(4) The hours of labour of school children are inordinately long. There are 60,268 employed from ten to twenty hours a week, 27,008 from twenty-one to thirty, and 12,961 employed for more than thirty hours a week; many are employed the whole of Saturday, and some constantly on Sundays.

(5) The wages earned are contemptibly small: 64,357 earn less than 1s., and of these 17,084 less than 6d. a week. A small sum for which to sacrifice the future of a child.

This practice of using school children as wage-earners produces upon their education two different effects: in some cases it brings about their withdrawal altogether from school; in others, it causes them to be sent to school in a state totally unfit to be taught.

The entire withdrawal of children from school in order to be employed in industrial pursuits is, to some extent, the fault of the inconvenient and inelastic character of the law of school attendance itself. The law is hard and rigid, it takes no account of the customs and habits of the people; it is incapable of being adapted to local circumstances. To the city and to the country identical rules are applied. If strictly enforced it would stop almost all employment of young children in agricultural pursuits. The little children in Bavaria, in Switzerland, in Norway, and other countries where elementary education is much more advanced than here, can assist in hay-making, harvesting, fruit-picking, and light work of that kind, not only with advantage to those by whom they are employed, but with great benefit to their own health and development. In England the child must according to law spend most of the summer in school. Abroad, at those seasons of the year when the help of children in agricultural pursuits is required, the schools are altogether closed, and very young children may be seen helping in hay-making, minding cows, taking care of flocks of goats, to the great advantage of their physical growth; and as the outdoor life of summer alternates with a very regular and constant attendance at school during the winter up to the age of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, the result of the system is as advantageous to the mind as it is to the body.

Strict obedience to the law in country districts in England entails loss to farmers of the children's services, and loss to parents of the wages which the children earn. The consequence is that, during hay and harvest time, the law is almost universally broken; the schools are depopulated, and the members of School Boards and school attendance committees, whose duty it is to see the law enforced, become by stress of circumstances the very people by whom it is persistently broken. But besides agriculture there are other pursuits in which occasions arise when child labour is greatly in demand, and the employment of it conflicts with the hard and unyielding law. In the fishing industry, at the seasons of the year when great catches of fish take place; in timber cutting, when the help of children is most

useful; at seaside places, where donkey drivers are required in the summer-time-the law is practically not enforced because the law is so inconvenient for the habits and necessities of the population. Besides this, the penalty imposed for contravening the law is absurd. It is only after long neglect of the duty of sending the child to school that a fine is inflicted at all, and the maximum fine under the present law is only 58. A case was quoted in the House of Commons last year of a London boy whose father had been summoned and fined pretty regularly every month for a period of nearly two years the 58. being a very trifling deduction from the wages which the boy was able to earn for his father by breaking the law.

When children are withdrawn from school for the purposes of labour a most injurious effect is produced upon the school itself. It is not only the loss to the income of the school of the grant which the child by its attendance would earn, but it is the disorganisation of the classes, and the impossibility of carrying on efficient class teaching, which renders the absence of a number of children from school disastrous to the efficiency of the school itself. It would be much to the advantage of the schools if there was an elastic system similar to that in Switzerland, by which at certain seasons, and for certain purposes, the whole school could be entirely closed, instead of the present system by which a number of children are at certain periods removed from the school while the unfortunate teacher is expected to carry on the work and do what he can with the remnant that is left. The necessity of regular attendance in order to maintain the efficiency of a school is seen in the Higher Grade Schools now established in so many of the towns and cities. The attendance in the classes of these schools rises to 96 and even to 100 per cent., and no such school could be efficiently carried on if the attendance sank to the low percentage which characterises so many of the ordinary elementary schools.

But the case of those children who, instead of being entirely removed from school, are sent there exhausted by toil, is the more sad. In the House of Commons, Mr. Ernest Gray mentioned, from his personal experience as a teacher in a London school, the case of a boy regularly employed to deliver milk or newspapers from about four o'clock in the morning till the time when he came to school. In inclement weather he constantly arrived without having had any breakfast and wet to the skin; his younger brother used to bring him food surreptitiously, and he ate it in school, under the judiciously blind eyes of his humane teacher. It is impossible for a child to do exhausting labour and learn at the same time. Half-timers who work in the morning in factories generally spend the hours of afternoon school in slumber. If children are to be employed in serious labour at all, the work must be relegated to one period of the year

and the school to another. It is quite impossible to carry on the two processes at one and the same time.

