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A STUDY OF THE EARLY HISTORY OF CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA¹

EDITH ABBOTT

Wellesley College

In 1870, the federal census published, for the first time, statistics of the employment of children in the United States, and each succeeding census has furnished further information on the subject. During this time, there has been a growing national consciousness of the wide extent of child labor in our great industrial states and we have had much discussion of its resulting evils, and of plans for reform. It is not the purpose of this study to contribute to that discussion, but rather to give an account of the origin of the system in this country and of its growth in the period before the census had begun to collect data on the subject.

The introduction of children into our early factories was a natural consequence of the colonial attitude toward child labor, of the provisions of the early poor laws and of philanthropic efforts to prevent children from becoming a public charge, and, above all, of the Puritan belief in the virtue of industry and the sin of idleness. Industry by compulsion, if not by faith, was the gospel preached to the young as well as to the old, and quite frequently to the children of the rich as well as the poor.

Thus we find Higginson rejoicing over the “New England Plantation” because “little children here by setting of corn may earne much more than their owne maintenance;”² and less than a decade later Johnson was commending the industrious people of Rowley who “built a fulling mill and caused their little ones to be very diligent in spinning cotton wool.”³

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This rigorous insistence on industry was, with the New England colonists, not only a matter of conscience but of necessity. For they had seen “the grime and grisly face of povertie coming upon them,” and Bradford points out with Puritan simplicity that “as necessitie was a stern task-master over them [the Puritans], so they were forced to be such, not only to their servants but in a sorte to their dearest children: the which as it did not a little wound ye tender hearts of many a loving father and mother, so it produced likewise sundrie sad and sorrowful effects. For many of their children . . . . haveing lernde to bear ye yoake in their youth, and willing to bear parte of their parents’ burden, were, oftentimes, so oppressed with their hevie labours that though their minds were free and willing, yet their bodies bowed under ye weight of ye same and became decreped in their early youth.”⁴

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Court Records and Province Laws give evidence of the serious attempt made to prevent idleness among children. In 1640, an order of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts required the magistrates of the several towns to see “what couse may be taken for teaching the boys and girles in all towns the spinning of the yarne.”⁵ And in 1641, “it is desired and will be expected that all masters of families should see that their children and servants should be industriously implied so as the mornings and evenings and other seasons may not bee lost as formerly they have bene.”⁶

In the following year more definite orders are given. For a child to “keep cattle” alone is not to be industrious in the Puritan sense, and it is decreed that such children as have this for their occupation shall also “bee set to some other impliment withall as spinning upon the rock, knitting, weveing tape, etc.”⁷ In 1656 a consideration of the advisability of promoting the manufacture of cloth leads to the order that “all hands not necessarily imployed on other occasions, as woemen, girles, and boys, shall and hereby are enjoyned to spin according to their skill and

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abilitee and that the selectmen in every towne doe consider the condition and capacitie of every family and accordingly assess them as one or more spinners.”⁸ In the same year Hull records in his dairy that “twenty persons, or about such a number, did agree to raise a stock to procure a house and materials to improve the children and youth of the town of Boston (which want employment) in the several manufactures.”⁹ In short there is no lack of evidence to show that it was regarded as a public duty in the colony of Massachusetts to provide for the training of children not only in learning but in “labor and other employments which may bee profitable to the Commonwealth.”¹⁰

The belief in the necessity and propriety of keeping little children at work may also be read in the early poor law provisions. In dealing with dependent children, as in so many other methods of providing for the poor, the colonies were much influenced by the practice of the mother country. In England, the Elizabethan poor law had provided for the apprenticing of the pauper child, and in the eighteenth, and even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the “philanthropic device of employing cheap child labor” was much approved. Spinning schools were established and houses of industry founded in order to provide for the employment of children.¹¹

Much the same policy was followed in the colonies with regard to the children of the poor. In Plymouth, in 1641, it was ordered “that those that have reliefe from the townes and have children and doe not ymploy them that then it shal be lawfull for the Towneship to take order that those children shal be put to worke in fitting ymployment according to their strength and

