LONDON'S CHILD STREET TRADERS

Evening Star, Issue 14548, 24 April 1911, Page 10

LONDON'S CHILD STREET TRADERS

The proposal of the London County Council to abolish street trading by children is one that has the warm approval of all who have had the opportumty to watch its illeffects. The dangers of street trading are numerous. Apart from its ill effects on health and moral character, it leaves tho children stranded in later years and cmircly' unfitted for any respectable occupation. As street traders children seldom learn anything useful. They get their wits sharpened, but there is no real intellectual development, and the result is that in many cases they drift, sooner or later, into the class which tills our giiols. At the present tinio there are in London nearly 14,000 boys and over a thousand girls under the age of sixteen hawking newspapers, matches, flowers, penny toys, playing, singing, shoeblacking. In a vast number of c:tses —especially among the match and flower sellers—" trading"' is a mere euphemism for begging. Some of these juvenile hawkers aro mites oi six or seven, who till in the time they do not spend at school in going the rounds of local public-houses with perhaps only a single box of matches as their entire stock-in-trade. A number of them are undoubtedly parentally educated up to the begging business, and it is quite certain that the home curriculum includes more subjects than the gentle art of begging. And as linguists some of these wizened Utile street hawkers would give points to a Dublin fishwife or a back-block bullock puncher in the matter of luridity and obscenity If the proposals of the L.C.C. become law. a certain amount of hardship must be inflicted on scores of hardworking widows and others who cannot keep the homo together unless assisted by their children. But. Ovr parents to whom the banning of child street trading will mean real hardship arc in a great "minority. By far the greater number

are the children of people wiiii little or no sense of parental responsibility, and to whom their children's earnings are only important because they give thera more money to spend in self-indulgence. There can, however, be no question that juvenile street trading as at present carried on" is a social evil requiring drastic remedies. A few may suffer by its suppression, but in tho long run. the State at large must benefit, providing a scheme can be devised whereby the children thrown out of employment are enabled to turn their spare time to good account in other directions. Mr ilundeua, vice-chairman of the Committee on Wage-earning Children, who is entirely in agreement with the London County Council proposal, believes that tho solution of the problem should be found in a system of trade classes for children combined with the old system of apprenticeship run on modern lines. He thinks that if more advantage were taken by the trade schools which exist at present all over the countrychildren would learn something useful, which would stand thein in good stead for the rest of their lives. This might bo brought about by a law compelling parents to send their children to a certain number of trade classes each week until they reached tho age of fifteen or sixteen. Pressure would, of course, have to be brought to bear also ou employers to see that children had the opportunity of attending these classes.—London correspondent, March 10.