THE CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS
In the week before I left for the South I dined in ---- with a very
charming woman and her husband. Before a table exquisite in its
appointments, laden with the best the market could offer and good taste
display, sat the mistress, a graceful, intelligent young woman, full of
philanthropic, charitable interests, and one whom I know to be devoted
to the care and benefiting of little children in her city. During the
meal I said to her casually:
"Do you know that in your mills in South Carolina to-night, as we sit
here, little children are working at the looms and frames--little
children, some of them not more than six years old?"
She said, in astonishment, "I don't know it; and I can't believe it."
I told her I should soon see just how true the reports were, and when I
returned to New York I would tell her the facts. She is not alone in her
ignorance. Not one person, man or woman, to whom I told the facts of the
cases I observed "_dreamed that children worked in any mills in the
United States_!" After my experience amongst the working class, I am
safe in saying that I consider their grievances to be the outcome of the
ignorance and greed of the manufacturer abetted, aided and made possible
by the ignorance and poverty of the labourer.
There is nothing more conscience-silencing than to accuse the writers of
the different articles on child-labour of sentimentality. The comfort in
which we live makes it easy to eliminate thoughts that torture us to
action in the cause of others. I will be delighted to meet an accusation
of sentimentality and exaggeration by any man or woman who has gone to a
Southern mill as an operative and worked side by side with the children,
lived with them in their homes. It is defamation to use the word "home"
in connection with the unwholesome shanty in the pest-ridden district
where the remnant of the children's lives not lived in the mill is
passed. This handful of unpainted huts, raised on stilts from the soil,
fever-ridden and malarious; this blank, ugly line of sun-blistered
shanties, along a road, yellow-sand deep, is a mill village. The word
_village_ has a cheerful sound. It summons a country scene, with the
charms of home, however simple and unpretentious. There is nothing to
charm or please in the villages I have already, in these pages, drawn
for you to see and which with veritable sick reluctance I summon again
before your eyes. Every house is like unto its neighbour--a shelter put
up rapidly and filled to the best advantage.
There is not a garden within miles, not a flower, scarcely a tree. Arid,
desolate, beautyless, the pale sand of the State of South Carolina
nurtures as best it can a stray tree or shrub--no more. At the foot of
the shanties' black line rises the cotton mill. New, enormous, sanitary
(!!). Its capital runs into millions; its prospectuses are pompous; its
pay-roll mysterious. You will not be able to say how many of the fifteen
hundred odd hands at work in this mill are adults, how many children. In
the State of South Carolina there are statistics of neither births,
marriages nor deaths. What can you expect of a mill village!
At 5:45 we have breakfasted--the twelve of us who live in one small
shanty, where we have slept, all five of us in one room, men to the
right of the kitchen, women and children on the left. To leave the
pestilence of foul air, the stench of that dwelling, is blessed, even if
the stroke that summons is the mill whistle.
As we troop to work in the dawn, we leave behind us the desert-like
town; all day it drowses, haunted by a few figures of old age and
infirmity--but the mill is alive! We have given up, in order to satisfy
its appetite, all manner of flesh and blood, and the gentlest morsel
between its merciless jaws is the little child.
So long as I am part of its food and triumph I will study the mill.
Leaving the line of flashing, whirling spools, I lean against the green
box full of cotton refuse and regard the giant room.
It is a wonderful sight. The mill itself, a model of careful,
well-considered building, has every facility for the best and most
advantageous manufacture of textiles. The fine frames of the intricate
"warping," the well-placed frames of the "drawing-in" all along the
window sides of the rooms; then lines upon lines of spool frames. Great
piles of stuff lie here and there in the room. It is early--"all the
yarn ain't come yet." Two children whose work has not been apportioned
lie asleep against a cotton bale. The terrible noise, the grinding,
whirling, pounding, the gigantic burr renders other senses keen. By my
side works a little girl of eight. Her brutal face, already bespeaking
knowledge of things childhood should ignore, is surrounded by a forest
of yellow hair. She goes doggedly at her spools, grasping them sullenly.
She walks well on her bare, filthy feet. Her hands and arms are no
longer flesh colour, but resemble weather-roughened hide, ingrained with
dirt. Around the tangle of her hair cotton threads and bits of lint make
a sort of aureole. (Her nimbus of labour, if you will!) There is nothing
saint-like in that face, nor in the loose-lipped mouth, whence exudes a
black stain of snuff as between her lips she turns the root she chews.
