12 
LAND & WATER 
October 25/ 1917' 
IS a statue to celebrate FieldcnV services to the pause of the 
Ten Hours Bill erected by the workpeople of Lancashire. 
Nofjody thinks now tliat Fielden's exertions were injurious to 
the manufacturing interest in its competition with (jermany 
and France. Let us keep this example in mind in consider- 
ing the case for a further reform to-day, and let us beware of 
allowing a nightmare to frighten us from the path of hiunanit\-.. 
There are many manufacturers who are quite ready for such 
a reform tif the industry as will secure decent opjwrt unities 
to the boys and girls engaged in it ; there are many workpeople 
bolder than the Cotton Factory Times, for a working class 
educational association in Lancasliire has petitioned Mr. 
Fisher to improve his Bill and to provide not eight hours a 
week but half the week for books and games. It is not a con- 
flict between the friends of education and the manufacturing 
community ; it is a conflict between two views, two sets of 
principles, and the two views do not follow any such strict 
lines of demarcation. 
There is one imjiortant difterence between our srtuation to- 
day and the situation of our grandfathers. At that time 
there was a prevalent belief, inspired originally by the geneial 
interpretation of the teaching of Malthus, that our danger 
was over-population. The wars of Napoleon were not 
destructive of life in these islands on any large scale. The 
population of England and Wales increased by over 40 per 
cent, between 1790 and iSii. Tlie reasoning of the age was 
governed by this obsession, this dread that there would soon be 
more mouths than food. At this moment almost all Europe 
is suffering under the greatest calamity that can befall the 
race : the extinction of its youth. Deatli is striking at all 
that is best, most vigorous, most full of life and energ}- for the 
future of the nation. 
War's Ravages 
Xo man can measure the ravages of the war. It is as if 
another Black Death had visited Europe, sparing the old 
and the weak, and singling out the young and tlie robust. 
Let there be no mistake about the price that is paid. Conceal 
and disguise it as they may, the boys who return from the 
fr<)nt, with a new seriousness and a certain haunted look in 
their eyes have lost for ever something of the atmosphere of 
youth. And this premature loss of the spirit of youth is 
inflicted by the nation on itself every time that it buries a 
bo\' and girl in tlie industrial system, taking them away from 
all the natural and buoyant conditions o^ life that are essential 
to their growth. 
This then is the question before the race to-day. Are we 
going to give the youth of to-morrow the opportunity of 
'leveloping their minds and their bodies, of growing into 
strong liealthy and happy men and women, or are we going to 
say that some law of economic predestination has assigned 
ail this population to a special fate, the fate of serving industry 
to the eternal loss of their own faculties ? Let any man or 
woman think of the question as afi>cting his own child. Let 
Jiim read Sir George Newman's report as if the million of 
children whose lives are wasted from bad conditions of living 
were not the children of the people whom he never sees, but 
the children of liimself and his friends. Let him ask himself 
whether he would be satisfied if his boy instead of spending 
his time from 14 to 18 at school with long hours in the open 
air, games and friendships was swept away into the factory 
f)r the mine for the livelong day, turned into a rivetter's boy 
or a bobbin boy or a van boy, "or a messenger bov, working 
long hours with scarcely any recreation, as if neither his mind 
nor his body needed education or the nourishment of games 
and rest and air. How ipany parents in the comfortable 
classes would hesitate about their choice ? But if their own 
mmds are made up in the case of their own cliildren, thev are 
clearly satisfied that if you are considering only the good o"f the 
child, his prospect of mental and bodily growth, the future of 
his health and happiness, it is much better that a boy sliould 
go on being educated after 14, and that he should play games 
and develop his muscles and his limbs. 
Now the nation should lo(3k upon every child in this con- 
nection in the spirit in Which the parent looks on his own child. 
For the nation as a whole it makes an infinite difference whether 
the men and women of the future are well-educated and 
developed. In this sense the nation of to-day has in its hands 
the making of the nation of to-morrow. All the nations start 
with the havoc caused by the war and any " forward looking 
man " considering what his nation will "be like fifty years 
hence will do to-day what a doctor implored bur grand- 
fathers to do in the early years of the factory system and con- 
sult " vital " rather than " iwlitical " economy 'as the canon of 
w;isdom. What a different people we should have to-day. 
How diiierent our towns, our industries, our homes, and our 
healths— if our grandfathers had listened to him ! 