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abilities or placed out by the Townes.¹² The Town of Boston in 1672 notifies a list of persons to “dispose of their severall children . . . . abroad for servants, to serve by Indentures accordinge to their ages and capacities,” and if they neglect this “the selectmen will take their said children from them and place them with such masters as they shall provide accordinge as the law directs.” The children are both girls and boys, for eight years old up.¹³ In 1682 the rebuilding of an almshouse and workhouse in Boston was recommended in order that children who “shamefully spend their time in the streets” and other idlers might be put to work “at ye charge of ye Town.”¹⁴ The Province Laws also provide for the binding out of the children of the poor,¹⁵ and the records of many towns give evidence that the practice was widespread. In some places where the custom of bidding off the poor prevailed, children were put to live “with some suitable person” until they were fourteen; at that age they were to be bound until they became free by law, with the special provision “if boys, put . . . . to some useful trade.”¹⁶

In Connecticut the system of dealing with the children of the poor was similar to that of Massachusetts. If their parents allowed them “to live idly or misspend their time in loitering,” they were to be bound out, “a man child until he shall come to the age of 21 years; and a woman child to the age of 18 years or time of marriage.”¹⁷

Information as to the exact character of these early apprenticeships is meager. That the work was in some cases very heavy, and the treatment severe and unkind, there is little reason

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to doubt,¹⁸ although conditions varied greatly according to the character of the master and his home. It should be noted further, that the binding out of poor children as apprentices did not necessarily mean teaching them a trade, and it is often expressly stated that the person who takes a child off the town shall have him “to be his servant” until he comes of age.”¹⁹ [The final quotation mark is unmatched in the original.]

It is not to be assumed that the work of these apprenticed children was as great an evil as child labor in a modern factory. In many cases they were employed in the open air and their tasks were only properly disciplinary.²⁰ The point which is to be emphasized is that child labor was believed in as a righteous institution, and when the transition to the factory system was made it was almost inevitable that this attitude toward children’s work should be carried over without any question as to whether circumstances might not have changed.

There are also records of the employment of children in some colonies outside of New England. Like the Puritan, the Quaker believed that children should be taught to work at

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an early age, and the Great Law of the Province of Pennsylvania provides that all children “of the age of twelve years shall be taught some useful trade or skill, to the end none may be idle, but the poor may work to live and the rich if they become poor may not want.”²¹ In Virginia the employment of children was as distinctly for purposes of gain as it has been in the past century. The London Company was not engaged in teaching moral precepts and its records indicate that child labor was accepted without any question as one way of developing the colony. There is the record of the acknowledgment of the General Court in 1819 of the arrival of the one hundred children sent over, “save such as dyed in the waie,” and it is prayed that one hundred more, twelve years old or over, may be sent the following spring.²² In 1621, the adventurers of Martin’s Hundred sent over “twelve lustie youths;”²³ a letter from England in 1627 relates that “there are many ships going to Virginia and with them fourteen or fifteen hundred children;”²⁴ a few years later the City of London is requested to send over “one hundred friendless boys and girls;” and it is held out as an inducement to the prospective immigrant laborer that “if he have a family, his wife and children will be able to beare part in that labor, . . . .”²⁵

Virginia also looked after the employment of the children of the poor. In 1646 two houses were erected in Jamestown for manufacturing linen. The different counties were respectively requested to send two poor boys or girls at least seven or eight years old “to be instructed in the art of carding, knitting and spinning.”²⁶

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The Virginia emphasis on the commercial side of child labor became pretty general in the other colonies in the eighteenth century, particularly in the latter half of it when attention began to be directed to the importance of developing domestic manufactures; and we find that the policy of keeping children at work becomes less and less a question of moral principle, even in New England. It is not so much the virtue of industry about which men are concerned but the fact that child labor is a national asset which may be used to further the material greatness of America.

The experiment in Boston, of which John Hull made record in 1656, was the prototype of many attempts in the following century to make children useful in developing the cloth manufacture. In 1720, the same town appointed a committee to consider the establishment of spinning schools “for the instruction of the children of this Town in spinning,” and one of the Committee’s recommendations is a suggestion that twenty spinning wheels be provided “for such children as should be sent from the almshouse;” while a generous philanthropist of the time erected at his own expense the “Spinning School House” which ten years later he bequeathed to the town “for the education of the children of the poor.”²⁷

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, more persistent efforts began to be made to further the cloth-making industry, and there is much interest in the possibility of making children useful to this end. Two Boston newspapers in 1750 announce that it is proposed “to open several spinning schools in this Town where children may be taught gratis:”²⁸ In the following Year the “Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor” was organized with the double purpose of promoting the manufacture of woolen and other cloth, and of employing “our own women and children who are now in a great measure idle.”²⁹

