OF THE ROYAL PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF GLASGOW. SESSION 1910-1911. Juvenile Employment. By JOHN S. SAMUEL, F.R.S.E. [Read before the Society, 2nd November, 1910.] THE Majority and Minority Reports of the Poor Law Commission, though differing on many matters agree in this that the unsatisfactory condition of adolescent labour and education is the gravest of all the grave facts which the Commission has laid bare, and that upon it is dependent much of the unemployment and crime of the country. The Reports of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education, of the Committee on Partial Exemption from School Attendance, and of the Education Committee of the London County Council; the evidence placed before the Home Office Committee on the Employment of Children Act, and the Resolutions passed by the Trade Union Congress, the National Union of Teachers, the London Chamber of Commerce, and other important bodies, are unanimous in declaring the necessity for something being done to improve the present condition of affairs. The establishment of a juvenile side to the National Labour Exchanges, under the direction of advisory Committees enquiring into the type of work offered to juveniles and supervising them in employment, and the steps already taken and in contemplation by the Postmaster-General in regard to the boys employed by his Department, are substantial advances in the attempt to grapple with the problem. The Prime Minister has on more than one occasion expressed his sympathy with the subject, as have also the President of the Board of Education and other members of the Government. But much the most important direction in which the subject has received attention has been the unanimous acceptance, with the assent of all parties, by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords of resolutions emphasising the importance of legislation. The following.motion was passed without a division by the House of Commons, on April 20, 1910:— "That in view of the relation of unemployment to adolescent and child labour, this House regards an improved educational system, with more adequate provision for the training and care of adolescents, as a matter of urgent necessity, and considers that the Imperial Exchequer should bear an increased share of the cost of this national service." On April 27, 1910, the House of Lords passed the following motion without a division: "That in the opinion of this House it is desirable that legislative effect should be given to the recommendation of the Departmental Committee on Partial Exemption, and that a statutory obligation should be imposed on local education authorities to provide, where it is reasonably practicable, continuation schools, and that provision be also made by statute to aid substantially from Parliamentary funds the cost of such schools." To realise the imperative need of some organised endeavour for preventing the degeneracy of our future National manhood, it is only necessary to go into our streets teeming with human wreckage, or into the open spaces of our great centres of population, and look at the crowds of idle lads and shiftless youths who spend day after day all the year round in desultory games and aimless loafing. As each generation has come and gone the intensified struggle for existence has been visible in the declining virility, and a corresponding increase of the wastrel and degenerate. The process is inevitable unless met and counteracted by remedial efforts to stay the action of normal conditions. This is the work which the Nation still leaves to voluntary effort, and which has been so nobly assumed by various organisations, which are doing splendid service in the interest of the youth of our country. If the Nation were really in earnest about the moral and physical well-being of its youth, it would at once undertake the adequate financing and organising of such magnificent work, and this would do more to reduce our vast expenditure on pauperism than anything else. As it is we are at present spending money at the wrong end on the maintenance of the manufactured pauper and degenerate, and continuing a process which in history has accompanied National declension. That a Nation should be content to leave remedial efforts to voluntary effort alone is a mark of an ill-omened insensibility. For twenty-seven years the Boys' Brigade have been doing the Nation's work; for eighteen years the Church Lads' Brigade have spread it further and wider throughout the Empire, and on the same splendid lines the London Diocesan Church Lads' Brigade, the Roman Catholic and Jewish Lads' Brigades, and the Boy Scouts, have been making history. The experience of all those who have taken part in social, educational and other work among boys and girls, and are acquainted with the conditions of their industrial life, goes to show that the seeds of much future profligacy and idleness are sown in the period of adolescence between fourteen and twenty. No proposals for dealing with unemployment can be regarded as satisfactory which leave these critical years out of count. In certain industries the conditions under which boys especially are employed are actually detrimental to their moral and physical welfare. With regard to street selling and such kindred occupations, the following quotation from a statement made by the Chief Constable of Manchester, in 1908, is instructive. He said : "Street trading, of all juvenile wage earning occupations, is productive of a greater amount of evil than any other occupation followed by children. The boys develop into lazy, shiftless and worthless men, becoming for the most part, race-course touts, and often travelling thieves and loungers. They dislike more and more honest work. They become mere creatures of chance, and sink down until they end their days either in the gaol or the workhouse." Instances could be multiplied of the havoc wrought on the characters of youths engaged in touting for carrying parcels at railway stations, vanboys, trace-boys, newsboys, and the amount of juvenile crime for which these occupations are responsible. There is at present no direction in which adolescents can be trained and equipped for honourable employment outside our prisons. It is a commentary upon the existing condition of things. that the class of youths with which we are dealing require to go to prison to find the remedial measures necessary to eliminate the imperfections of their early training. Parliament has recognised the principle of special treatment for adolescents when in prison, so that they may be trained, if possible, for a life of honest industry, but we are inclined to think such effort comes too late. We are tempted to ask whether it would not be a wiser policy to begin at an earlier stage. It seems to us that, in the absence of organisation and wise direction in the earlier and critical years of life much good material is being wasted and allowed to drift until it lapses into crime or the beginnings of crime. We think that much greater use could be made of existing organisations dealing with the employment of children. In most cases boys and girls leave school without any thought to the future, without any guidance which may induce them to seek employment where their special abilities, inclination and character may be put to the best account. The first job that offers is taken, with the result that dismissal follows after a few years work. The employer often deals with the boy as a convenient machine easily replaced; the parents, in too many cases, regard their sons merely as financial assets of the family to be exploited for its common benefit, and are indifferent or even hostile to the boy's real future welfare. There is little doubt that the street is a training ground for crime and moral degradation. Lads who commence selling on the streets seldom take part in regular honest work in after life. It is much easier to deal with the root cause which makes criminals or loafers of these youths, than to endeavour to reform them afterwards. The economic obligation of the Nation to its youth is a very serious and obvious one. The cost to the Nation of neglecting its children is incalculable, and in many cases irreparable. It is the neglect to bring up children as capable and honest citizens which produces perhaps the most terrible evil by which modern society can be afflicted, viz., the evil of unemployment. It produces or populates our prisons, workhouses, hospitals, and all the various agencies by which society endeavours to make good the mischief which, at a very small cost, might be prevented if taken in early youth. The neglect of taking proper care of the children in their early days has to be repaid with usurious interest when they grow up to manhood. It is a saving which is one of the most extravagant and foolish kinds of economy that could possibly be practised. economy is certainly ours, but our descendants will have to pay dearly for our neglect. The When the Prime Minister was recently in Glasgow receiving the freedom of the City, he stated :— "There are two sights in particular which always fill me with a certain despondency when I wander about one of our great towns. The first is the sight of the children in the streets after school hours, many of them with nothing that can be called a home to go to, idling, loafing, taking to horse-play, often learning their first lessons in beggary and crime, while the schools and the playgrounds lie empty and unused. The other and equally tragic sight, to those who have eyes to see, is the sight of a boy of fifteen or sixteen sitting at the tail of a van using the education he still retains in reading some cheap sporting paper or trashy novelette, and preparing, when he becomes too old for his present casual and transitory work, to graduate in the class of the unemployable. Happily the public conscience is growing alive to those perils and already recognises that there are large fields here for the fruitful exercise of municipal and educational activity." The question naturally emerges, what has to be done to cure the evil, and it is instructive here to allude to the recommendations of a Committee which reported on the subject in 1908. They made the following practical suggestions: 1. The adoption of a system of compulsory attendance at continuation schools up to the age of seventeen, accompanied by compulsory reduction of working hours among young people under that age, together with the development of full time day trade schools admitting children suitable for skilled industrial training. 2. The raising of the school leaving age together with the abolition of the half-time system. 3. The development of a National system of Children's Employment Committees on a wider basis than now exists, working in association with Labour Exchanges and in close |