"She's a mean girl," my little companion says; "we-all don't hev nothin'
to say to her."
"Why?"
"Her maw hunts her to the mill; she don't want to go--no, sir--so she's
mad most the time."
Thus she sets her dogged resistance in scowling black looks, in quick,
frantic gestures and motions against the machinery that claims her
impotent childhood. The nimbus around her furze of hair remains; there
are other heads than saints--there are martyrs! Let the child wear her
crown.
Through the looms I catch sight of Upton's, my landlord's, little
child. She is seven; so small that they have a box for her to stand
upon. She is a pretty, frail, little thing, a spooler--"a good
spooler, tew!" Through the frames on the other side I can only see her
fingers as they clutch at the flying spools; her head is not high
enough, even with the box, to be visible. Her hands are fairy hands,
fine-boned, well-made, only they are so thin and dirty, and her
nails--claws; she would do well to have them cut. A nail can be torn
from the finger, _is_ torn from the finger frequently,[9] by this
flying spool. I go over to Upton's little girl. Her spindles are not
thinner nor her spools whiter.
[Footnote 9: In Huntsville, Alabama, a child of eight lost her
index and middle fingers of the right hand in January, 1902. One
doctor told me that he had amputated the fingers of more than a
hundred babies. A merchant told me he had _frequently_ seen
children whose hands had been cut off by the
machinery.--_American Federationist_.]
"How old are you?"
"Ten."
She looks six. It is impossible to know if what she says is true. The
children are commanded both by parents and bosses to advance their ages
when asked.
"Tired?"
She nods, without stopping. She is a "remarkable fine hand." She makes
forty cents a day. See the value of this labour to the
manufacturer--cheap, yet skilled; to the parent it represents $2.40 per
week.
I must not think that as I work beside them I will gain their
confidence! They have no time to talk. Indeed, conversation is not well
looked upon by the bosses, and I soon see that unless I want to entail a
sharp reproof for myself and them I must stick to my "side." And at noon
I have no heart to take their leisure. At twelve o'clock, Minnie, a
little spooler, scarcely higher than her spools, lifts her hands above
her head and exclaims: _"Thank God, there's the whistle!"_ I watched
them disperse: some run like mad, always bareheaded, to fetch the
dinner-pail for mother or father who work in the mill and who choose to
spend these little legs and spare their own. It takes ten minutes to go,
ten to return, and the little labourer has ten to devote to its own
food, which, half the time, he is too exhausted to eat.
I watch the children crouch on the floor by the frames; some fall asleep
between the mouthfuls of food, and so lie asleep with food in their
mouths until the overseer rouses them to their tasks again. Here and
there totters a little child just learning to walk; it runs and crawls
the length of the mill. Mothers who have no one with whom to leave their
babies bring them to the workshop, and their lives begin, continue and
end in the horrible pandemonium.
One little boy passes by with his broom; he is whistling. I look up at
the cheery sound that pierces fresh but faint and natural above the
machines' noise. His eyes are bright; his good spirits surprise me: here
is an argument for my comfortable friends who wish to prove that the
children "are happy!" I stop him.
"You seem very jolly!"
He grins.
"How long have you been working?"
"Two or three days."
The gay creature has just _begun_ his servitude and brings into the
dreary monotony a flash of the spirit which should fill childhood.
I think it will be granted that it takes a great deal to discourage and
dishearten a child. The hopefulness of the mill communities lies in just
those elements that overwork in the adult and that child labour will
ultimately destroy. When hope is gone in the adult he must wreak some
vengeance on the bitter fate that has robbed him. There is no more
tragic thing than the hopeless child. The adult who grows hopeless can
affiliate with the malcontents and find in the insanity of anarchy what
he calls revenge.
It seems folly to insult the common sense of the public by asking them
whether they think that thirteen hours a day, with a half to
three-quarters of an hour for recreation at noon, or the same amount of
night-work in a mill whose atmosphere is vile with odours, humid with
unhealthfulness, filled with the particles of flying cotton, a
pandemonium of noise and deafening roar, so deafening that the loss of
hearing is frequent and the keenness of hearing always dulled ...
whether the atmosphere combined with the association of men and women
whose morals or lack of morals is notorious all over the world, is good
for a growing child? Is it conducive to progressive development, to the
making of decent manhood or womanhood? What kind of citizen can this
child--if he is fit enough in the economic struggle of the world to
survive--turn out to be? Not citizens at all: creatures scarcely fit to
be called human beings.