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The Province Laws of the session of 1753-54 provide for a tax on carriages for the support of a linen manufactory which it is hoped will provide employment for the poor—“especially women and children” and lessen the burden of caring for them.³⁰ Although this scheme did not realize all the hopes of its promoters, the policy was not abandoned. In 1770, Mr. William Molineux of Boston petitions the legislature to assist him in his plan for “manufacturing the children’s labour into wearing apparel” and “employing young females from eight years old and upward in earning their own support;”³¹ and public opinion commends him because, owing to his efforts, “the female children of this Town . . . . are not only useful to the community but the poorer sort are able in some measure to assist their parents in getting a livelihood.”³²

Domestic industries became increasingly important during this period, and children were not only employed in the various processes of manufacture carried on in the household but it was considered a subject for public congratulation that they could be so employed. The report of the governor of New York declares that in his province “every home swarms with children, who are set to spin and card.”³³ In 1789 the New York Linen “Manufactory” advertises that “the Directors are disposed to take young boys as apprentices to the linen and cotton branches” and notifies parents to make application for their children.³⁴ In the same year President Washington finds a sail duck “manufactory” in Boston where there are fourteen girls “spinning with both hands, the flax being fastened to the waist,” and with children (girls) to turn the wheels for them; that children should be

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employed at work of this kind seems to have been regarded without any misgivings, both in Boston and at Haverhill, where he thinks the system more “ingenious.”³⁵ Instances might be multiplied of the employment of children in these early “manufactories.” An establishment in Bethlehem, Conn., advertises for boys and girls from the age of ten to fourteen;³⁶ and another in the same state “having made and making additions to the factory” wanted “a number of lively boys from eight to eighteen.”³⁷ In the Globe “Mills” of Philadelphia at this time, the labor was chiefly performed by boys.³⁸ The card “manufactory” in Boston was a subject for congratulation because it employed “not less than twelve hundred persons, chiefly women and children.”³⁹ The account of a Philadelphia factory calls attention to the fact that “satisfactory testimonials have been adduced of the good behavior of the women and children.”⁴⁰

With the introduction of machinery and the opening up of new and great possibilities for manufacturing industries, the employment of children became more and more profitable and we find that their labor is always counted on as a valuable resource with which to meet the deficiency and high cost of male labor in this country. In the first mills in which machinery was used, children’s labor was depended on. In 1789 a petition in behalf of the “first cotton factory,” that of Beverly, Massachusetts, states that “it will afford employment to a great number of women and children, many of whom will be otherwise useless, if not burdensome to society.”⁴¹ In Rhode Island, Samuel Slater, the “father of American Manufactures,” employed only

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children in his first small establishment. Smith Wilkinson’s account of this mill, which was published many years later, describes all of the operatives as being between seven and twelve years of age. “I was then,” he says, “in my tenth year and went to work for him tending the breaker.”⁴²

When the new government began to consider seriously the possible means of developing our “infant industries,” we find Hamilton calling attention in his “Report on Manufactures” to the fact that “children are rendered more useful by manufacturing establishments than they otherwise would be,”⁴³ and Trench Coxe argues that women and children with the newly discovered power machinery will do the work and meet the demand for factory labor.⁴⁴ It was indeed one of the arguments with which the early protectionists most frequently met their opponents in the first quarter of the last century. The objection that American labor was most profitably employed in agriculture and that to “abstract” this labor from the soil would be unwise and unprofitable, was answered by pointing to the children. In the pages of Niles’ Register this is done again and again. The work of manufactures does not demand able-bodied men, it is claimed, but “is now better done by little girls from six to twelve years old.”⁴⁵

One hoary old protectionist in the pages of the same journal carefully works out the exact gain that comes to a typical village from the employing of its children in textile factories. He

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comes to the conclusion that “if we suppose that before the establishment of these manufactories, there were two hundred children between seven and sixteen years of age, that contributed nothing towards their maintenance and that they are now employed, it makes an immediate difference of $13,500 a year to the value produced in the town!”⁴⁶

