CHAPTER V WAGE-EARNING CHILDREN Children and home work—Boot making—Box making—All night at match box making—“Can do nearly everything”—A boy tooth brush maker—A boy belt maker—Polishing “spindle legs”—Children and laundry work—Errands—Street sellers—Boys in bakehouses—In brick fields—Girls and heavy trays of jam—Half timers’ heavy loads—Things as they were—Terrors of the early cotton mills—A five year old maker of “blonde net”—Miss Edgeworth’s “Ellen”—Mrs Hogg and wage-earning children—Children in American cotton mills—The glass bottle works—Effects of juvenile work on health—On education—On morals—On industrial efficiency. The very worst feature of underpaid labour is that it tends to make wage earners of children and, in so doing, deteriorates the coming generation of adult wage earners. Where work is carried on in the home, the temptation to press children into the service is very great. The tedious process of fetching and carrying work from and to the factory or workshop generally falls to their lot; indeed, workers who have no children of their own not infrequently hire a child, for a few pence, to perform that duty. The time of a child is considered to be of little value—of less value than the three halfpence or twopence earned by the home worker in the hour or more that is often spent in waiting. Not a few children are habitually late for school, in consequence of being thus employed. Here is an instance. “Jane B. Standard 6. Age 13. Father a potman at 25s. a week. Mother machines uppers of boots; common goods, 10d. a dozen; better, 1s. 3d. a dozen. Jane sews on buttons, cuts apart work, inks round button holes. A little brother, aged nine, does buttons” (_i.e._, I suppose, sews them on). “Mother, who does sometimes three dozen in a day, sometimes only three pairs, begins work at 7 A.M. Jane begins at 7.45. She goes to the shop for work, in the morning, and carries it in—a heavy load of three dozen pairs sometimes—when she comes home from school. She gets late for school, and is only in time in the afternoons.” At the same school, a girl of eleven, Alice J., pastes in the soles of babies’ shoes and sews together the pairs. A sister “sews and beats.” These are white buck shoes, and are paid at the rate of 1s. 1d. to 1s. 3d. a dozen. Two dozen can be done in a day. The father is a cabinet maker in regular work; the mother a cleaner (apparently at an office or warehouse). The sister, of 18 or 19, makes 10s. a week. The little Alice works from 12 to 1, and again from 5.30 to 6.30, doing in that time a dozen or fifteen pairs; she reckons that it takes her five minutes to finish a pair, or perhaps twenty minutes for six pairs.