I asked the little girl who teaches me to spool who the man is whom I
have seen riding around on horseback through the town.
"Why, he goes roun' rousin' up the hands who ain't in their places.
Sometimes he takes the children outen thayre bades an' brings 'em back
to the mill."
And if the child can stand, it spins and spools until it drops, till
constitution rebels, and death, the only friend it has ever known, sets
it free.
Besides being spinners and spoolers, and occasionally weavers even, the
children sweep the cotton-strewed floors. Scarcely has the miserable
little object, ragged and odourous, passed me with his long broom, which
he drags half-heartedly along, than the space he has swept up is
cotton-strewn again. It settles with discouraging rapidity; it has also
settled on the child's hair and clothes, and his eyelashes, and this
atmosphere he breathes and fairly eats, until his lungs become diseased.
Pneumonia--fatal in nearly all cases here--and lung fever had been a
pestilence, "a regular plague," before I came. There were four cases in
the village where I, lived, and fever and ague, malaria and grippe did
their parts.
"Why, thar ain't never a haouse but's got somebody sick," my little
teacher informed me in her soft Southern dialect. "I suttinly never did
see a place like this for dyin' in winter time. I reckon et's funerals
every day."
Here is a little child, not more than seven years old. The land is a hot
enough country, we will concede, but not a savage South Sea Island! She
has on one garment, if a tattered sacking dress can so be termed. Her
bones are nearly through her skin, but her stomach is an unhealthy
pouch, abnormal. _She has dropsy._ She works in _a new mill_--in one of
the largest mills in South Carolina. Here is a slender little boy--a
birch rod (good old simile) is not more slender, but the birch has the
advantage: it is elastic--it bends, has youth in it. This boy looks
ninety. He is a dwarf; twelve years old, he appears seven, no more. He
sweeps the cotton off the floor of "the baby mill." (How tenderly and
proudly the owners speak of their brick and mortar.) He sweeps the
cotton and lint from the mill aisles from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. without a
break in the night's routine. He stops of his own accord, however, to
cough and expectorate--he has advanced tuberculosis.
At night the shanties receive us. On a pine board is spread our
food--can you call it nourishment? The hominy and molasses is the best
part; salt pork and ham are the strong victuals.
It is eight o'clock when the children reach their homes--later if the
mill work is behindhand and they are kept over hours. They are usually
beyond speech. They fall asleep at the table, on the stairs; they are
carried to bed and there laid down as they are, unwashed, undressed; and
the inanimate bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them with
its imperious cry before sunrise, while they are still in stupid sleep:
"What do you do on Sundays?" I asked one little girl.
"Why, thare ain't nothing much to dew. I go to the park sometimes."
This park is at the end of a trolley line; it is their Arcadia. Picture
it! A few yellow sand hills with clusters of pine trees and some scrubby
undergrowth; a more desolate, arid, gloomy pleasure ground cannot be
conceived. On Sundays the trolleys bring those who are not too tired to
so spend the day. On Sundays the mill shanties are full of sleepers.
The park has a limited number of devotees. Through the beautyless paths
and walks the figures pass like shadows. There come three mill girls arm
in arm; their curl papers, screwed tight all the week, are out on
Sunday, in greasy, abundant curls. Sunday clothes are displayed in all
their superbness. Three or four young men, town fellows, follow them;
they are all strangers, but they will go home arm in arm.
Several little children, who have no clothes but those, they wear, cling
close to the side of a gaunt, pale-faced man, who carries in his arms
the youngest. The little girl has become a weight to be carried on
Sundays; she has worked six days of the week--shall she not rest on the
seventh? She shall; she claims this, and lies inert on the man's arm,
her face already seared with the scars of toil.
I ran such risk taking pictures that I relinquished the task, and it was
only the last day at the mill, while still in my working clothes with a
camera concealed in my pocket, that I contrived to get a picture or two.
I ventured to ask two little boys who swept the mill to stand for their
pictures.