Philanthropists like Matthew Carey follow in the wake of colonial traditions which made industry a fetich, and are warm with their praise of manufactures because of the larger field of employment furnished for children. They point to the additional value that can be got from girls between the ages of ten and sixteen, (604,912 being their estimated number) “most of whom are too young or too delicate for agriculture,"⁴⁷ and in contrast call attention to the “vice and immorality to, which children are exposed by a career of idleness.” Indeed the approval of child labor is met with on all sides. Commendation was solicited for Baxter’s machines on the ground that they could be turned, one sort by children from five to ten years and the other by girls from ten to twenty years.⁴⁸ Governor Davis of Massachusetts calls attention in one of his messages to the fact that not only the machines in the textile manufacture but “thousands of others equally important, are managed and worked easily by females and children.”⁴⁹

It is true that the absolute number of children employed in our early mills was not appalling, but the absolute number of all employees in our manufacturing industries was small. It seems clear, however, that children formed a very large proportion of the total number of employees and that the utilization of children’s labor was commended almost with unanimity. Such

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protests as one meets come for the most part from foreigners. A French traveler before the close of the eighteenth century writes that he finds “manufactures are much boasted of because children are employed therein from their most tender age.”⁵⁰ An English woman in 1829 addressed an American audience in terms of reproach: “In your manufacturing districts you have children worked for twelve hours a day and . . . . you will soon have them as in England, worked to death. . . .⁵¹ Now and then a free-trader comes in with a word of opposition. Condy Raguet, finding it hard to deny that manufactures make it possible to get large profits out of children’s labor, fell back upon the argument that farm work was better for both boys and girls than factory work, and that girls were more likely to become good wives if they worked in kitchens instead of factories.⁵²

An American manufacturer called as a witness before the English Factory Commission, was asked, “Have any complaints been made in the United States as to the propriety of such extent of labour for children?”⁵³ His reply was, “There have been newspaper complaints originating probably from the workmen who came from this country to the United States, but among our workmen there is no desire to have the hours of labor shortened, since they see that it will necessarily be accompanied by a reduction of wages.”⁵⁴

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Unfortunately there are no available statistics showing the extent of child labor in the first half of the nineteenth century. From time to time, however, estimates are recorded which, in the absence of accurate data, are of considerable interest. Gallatin estimated in his Report on Manufactures that our cotton mills in 1811 would employ 500 men and 3,500 women,⁵⁵ but the proportion of women to children and the ages of the children are not given. The Committee on Manufactures in 1816 reports vaguely 24,000 “boys under seventeen” and 66,000 “women and girls” out of an estimated 100,000 cotton mill employees.⁵⁶ John Quincy Adams in his Digest of Manufactures gives statistics.⁵⁷ which show that in the various manufactures of cotton more than 50 per cent. of the total number of persons employed are children, but again the age limit for “children” is not given and the Digest itself was considered unreliable for many reasons. There are other estimates for the first quarter of the century for individual towns and mills, but all alike give only the classification “women and children” or “girls and boys,” and although they uniformly show an extremely small percentage of men employed, they do not answer the question, How many children were at work and of what age were they?⁵⁸ Now and then an interesting document is found which seems to throw more light on prevailing conditions than such statistics as we have. The following extract from a memorandum book⁵⁹ of an early manufacturer under date of January 27, 1815, is of interest from this point of view:

Dennis Rier of Newbury Port has this day engaged to come with his family to work in our factory on the following conditions. He is to be here about the 20th of next month and is to have the following wages per week:

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Moreover the employment of children varied not only from state to state but from district to district. Child labor was much less extensive in Massachusetts than in Rhode Island. Samuel Slater had established in Providence and its vicinity the plan of employing families in his mills—a transplanting of the system with which he had been familiar in England. The factory village of the Rhode Island type, therefore, was composed of families entirely dependent upon their labor in the mills, and the mill children lived at home with their parents. On the other hand, in towns like Lowell and Waltham in Massachusetts,⁶⁰ the operatives were almost entirely farmers’ daughters, who, being away from their own homes, were cared for in corporation boarding-houses. The result was, that since the cost of their board was more than a child could earn, the employment of children was not profitable.⁶¹ Kirk Boott’s estimate for Lowell in 1827 was that, in six mills employing 1,200 persons, nine-tenths of the operatives were females and only twenty were from twelve to fourteen years of age. But that children were often employed very young, even in so-called model places like Waltham and Lowell, cannot be questioned. Mrs. Robinson, who gives us a delightful if somewhat optimistic

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account of the early mill girls, was only ten years old when she went to work in the Tremont Mills,⁶² and Lucy Larcom was only eleven when she became a little doffer on the Lawrence Corporation.⁶³

The New Hampshire factories were more like those of Eastern Massachusetts,⁶⁴ but Connecticut⁶⁵ and the southern and western parts of Massachusetts⁶⁶ were more like Rhode Island, where the tendency was all along toward the “family system.”

