-J tion of miners and their philosophy of life has led me to believe the miner himself quite as much as the company, is direc'tlv responsible for the mental am moril stunting of the.","eM rh:id. 1 believe that the condition of children of Anthracite would be "We improved if the present strike g were to end m victory for the miner and the increase of his wages. Poor as the miner is. the two or three dollars a week that his child can earn in the mine do not make enough difference dif-ference in the family income to compensate com-pensate for the lack of education and opportunity which offer to the child his only hope of ever escaping from the prison of a miner's life. To a very large extent, the miner takes his child to the breaker from choice. The troglodyte has the habit of child-stunting. For the miner there is no other world than the colliery town, and there is no other vocation for his child than the coal black burrow. That the miner can take this view only goes to prove his own assertion that his life and environment environ-ment are lowering him. The image of God is grimed with the soot of the mine. "Why shouldn't the lad work in the breaker?" the miners' wives have said to me. "He is strong and healthy, and if he went to the school he would be hanging, around most of the afternoon after-noon doing nothing. Besides, book learning won't help him much in the mine." S 'V 'V . Another indication of the prevalence of the child-stunting habit in Anthracite Anthra-cite is the appearance in the land during dur-ing the last ten years of the stocking factories, which make a market for the labor of miners little daughters. A considerable con-siderable percentage of all the hosiery worn in the United States is produced in the enormous mills in the vicinity of Wilkesbarre. In these mills are employed em-ployed thousands of little girls. They are paid under the piece work system, and are able to earn from $1.50 to $3 per week. The limit of age at which girls are allowed to work in Pennsylvania Pennsyl-vania is 13. For every child who earns a pittance at the stocking loom an affidavit af-fidavit is on file in the mill office declaring de-claring she is 13 years old. Yet one does not have to employ close scrutiny to see that very few of the girls are oyer 10. They are miners' children, the sisters of boys, who, under a sworn guarantee of 12, are picking the slate out of coal for 40 cents a day. Why have the stocking manufacturers manufactur-ers selected Anthracite for their factory fac-tory sites? Because they know that the child labor demanded by their business can be more readily supplied in the land of the miner than anywhere else in the United States. They realized the prevalence of child-stunting when they came to Anthracite. "My youngest child was a girl," a woman said. "When my husband was killed in the mine cave-in the three boys went to work in the breaker. The fore-woman of the factory promised to make a place for Mary at the loom, where she could make 50 cents a day. 'But she isn't 12 years old,' says I. 'Oh, that's easy,' says she; 'lots of them are younger nor that. You can have the papers made out any age you want to for half a dollar.' 'No,' I says, thinking it over, 'the Bible says not to tell no lies, and because of that I can't lie about her age, although I d like to do it for the money. I'll bring her to the factory the day she's 13,' I says. I'm glad now of what I done, because when she were 12 year and eleven months, God, he took her. The asthma asth-ma she had, kind of turned into consumption, con-sumption, so she died. And she could not go to heaven and tell them all up there that her mother was a liar." |