Why Not Chimney Sweepers?

While on my morning walk up to Majestic Point yesterday, I heard a discussion about presidential candidate New Gingrich's 100 ideas an hour. I was reminded of the famous line from Romeo and Juliet about Mercutio--that he speaks more in a minute than he will listen to in a month. This time Newt indicated that poor children, ages 14 to 16, could be used as janitors in order to replace the union janitors currently employed. My mind went back immediately to the William Blake poem entitled, "The Chimney Sweeper," in which the persona is in heaven already and lamenting that fact. It's common knowledge that young children in pre-modern times were used because of their size to clean chimneys. As a result, many did not live until adulthood.

I tried to apply this possibility to my own childhood as a poor child growing up in the Mississippi Delta towns of Greenville and later Tutwiler. My current primary care physician tells me now that my chest x-rays show a lesion caused most likely by childhood tuberculosis that mysteriously calcified over. I wonder if I could have survived as a child working as a janitor around a lot of dust, asbestos, lead, and so on.

Newt's idea is simply ludicrous. There is no need to return to Charles Dickens' Nineteenth Century England.