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Smith Wilkinson writes from Pomfret, Connecticut,

“In collecting our help, we are obliged to employ poor families, and generally those having the greatest number of children;” and the company’s real estate investments are explained as an attempt “to give the men employment on the lands while the children are employed in factory.”⁶⁷

But Connecticut’s point of view with regard to Rhode Island was distinctly Pharisaical, and a Connecticut official in 1842 gave the following account of the situation:

The English factory system was introduced into Rhode Island by Slater, and along with it, many of the evils of that system as it was before a more enlightened public opinion and beneficial legislation had improved it. There is a much larger proportion of children among the factory laborers in Rhode Island than in Connecticut or Massachusetts.⁶⁸

The contrast between Rhode Island and the other cotton manufacturing states in respect to child labor is made clear by the table accompanying the “Report on Cotton” at the Convention of the Friends of Industry in 1831. The total number of children under twelve employed in cotton factories in 1831 was 4,691 (excluding printeries which employed 430 more). Of this number 3,472 were from Rhode Island, 484 from New York, 439 from Connecticut, 217 from New Jersey, 60 from New Hampshire, 19 from Vermont and none from Massachusetts.⁶⁹

The Committee on Education of the Massachusetts Senate reported in 1825 that there was no necessity for legislative interference on the subject, and concluded that “this is a subject always deserving the parental care of a vigilant government. It appears, however, that the time of employment is generally

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twelve or thirteen hours each day, excepting the Sabbath.”⁷⁰ But a report from the House Committee on Education from the same state in 1836 is of considerable length and of a somewhat different tenor, as the following extracts sufficiently indicate:

According to an estimate made by an intelligent friend of manufactories . . . . there were employed in 1830, in the various manufacturing establishments in the United States, no less than 200,000 females. If the number has increased in other parts of the country since the estimate was made, as it has in this state, it must at the present time amount to more than half a million! . . . . These are females alone, and most of them of young and tender years. . . . . Labor being dearer in this country than it is in any other with which we are brought in competition in manufacturing, operates as a constant inducement to manufacturers to employ female labor, and the labor of children, to the exclusion of men’s labor, because they can be had cheaper . . . . . [With the increase of numerous and indigent families in manufacturing districts] there is a strong interest and an urgent motive to seek constant employment for their children at a very early age, if the wages obtained can aid them even but little in bearing the burden of their support . . . . . [Causes] are operating, silently perhaps but steadily and powerfully, to deprive young females particularly, and young children of both sexes in a large and increasing class in the community, of those means and opportunities of mental and moral improvement . . . . essential to their becoming . . . . good citizens. . . .

In four large manufacturing towns, not however including the largest, containing by the last census a population of little less than 20,000, there appear to be 1,895 children between the ages of four and sixteen who do not attend the common schools any portion of the year . . . . . If full and accurate answers were given by all the towns in this Commonwealth, . . . . it is believed there would be developed a state of facts which would at once arrest the attention of the legislature and not only justify but loudly demand legislative action upon the subject.”⁷¹

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Turning from the extent of child labor to the conditions under which children worked, there is also much variation from state to state; but this variation is due rather to standards set by different manufacturing centers than to the interference of state laws. For child labor was practically unregulated in this country until after the Civil War. A few laws had been passed, but they remained on the statute books as so many dead letters. In Massachuset[t]s a ten-hour law for children under twelve years was ineffectual,⁷² and not only in Massachusetts but in Connecticut and Rhode Island, laws which provided a low minimum of “schooling” went unenforced.⁷³ The inevitable result of this lack of regulation was not only that very young children were worked, but that they were worked long hours, over time, and