"I don't kyar to," the older one said. I explained that it would not
hurt them, as I thought he was afraid; but his little companion
vouchsafed: "We-all ain't got no nickel." When they understood it was a
free picture they were as delighted as possible and posed with alacrity,
making touching apologies for their greasy, dirty condition.
When I asked one of them if he was ever clean, he said: "On Sunday I
wash my hands."
It was noon, on the day I chose to leave ----, turning my back on the
mill that had allured me to its doors and labour. In South Carolina
early April is torrid, flies and mosquitoes are rampant. What must this
settlement be in midsummer heat? There is no colour in the Southern
scene; the clothes of the mill-hands, the houses, the soil are of one
tone--and, more strange, there is not one line of red, one dash of life,
in the faces of the hundreds of women and children that pass me on their
way back to work.
Under the existing circumstances they have no outlook, these people, no
hope; their appearance expresses accurately the changeless routine of an
existence devoted to eternal ignorance, eternal toil.
From their short half-hour of mid-noon rest, the whistle, piercing,
inanimate call, has dared to command the slavish obedience of animate
and intelligent beings. I pause by the trestle over which rumble the
cars, heavily laden with the cotton cloth whose perfection has made this
Southern mill justly famous.
The file of humanity that passes me I shall never forget! The Blank Mill
claims 1,500 of these labourers; at least 200 are children. The little
things run and keep step with the older men and women; their shaggy,
frowzled heads are bent, their hands protrude pitifully from their
sleeves; they are barefooted, bareheaded. With these little figures the
elements wanton; they can never know the fullness of summer or the
proper maturity of autumn. Suns have burned them, rains have fallen upon
them, as unprotected through storms they go to their work. The winter
winds have penetrated the tatters with blades like knives; gray and
dusty and earth-coloured the line passes. These are children? No, they
are wraiths of childhood--they are effigies of youth! What can Hope work
in this down-trodden soil for any future harvest? They can curse and
swear; they chew tobacco and take snuff. When they speak at all their
voices are feeble; ears long dulled by the thunder of the mill are no
longer keen to sound; their speech is low and scarcely audible. Over
sallow cheeks where the skin is tightly drawn their eyes regard you
suspiciously, malignantly even, never with the frank look of childhood.
As the long afternoon goes by in its hours of leisure for us fatigue
settles like a blight over their features, their expressions darken to
elfish strangeness, whilst sullen lines, never to be eradicated, mark
the distinctive visages of these children of labour.
At certain seasons of the year they actually die off like flies. They
fall subject, not to children's diseases exactly--nothing really natural
seems to come into the course of these little existences--they fall a
prey to the maladies that are the outcomes of their conditions. They are
always half-clad in the winter time; their clothes differ nothing at all
from their summer clothes; they have no overcoats or coats; many of them
go barefoot all winter long. They come out from the hot mills into cold,
raw winds and fall an easy prey to pneumonia, scourge of the mill-town.
Their general health is bad all the year round; their skins and
complexions have taken the tone of the sandy soil of the Southern
country in which they are bred and in which their martyrdom is
accomplished. I never saw a rosy cheek nor a clear skin: these are the
parchment editions of childhood on which Tragedy is written indelibly.
You can there read the eternal condemnation of those who have employed
them for the sake of gain.
It is a melancholy satisfaction to believe that mill labour will kill
off little spinners and spoolers. Unfortunately, this is not entirely
true. There are constitutions that survive all the horrors of existence.
I have worked both in Massachusetts and the South beside women who
entered the mill service at eight years of age. One of these was still
in her girlhood when I knew her. She was very strong, very good and
still had some illusions left. I do not know what it goes to prove, when
I say that at twenty, in spite of twelve years of labour, she still
dreamed, still hoped, still longed and prayed _for something that was
not a mill_. If this means content in servitude, if this means that the
poor white trash are born slaves, or if, on the contrary, it means that
there is something inherent in a woman that will carry her past suicide
and past idiocy and degradation, all of which is around her, I think it
argues well for the working women.
The other woman was forty. She had no illusions left--please remember
she had worked since eight; she had reached, if you like, the idiot
stage. She had nothing to offer during all the time I knew her but a few
sentences directly in connection with her toil.
It is useless to advance the plea that spooling is not difficult. No
child (we will cancel under twelve!) should work at all. No human
creature should work thirteen hours a day. No baby of six, seven or
eight should be seen in the mills.
