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In Boston, 1682, a workhouse was ordered built to employ children who "shamefully spend their time in the streets." Gabriel Harris died in 1684, leaving four looms; his six children took part in the work. Boston in 1720 appointed a committee which recommended that twenty spinning-wheels be provided for such children as should be sent from the almshouse and a Massachusetts act of the same year provided that all children of the poor whose parents, whether receiving alms or not, were unable to maintain them were to be set to work or bound out by the selectmen or overseers, the males till twenty-one, the females till eighteen. Fifty years later William Molineux, of Boston, asked the legislature for assistance in his plan for "manufacturing the children's labor into wearing apparel" and "employing young females from eight years old and upward."

The Connecticut system of dealing with the children of the poor was similar to that of Massachusetts.

Probably children were very much overworked in these early days before the factory system. But in domestic industries on isolated farms their condition was less conspicuous than when, later, children came to be massed in great factories. The custom of giving all Saturday as school holiday seems to have grown out of the need of children at home to make Puritanical preparation for Sabbath.

The industries of children were varied and important. Some have been already mentioned. There was much work on the farm even for small children. They sowed seed, weeded flax fields, hetchelled flax, combed wool. Girls of six could spin flax. The boy had to rise early and do chores before he went to school. must be diligent in study and in the evening do more chores. His whole time out of school was occupied

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with bringing in fuel, cutting feed, feeding pigs, watering horses, picking berries, gathering vegetables, spooling yarn. There was sawing and wood chopping, and the making of brooms for which he got six cents each. Splitting shoe pegs was another job; setting card teeth, etc. Such work provided a phase of education that modern educators find it hard to replace now that industry has forsaken the home.

In putting the boys early to some useful handicraft the Puritans imitated their favorite model, the Hebrews. In Puritan ethics, idleness was a serious sin.

But colonial child labor was fundamentally a response? to a condition rather than to a theory. It was a compliance with the exigencies of the case. The rigor of the struggle for existence in early New England made impossible the prolongation of infancy that marks high civilization. Work was abundant; but real wages were low, as prices were comparatively high. Colonial industry was far from being a poor man's paradise. The starvation line and the debtors' prison loomed large. Child labor was, at least seemingly, a colonial necessity, aggravated of course by the existence of an exploiting aristocracy. The introduction of children into the early factories was a natural sequence of the colonial attitude regarding child labor and of the Puritan belief in the sin of idleness.

VII. SEX SIN AND FAMILY FAILURE IN COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND

Sexual irregularities both before and after marriage gave considerable concern. Part of the trouble was associated with bundling, an antique folkway that found new life in the New World.

Bundling" prevailed to a very great extent in New England from a very early time. It was originally confined to the lower classes or to those that were under the necessity of strict economy in firewood and candle light. Many of the early dwellings consisted of but one room. The wayfaring friend must be accommodated, if only with half a bed. The Abbé Robin, who was in Connecticut in 1788, says, "The Americans of these parts are very hospitable; they have commonly but one bed in the house, and the chaste spouse, although she were alone, would divide it with her guest, without hesitation or fear." If this remarkable assertion be true it is not strange that careful mothers saw no impropriety in the custom of allowing young men and women to lie together (without undressing). Evidently the usage was distinctly an economic phenomenon. Harsh economic conditions denied leisure for more seemly courtship and afforded but inadequate facilities for keeping houses warm.

Bundling was carried further in Connecticut and

57 Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, second ser., vol. vi, 503510; Low. The American People, vol. i: Planting of a Nation, 346-349; Fisher. Men, Women, and Manners in Colonial Times, vol. i, 284-290; Stiles. Bundling.

Massachusetts than elsewhere. In Massachusetts this trustful innocence did not confine itself to the lower classes it would seem. The Connecticut forefathers tolerated it complacently. In early times in New England, if we may believe numerous authorities, bundling brought very few unfortunate results. The advocates of the custom maintained that mishaps in connection with it were rarer than in higher circles with different methods of courtship. But at no time did it win universal approval. It is easy for those in comfortable circumstances to reprobate as vices the makeshifts of penury.

Bundling lingered long in some places. It is described in western Massachusetts as late as 1777. It was said to be in some measure abolished along the sea-coast but there a like usage called "tarrying" was practiced. Charles Francis Adams believes that bundling continued even in eastern Massachusetts and the towns adjoining Boston until after the Revolutionary disturbance and probably till the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mrs. John Adams writes, 1784, of an ocean voyage: "What should I have thought on shore to have laid myself down in common with half a dozen gentlemen? We have curtains it is true, and we only in part undress-about as much as the Yankee bundlers." It is alleged, indeed, that the practice has not altogether passed away yet.

The menace of the old usage became apparent after the French and Indian wars when the young men, habituated in camp and army to vice and recklessness, stripped bundling of its innocence. At last the custom became such a scandal that the church was forced to proceed to its suppression. Jonathan Edwards attacked it in the pulpit and other ministers, who had allowed

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