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at night. Even in Lowell, where conditions were particularly favorable, little mites of ten were on duty nearly fourteen hours a day, and then did household tasks and went to evening school.⁷⁴ The testimony quoted in the special report of the committee of the Massachusetts legislature in 1866⁷⁵ throws much light on all of these points. It was claimed that at that time overseers in need of “small help” went about and systematically canvassed for children.⁷⁶ There is an increasing amount of testimony that many were employed very young. Witnesses from New Bedford and Fall River testified that in both places children of seven were employed. In answer to the question: “Is there any limit on the part of the employers as to the age when they take children?” the reply was, “They’ll take them at any age they can get them, if they are old enough to stand. . . . . I guess the youngest is about seven. There are some that’s younger, but

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very little (sic).⁷⁷ From Lawrence it was reported that “a great number of children from twelve to fifteen” were working at night. “The majority of those who do night work are under eighteen years of age.”⁷⁸ There were no laws requiring the fencing of machinery nor prohibitions regarding the care of dangerous machinery by children, and accidents were common enough.⁷⁹ While there seems to have been no such gross and widespread brutality as the earlier English investigations revealed, cases of corporal chastisement were not unknown.⁸⁰

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It may seem that much of this is the testimony of ex-parte witnesses and to be discounted as such, but in the absence of disinterested official investigations, no unimpeachable evidence exists. Such information as is furnished by the state reports has been utilized but few of them are thorough or satisfactory. The old method of sending out “questionnaires” to employers who found it along the line of least resistance to disregard them, made such inquiries so incomplete as to be fruitless. General Oliver of Massachusetts in one of his reports explains that he is obliged to qualify his statements by saying “‘so far as I can learn,’ because in some cases answers to this query were not given, and such declining can have only one cause; and that not unreasonably may be assumed to be that children had been so employed but it was thought preferable not to refer to it.” A further difficulty in attempting to ascertain the extent of child labor was that parents were allowed to take young children into the mills as their assistants, and by this means they were able to tend a larger number of looms. The names of such children did not, of course, appear upon the company’s books and their work was paid for only as an increase of their parents’ earnings.⁸²

In conclusion it may be said that although data do not exist for accurately estimating the extent of child labor before 1870, it has seemed worth while to bring together whatever available material on the subject there may be, with the hope that, even if fragmentary, it may throw some light on the origin and

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growth of one of our modern problems of poverty. It has been assumed by reformers both within and without the labor movement that child labor is a social sin of the present day. Mrs. Kelley dates its growth from 1870,⁸³ and among labor agitators it has been considered a result of a deterioration in working-class conditions which has necessitated an increase in the family earnings by the employment of children.⁸⁴

These statements may be true in part. Child labor has undoubtedly increased greatly since 1870 and the working-man may be right in thinking that this has been in some measure due to a social injustice which has not preserved a proper balance between his wages and the cost of his standard of living. The late veteran labor leader, George E. McNeill, in an argument before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature, declared that the poor man had been unable to subsist on the “pauper wages” of the cotton industry, and as a result the wife, mother, and child had been dragged “from the sanctity of the home, and had become the prey of this devouring monster [the cotton mill].”⁸⁵ Mr. McNeill was probably right as to the insufficiency of the man’s wages, but the presence of women and children in the mills was certainly as much cause as effect. Ample evidence certainly exists to show that both women and children were employed in the earliest factories, and in the early part of the nineteenth century, they were the most numerous class of operatives.⁸⁶

The history of the employment of children in industry is an interesting chapter in the story of our economic development.

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Looked at through an historical perspective our modern child-labor problem seems to have been inherited from the industrial and social life of the colonies, as well as from the industrial revolution and the establishment of the factory system. The having “all hands employed” was a part of the Puritan idea of virtue, and although the employment of children tended to become more and more for commercial purposes rather than for moral righteousness, the old moral arguments were used and are still used to support the commercialized system. It is clear and unmistakable that the colonial policy of promoting thrift and industry was skillfully used in the early part of the nineteenth century by the “friends of industry” who saw in child labor a useful instrument for the developing of our national resources. Such documents as Samuel Slater’s time list for his first group of operatives, all children, the memorandum of the hiring out of Dennis Rier and his family of little children from Newburyport, or Lucy Larcom’s “Strange Story of a Little Child Earning Its Living”⁸⁷ all point to a general acceptance of the propriety of children’s labor in the early days of the factory system. That so little interest was taken in the subject until the last two decades is due, perhaps, to the fact that our social reform movement belongs to recent, if not contemporary, history. A consciousness of our social sins today does not mean that they are of sudden growth, but rather that public opinion has slowly become enlightened enough to take cognizance of them.