It is also useless to say that these children tell you that they "like
the mill." They are beaten by their parents if they do not tell you
this, and, granted that they do not like their servitude, when was it
thought expedient that a child should direct its existence? If they do
not pass the early years of their lives in study, when should they
learn? At what period of their lives should the children of the Southern
mill-hand be educated? Long before they reach their teens their habits
are formed--ignorance is ingrained; indeed, after a few years they are
so vitally reduced that if you will you cannot teach them. Are these
little American children, then, to have no books but labour? No
recreation? To be crushed out of life to satisfy the ignorance and greed
of their parents, the greed of the manufacturers? Whatever else we are,
we are financiers _per se_. The fact that to-day, as for years past,
Southern cotton mills are employing the labour of children under tender
age--employing an army of them to the number of twenty thousand under
twelve--can only be explained by a frank admittal that infantile labour
has been considered advantageous to the cause of gain.
This gain, apparent by the facts that a mill can be run for thousands
of dollars less in the South than a like mill can be run in the North,
and its net surplus profits be the same as those of the Northern
manufactory, is one by which one generation alone will profit. The
attractiveness of the figures is fallacious. What I imply is
self-evident. The infant population (its numbers give it a right to this
dignity of term) whose cheap toil feeds the mills is doomed. I mean to
say that the rank and file of humanity are daily weeded out; that
thousands of possibly strong, healthy, mature labouring men and women
are being disease-stricken, hounded out of life; the cotton mill child
cannot develop to the strong normal adult working-man and woman. The
fiber exhausted in the young body cannot be recreated. Early death
carries hundreds out of life, disease rots the remainder, and the dulled
maturity attained by a creature whose life has been passed in this
labour is not fit to propagate the species.
The excessively low wages paid these little mill-hands keep under, of
necessity, the wage paid the grown labourer. It is a crying pity that
children are equal to the task imposed upon them. It is a crying pity
that machines (since they have appeared, with their extended,
all-absorbing power) should not do all! Particularly in the Southern
States do they evince, at a fatal point, their limit, display their
inadequacy. When babies can be employed successfully for thirteen hours
out of the twenty-four at all machines with men and women; when infants
feeds mechanism with labour that has not one elevating, humanizing
effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence
below par and cheapens and distorts the nobler forms of toil. Not only
is it "no disgrace to work," but on the contrary it is a splendid thing
to be able to labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat of
their brow are not the servants of mankind in the sense of the term, but
the patriarchs and controllers of the world's march and the most subtle
signs of the times. But there are distinctly fitnesses of labour, and
the proper presentation to the working-man and woman and child is a
consideration.
No one to-day would be likely for an instant to concede that to replace
the treadmill horse with a child (a thing often seen and practised in
times past) would be an advantage. And yet the march of the child up and
down before its spooling frame is more suggestive of an animal--of the
dog hitched to the Belgian milk cart; of the horse on the
mill-tread--than another analogy.
Contrast this pallid automaton with the children of the poor in a New
York kindergarten, where the six-or seven-year-old child of the German,
the Hungarian, the Polish emigrant, may have its imagination stimulated,
its creative and individual faculties employed as it is taught to _make
things_--construct, combine, weave, sew, mould. Every power latent is
cajoled to expression, every talent encouraged. Thus work in its first
form is rendered attractive, and youth and individuality are encouraged.
In the South of this American country whose signet is individualism,
whose strength (despite our motto, "United we stand") is in the
individual freedom and vast play of original thought, here in the South
our purest born, the most unmixed blood of us, is being converted into
machines of labour when the forms of little children are bound in youth
to the spindle and loom.
In a certain mill in Alabama there are seventy-five child-labourers who
work twelve hours out of the twenty-four; they have a half-hour at noon
for luncheon. There is a night school in connection with this mill
corporation. Fancy it, a night school for the day-long child labourer!
Fifty out of seventy-five troop to it. Although they are so tired they
cannot keep awake on the benches, and the littlest of them falls asleep
over its letters, although they weep with fatigue, they are eager to
learn! Is there a more conclusive testimony to the quality of the
material that is being lost to the States and the country by the
martyrdom of intelligent children?