To find a remedy for this social evil is a problem of extreme difficulty. It is a question of degree. Under present social conditions it is impossible to suppress altogether the working of school children for wages or profit. Some such employment is inevitable, and all that can be done is to attempt so to regulate it that it shall not cause the immense injury to the child which long hours of labour combined with attendance at school must cause. But there is something else which in justice to the children of the poor should at this point be referred to. Some people seem to imagine that it is right to divide a child's time between school and work, and they forget that young children also require time to play. The old adage that All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' seems to be thought inapplicable to the poor, and our arrangements are to be made as if recreation were not a necessity for all children, but a luxury appropriate only to the children of the rich. If it be considered how very much of the time at school and college is spent in games by those whose after life is not likely to be entirely destitute of enjoyment, it seems hard that the children of the poor, who have little to look forward to in the future but a life of monotonous toil, should be altogether deprived of the pleasure of play, so necessary for every young animal in its early years.

Work which children are expected to do should therefore not infringe either upon the time which ought to be devoted to learning, or upon the time which ought to be consecrated to recreation and play. The amount of industrial work which can be performed by a school child is best regulated and limited by its parents, and in the vast majority of cases this discretion is exercised wisely, and children are not allowed to be over-pressed. It is only a minority of the parents that require to be restrained by legislation from exacting too much from their children, and the problem which the legislature has to consider is, by what means the cruel or thoughtless parent can be prevented from inflicting this kind of injury upon his child. In this regard far more confidence can be placed in local authorities than in the wisdom of Parliament. Circumstances and conditions differ between town and country, and between one part of the kingdom and another. These varying circumstances require`differential treatment, and it would be impossible to frame one hard and fast law which would apply to the multifarious conditions of different parts of England and Wales. Moreover, people who manage local affairs are quite as capable as members either of Parliament or of the Civil Service. The effects of their efforts are visible and immediate, and they could in the main be trusted to make such regulations as would be suitable to the particular circumstances of their towns or districts.

There is one part of the employment of children which could easily be placed under the supervision of the local authorities, the work that is carried on in the streets,-selling newspapers, matches, and other articles.

In Liverpool regulations have lately been made by the Corporation under their local Act of 1898, with reference to children trading in the streets. No child is entitled to trade at all without a licence and without wearing a distinctive badge. These badges which are given out on the issue of the licence are of two sorts, one to be worn by children who are by law exempt from attendance at school, and the other by those who are still under the obligation to go to school, so that every policeman in Liverpool can at once distinguish to which class the child belongs. No charge is made for the badge; a deposit of sixpence may be asked for, but the Watch Committee have power to forego this deposit. The licence is given upon condition that certain regulations are observed, imposed by the Corporation of Liverpool for the benefit of the children. No licensed child may trade in the street after nine o'clock at night; no child which is not exempt from school attendance, and no girl, may trade after seven o'clock between the 1st of October and the 31st of March. The licensed children must be decently and sufficiently clothed. They must not enter any public-house or any place of public entertainment. No child which is not exempt from school attendance can trade in the street at all during school hours. Such regulations will put an end in Liverpool to a considerable amount of the evil disclosed in the recently published return. The Liverpool Corporation has power to make such regulations under a private Act of Parliament. Why should not every municipal authority in the United Kingdom be invested by public Act with similar power, and be encouraged by the Home Office to make similar regulations?

As regards other working children: the various authorities by whom government is administered scarcely make sufficient use of the circumstance that the general mass of children in the country come daily under the observation of the teachers in the elementary schools. The condition in which a child is sent to school is immediately cognisable by them: they are persons trained in the observation of children and competent to discern anything abnormal in the state in which their scholars present themselves. For a parent who can help it to wilfully send a child to school starving, or wet through, or dirty, or insufficiently clad, or exhausted by labour, is an offence. against morality, and should be made an offence against the law. In the case of children who come to school unfed, the authorities of the school are now placed in a very difficult dilemma. To attempt to work the brain of a starving child when its body has no reserve supply to replace the exhausted tissue is just as much a piece of cruelty as to work an over-driven horse. A child must be fed before

it can be taught. If a parent, who from neglect, from laziness, or from drunkenness, not able to plead the excuse of poverty and inability, sent a child to school unfed, were sure to receive the wellmerited punishment for such an offence, there would then be less economic danger in giving breakfast at the public expense to school children who were starving because their parents had no bread to give. The offence of sending a child to school in an unfit condition to receive instruction from any of the causes above enumerated is, unless the school is of preposterous size, sure of detection by the teacher of the school: and if such an offence were equally sure of being punished by the magistrate, a great deal of the evil resulting from the over-employment of children at school would disappear. The first cases to come under observation and punishment would be those that were most flagrant and inexcusable. If these were adequately dealt with, regard for their duties to their children would be instilled into the minority of thoughtless and cruel parents. They would feel constrained to perform that duty towards their children which the majority perform of their own accord, and to see that their children did not suffer from undue pressure when employed for wages or profit.

JOHN E. GORST.

VOL. XLVI-No. 269

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