I Some will say that this is all very plausible but that to 
Drovide that every boy and girl shall have half his or her time 
for education and'games up to' iS means an immense soc'al 
revolution in which industry will suffer and poor parents will 
suffer. The answer surely is that the war has brought a 
revolution, and that even if we leave the law exactly as it is, 
industry has to adapt itself to new conditions. There have 
been vast changes in the structure and details of industrial 
work during these three years. Who would have supposed 
three years ago that our industries could carry on at all w>ith 
rt\e millions of men withdrawn from productive work ? 
Are we to be told that they will be permanently crippled if 
the boys and girls available between the ages of 14 and 18 
are reduced by one-half ? 
I-' very industry will have to take stock of its new position 
at the end of the war. If new difficulties have arisen, new 
soiuces of power and energy ha\e been discovered. Many 
boys and girls are doing work that must be done, but nobody 
supposes that a great industry like the cotton industry will 
pull down the blinds because it has fewer boys and girls to 
employ. The effect will be, of course, to introduce another 
I'lement into the problem of reorganisation. If there are fewer 
young tenters, and young piercers, the industry will have 
to pay better wages to grown-up workpeople. AH industry 
suffers from the employment of boys and girls on a great 
scale, because wages are depressed and men and women are 
thiven into other occupations. The boy who becomes a full- 
time wage earner before he has lialf grown up, will give place 
thirty or forty years hence to another generation of victims 
of the custom that is robbing him to-day of his right to the 
full development of his mind and body. Parth' the problem 
will be solved by the introduction of machinery such as mec- 
hanical "dofiers." 
So far as the work which is being done by young boys and 
girls is necessary work, it will be done in part by boys and 
girls (for a half-time boy of 16 would be often more productive 
than a whole time boy of 16), partly by grown-up men, partly 
by disabled soldiers, and women, parti}' by machinery, and 
the effect, of course, will be to add enormously to the indus- 
trial power of the nation, for education and health are sovran 
elements of strength. 
But a gretit deal of the work done by these boys and girls 
is not necessary to industry : the selling of papers, the running 
of errands, many and other miscellaneous occupations which 
absorb boys and girls for a few years of life and then throw 
them on to the world without experience or training of any 
value. Still, it will be said, these boys are helping to keep a 
roof over many a widow's head. What are you going to do 
with the homes which depend on their earnings ? It would 
be infinitely better to subsidise directly every person who has 
to depend on the earnings of those children than to allow 
this process to continue indefinitely, and to keep generation 
after generation in this vicious circle. These children will not 
cease to earn ; it is even doubtful whether their earnings will 
be much reduced. Their parents suffer. They must be 
compensated, but in time of course the earnings of the parents 
will rise in consequence. Moreover, it is coming more and 
more to be recognised that the living wage must mean a wage 
that makes a man independent of his children's earnings. In 
this, as in many cases, the bold policy is the safest.' 
Mr. Fisher would do well to follow his own inclinations 
as an educationalist and to allot to education more than 
the mere eight lio urs a week for w^hich he asks in the Bill. 
Eight hours will not go far if they are to include games, camp 
life, physical training, as well as education in the narrower 
sense of the term. Let him ask the nation to make a great 
bid for the power that belongs to a society which develops its 
highest resources, for the happiness that men and women can 
obtain, the strength of the body and the pleasures of the 
mind. The Goyernment have announced that they cannot 
find time for Mr. Fisher's Bill this session. This will not be 
an unqualified misfortune if advantage is taken of the delay 
to continue the process of educating the country and also to 
improve the Bill. It is quite possible that to proyide for 
half-time at first perhaps to 16 and then to 18 would be less 
of an interference with industry than taking merely eight 
hours a week. 
.\\\ the tendencies of the age point to a new and 
nobler conception of industrial life in which a greater and 
more responsible space will fall to the men and women wlio 
are now too often merely part of a great machine. An 
educated industrial democracy will provide the energy and 
power that are needed to give to such associations their hope 
of success. For the moment certain industries will have to 
suffer the inconvenience and the trouble of revising their 
arrangements, but is that too great a demand to make of them ? 
Let us suppose that these boys and girls were wanted for the 
army, that the defence of the nation depended absolutely on 
their being withdrawn from employment for half the "day, 
would the nation hesitate ? Neither then ought it to hesitate 
vvhen the need is not the defence of its shores but the defence 
of it.'J future. 