One hears two points of view expressed on this subject. The capitalist
advances that the greed of the parents forces the children into the
mills; the people themselves tell you that unless they are willing to
let their available children work, their own lives are made impossible
by the overseers. A widow who has children stands a fair chance of
having her rent free; if she refuses this tithe of flesh and blood she
is too often thrust into the street. So I am told. Now, which of these
facts is the truth? It seems to be clearly too much left to the decision
of private enterprise or parental incapability. The Legislature is the
only school in which to decide the question. During my stay in South
Carolina I never heard one woman advocate the mills for children. One
mother, holding to her breast her illegitimate child, her face dark with
dislike, said: "_Them mills!_ I would not let _my_ little boy work in
'em! No, sir! He would go over my dead body." Another woman said: "_My_
little girl work? No, ma'am; she goes to school!" and the child came in
even as she spoke--let me say the only cheerful specimen of childhood,
with the exception of the few little creatures in the kindergarten, that
I saw in the mill district.
South Carolina has become very haughty on this topic and has reached a
point when she tells us she is to cure the sore in her own body without
aid or interference. At a late session of the Legislature the bill for
the restriction of child labour--we must call it this, since it
legislates only for the child under ten--this bill was defeated by only
two dissenting voices. A humane gentleman who laid claim to one of
these voices was heard to ejaculate as the bill failed to pass: "Thank
God!" Just why, it is not easy to understand.
When I was so arrogant as to say to the editor of _The State_, the
leading paper in South Carolina, that I hoped my article might aid the
cause, I made an error clearly, for he replied:
"We need no aid. The people of South Carolina are aroused to the horror
and will cure it themselves."
Georgia is not roused to the horror; Alabama is stirring actively; but
the Northerners who own these mills--the capitalists, the manufacturers,
the men who are building up a reputation for the wealth of South
Carolina and Alabama mills, are the least aroused of all. We must
believe that many directors of these mills are ignorant of the state of
affairs, and that those who are enlightened willingly blind their eyes.
The mill prospectuses are humourous when read by the investigator. We
are told "labour-unions cut no figure here!"
Go at night through the mills with the head of the Labour Federation and
with the instigator of the first strikes in this district--with men who
are the brain and fiber of the labour organization, and see the friendly
looks flash forth, see the understanding with which they are greeted all
through certain mills. Consider that not 200 miles away at the moment
are 22,000 labourers on strike. Then greet these statements with a
smile!
* * * * *
On my return to the North I made an especial effort to see my New
England friend. We lunched together this time, and at the end of the
meal her three little children fluttered in to say a friendly word. I
looked at them, jealous for their little defrauded fellows, whose
twelve-hour daily labour served to purchase these exquisite clothes and
to heap with dainties the table before us. But I was nevertheless
rejoiced to see once again the forms of real childhood for whom air and
freedom and wealth were doing blessed tasks. When we were alone I drew
for my friend as well as I could pictures of what I had seen. She leaned
forward, took a brandied cherry from the dish in front of her, ate it
delicately and dipped her fingers in the finger-bowl; then she said:
"Dear friend, I am going to surprise you very much."
I waited, and felt that it would be difficult to surprise me with a tale
of a Southern mill.
"Those little children--_love the mill!_ They _like_ to work. It's a
great deal better for them to be employed than for them to run the
streets!"
She smiled over her argument, and I waited.
"Do you know," she continued, "that I believe they are really very
happy."
She had well presented her argument. She had said she would surprise
me--and she did.
"You will not feel it a breach of affection and hospitality if I print
what you say?" I asked her. "It's only fair that the capitalist's view
should be given here and there first hand. You own one-half the mill
in ----, Carolina?"
"Yes."
"What do you think of a model mill with only nine hours a day labour,
holidays and all nights free, schools, where education is enforced by
the State; reading-rooms open as well as churches--amusement halls,
music, recreation and pleasure, as well as education and religion?"
"I think," she said keenly, "that united, concentrated action on the
part of the cotton mill owners might make such a thing feasible; for us
to try it alone would mean ruin."
"Not ruin," I amended; "a reduction of income."
"Ruin," she said, firing. "We couldn't compete. To compete," she said
with the conviction of an intelligent, well-informed manufacturer, "I
must have my sixty-six hours a week!"
The spirit of discontent is always abroad when false conditions exist.
