Child Labor.

By JEROME DOWD, A. M.

or

Affectionate care of offspring has been a characteristic of the earliest people of the earth. But among savages affection is spasmodic. It does not extend to all of the offspring and does not last to their maturity. When the savage is pressed by want he does not hesitate to abandon his child, kill and eat it, sell it to a stranger. In Africa, Australia, and Polynesia we find instances in modern times of parents eating their children. Sometimes when an infant is dying, boiling water is prepared just before the last breath of life has gone out, in order that no time may be lost in cooking and devouring the flesh. Australian men have been known to bait their fishing hooks with the flesh of their own children. The Fuegians of South America will sell their children into slavery for a few trinkets, and the Patagonians have been known to pawn and dispose of a child for a pint of brandy. According to Bancroft children used to be sold and gambled away among the Sound Indians, and it is said, among the Wacusi tribe, that the prices of a child and of a dog are the same. Among the early Greeks and Romans a father had the right to sell or put his child to death, a right which he often exercised.

The birth and spread of Christianity throughout the world resulted in elevating children to a higher place in the estimation of mankind. Nothing is more characteristic of modern civilization, and nothing has done more to promote civilization, than the growing interest taken in the welfare of children. John Fiske and Prof. Drummond have stated that individual development is in proportion to the prolongation of infancy; that is to say, that the more we extend the period of play for children, the more we give the immature years to education, the greater will be the efficiency of the adults.

But as much as we may rejoice in the contribution of modern civilization to the welfare of children, we are forced to admit that the development of the commercial spirit of the nineteenth century, the greed of capitalists on the one hand and the economic distress of the wage-class on the other, have led to

a sacrifice of the child's welfare in a way that is about as brutal and savage as anything that we find in the past. When a child five or seven years of age is put to work in a factory and its life sacrificed in the interest of the parent or the capitalist, is that in principle any better than selling it into slavery or eating it? Is it not a refined form of cannibalism?

If a farmer were to hitch his young colts to a plough and work them eight hours a day, his neighbors would denounce him as a brute. What sort of horses would such colts come to be? Can we afford to be less humane in the treatment of children than in the treatment of colts? The testimony of medical science and of statistics is that child labor in factories shortens life about one-half and stunts both the mind and the body.

This inhumanity to children has so outraged the feelings of civilized people, that there is not now a manufacturing country in the civilized world, except a few States in the South, where children without age limit are allowed to work in factories. Even Russia and Japan throw the protecting arm of the law around these innocent and helpless human beings. There are about 15,000 children in the Southern States working in factories under 14 years of age, and many of these are under 10 years. This is the greatest blot upon Southern civilization. Last winter the manufacturers of North Carolina agreed among themselves not to employ children under twelve, but the agreement embraced so many exceptions and conditions, that it left a gap open for any manufacturer to do as he pleased about carrying out the agreement. The agreement was a farce and has not at all been observed. Only yesterday, I read in the Charlotte News that a man was before the mayor's court for some offense and that he admitted that his own child, 10 years old, worked in one of the Charlotte factories, and that there were also others of the same age employed in the same factory.

There is nothing in the world that can be said as an excuse for child labor, either in behalf of the parent, the manufacturer, or the public. There is no kind of outcome of the nonemployment of children that is not better for all concerned than the grinding up of the children in factories.

I recently read in the Outlook that the main opposition to a child labor law in the South comes from the capitalists who have recently migrated from New England. I know it to be a fact that Mr. D. A. Tompkins and other native Southern manufacturers are in favor of such a law. They do not themselves wish to coin money out of children and they realize that the only way to prevent others from doing so is to have a law.

The Southern pulpit and press, on this question of child labor, seem to be largely deaf and dumb, and unless there is soon a mighty awakening, the outside world will rightly conclude that the last spark of Southern chivalry has disappeared.

Alfred

in Relation to English Literature and Culture.'

By WILLIAM PRESTON FEW, PH. D.

Freeman, the very competent and discriminating historian of older England, has given this simple, comprehensive estimate of Alfred the Great. "Alfred is the most perfect character in history. No other man on record has ever so thoroughly united all the virtues, both of the ruler and of the private man. A saint without superstition, a scholar without ostentation, a warrior all whose wars were fought in defense of his country, a conqueror whose laurels were never stained with cruelty, a prince never cast down by adversity, never lifted up to insolence in the hour of triumph-there is no other name in history to compare with his." This may seem to be excessive praise, but it is perhaps no extravagance to call Alfred the most perfect man of action of whom we knew. Epitaphs are proverbially optimistic, but of hardly any other could be written even in an epitaph the inscription on the base of the statue erected to Alfred in 1877, at Wantage, his birth-place: "Alfred found Learning dead, and he restored it; Education neglected, and he revived it; the laws powerless, and he gave them force; the Church debased, and he raised it; the Land ravaged by a fearful Enemy, from which he delivered it. Alfred's name will live as long as mankind shall respect the Past."

It is easy to speak with enthusiasm of the many virtues of the many-sided Alfred. He was a brave and successful warrior. He was a great state-builder. He was a disinterested patriot and self-sacrificing lover and servant of his fellows. He was a wise man and knew how to deal with men. He was a manly man, full of energy and effort, a rough and ready toiler in the world's work, an olden time exemplar of the strenuous life. He was a gentle man and had all of a woman's tenderness, affection, and capacity for high and

This paper and the one following it were written to be read at Trinity College on the occasion of the thousandth anniversary of the death of King Alfred the Great.

unselfish devotion. He was a saint, who lived untouched with fanaticism in an age of superstition, who was free from bitterness and narrowness, whose sympathies and ideals included the whole of human life and rested upon a wide, sane view of things. He was a scholar without ostentation and pedantry; "his noble nature implanted in him from his cradle a love of wisdom above all things;" like all fine spirits of the earth he had a delicate susceptibility to the beautiful things in the outward world, in the inner character of men and in literature; the noblest form of literature known to him, the old English song, he loved passionately, for the very good reason that

It is old and plain;

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun

And the free maids that weave their thread with bones

Do use to chant it: it is the simple truth,

And dallies with the innocence of life,

Like the old age;

he loved learning because he recognized in it the surest means for sweetening, strengthening, and sustaining his own life and for uplifting and enlarging the lives of his countrymen.

I shall not speak of the varied manifestations of Alfred's practical genius; but I shall speak of him only in his relations to English literature and learning and of his influence in the general uplifting of the English race.

Aside from the wars in which Alfred was forced so often to engage in the defense of his country, we know little of the details of his life. Our most trustworthy source of information is the life of Alfred by Asser, a Welsh monk and scholar, who at the earnest solicitation of the king consented to live in the royal household six months of each year. The biography covers the years from Alfred's birth in 849 to the year 887. Asser speaks of Alfred always with affection and reverence, but, so far as we know, with justice and moderation.

I quote Asser's words on Alfred's youth. "He was loved by his father and mother, and even by all the people, above all his brothers, and was educated altogether at the court of the king. As he advanced through the years of infancy and youth, his form appeared more comely than that of his brothers; in look, in speech, and in manners he was more graceful