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Plea For Boys in Large Cities
Messenger work declared demoralizing by Miss Florence Kelly
People called upon to refuse to buy the products of child labor
Toronto Star, August 13, 1904
“No religious body has worked so hard in behalf of neglected children
as the Society of Friends,” said Miss Florence Kelly of New York, when
she spoke on “Our Duty to Neglected Children,” at the Friends’
conference today. Miss Kelly has been largely instrumental in securing
factory legislation for the protection of women and children. She was
formerly chief inspector of factories and workshops for Illinois and is
now Secretary of the Consumers’ League, which aims to prevent sweatshop
clothing being worn.
“Sending young children to factories was terribly demoralizing”, she
said. A Denver judge told that one-third of all the boys who came into
the juvenile courts had started in the career in crime as telegraph
messenger boys. Protests should be made against these and other
companies employing boys and girls. The products of child labor not be
bought by those who were opposed to it if they did not wish to be
inconsistent.
We must get away with all such delusions that messenger boys and
children in factories were learning a trade. They were forgetting what
they knew not learning anything that would stand them in stead in later
days.
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