Its restless presence is controlled by one spirit alone--humanity--when
reasonably are weighed and justly decided the questions of balance
between Capital and Labour.
We must believe that there is no unsolvable problem before us in
considering the presence of the child in the Southern mills.
There is nothing in the essence of the subject to discourage the social
economist. The question should not be left to the decision of the
private citizen. This stuff is worth saving. There is the making in
these children of first-class citizens. I quote from the illustrated
supplement of the South Carolina _State_ that you may see what the mill
manufacturers think of the quality of the "poor white trash":
"The operatives in the South Carolina mills are the common
people--the bone and sinew who have left the fields to the
Negroes. They are industrious, intelligent, frugal, and have
the native instincts of honesty and integrity and of fidelity
which are essential to good citizenship."
If such things are true of the mill-hands of South Carolina, it is worth
while to save their children.
* * * * *
Henceforth, to my vision across the face of the modern history of labour
and manufacture will eternally defile the gray, colourless column of the
Southern mill-hands: an earth-hued line of humanity--a stream that
divides not.
Here there are no stragglers. At noon and night the pace is quick,
eager. Steady as a prison gang, it goes to food, rest and freedom. But
this alacrity is absent in the morning. On the hem of night, the fringe
of day, the march is slow and lifeless. Many of the heads are bent and
downcast; some of the faces peer forward, and sallow masks of human
countenances lift, with a look set beyond the mill--toward who can say
what vain horizon! The Stream wanders slowly toward the Houses of
Labour, although whipped by invisible scourge of Need. Without this
incentive and spur, think you it would pursue a direction toward
_thirteen hours of toil_, shut from air and sunlight and day, taking in
its rank the women, the young girl and the little child?
The tone of the garments is somber and gray, blending with the gray of
the dawn; or red, blending with the earth stains of the peculiar
Southern soil; or claylike and pale yellow. Many of the faces are
pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent, dulled by toil and
yet not all unintelligent. Those who are familiar with the healthy type
of the decent workmen of the West and East must draw their distinctions
as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar class. The Southern
mill-hand's face is unique--a fearful type, whose perusal is not
pleasant or cheerful to the character-reader, to the lover of humanity
or to the prophet of the future. Thus they defile: men with felt hats
drawn over their brows; women, sunbonneted or hatless; children
barefoot, bareheaded, ragged, unwashed. Unwashed these labourers have
gone to bed; unwashed they have arisen. To their garments cling the bits
of cotton, the threads of cotton, the strands of roping, badges of
their trade, brand of their especial toil. As they pass over the red
clay, over the pale yellow sand, the earth seems to claim them as part
of her unchanging phase; cursed by the mandate primeval--"by the sweat
of thy brow"--Earth-Born!
In the early morning the giant mill swallows its victims, engorges
itself with entering humanity; then it grows active, stirring its
ponderous might to life, movement and sound. Hear it roar, shudder,
shattering the stillness for half a mile! It is full now of flesh and
blood, of human life and brain and fiber: it is content! Triumphantly
during the long, long hours it devours the tithe of body and soul.
Behind lies the deserted, accursed village, destitute of life during the
hours of day, condemned to the care of a few women, the old, the
bedridden and the sick--of which last there are plenty.
Mighty Mills--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate; charnel
houses, devastators, destructors of homes and all that mankind calls
hallowed; breeders of strife, of strike, of immorality, of sedition and
riot--buildings tremendous--you give your immutable faces,
myriads-windowed, to the dust-heaps, to the wind-swept plains of sand.
When South Carolina shall have taken from you (as its honour and wisdom
and citizenship is bound to do) the youngest of the children, do you
think that you shall inevitably continue to devour what remains? There
is too much resistance yet left in the mass of human beings. Youth will
then rebel at a servitude beginning _at ten years of age_: and the women
will lift their arms above their heads one day in desperate gesture of
appeal and cry out--not for the millionaire's surplus; not a tirade
anarchistic against capital.... What is this woman of the hills and
woman of the mills that she should so demand? She will call for hours
short enough to permit her to bear her children; for requital
commensurate with the exigence of progressive civilization; for wages
equal to her faithful toil.
This is not too fantastic a demand or too ideal a state to be divinely
hoped for, believed in and brought to pass.[10]
[Footnote 10: Of the 21,000,000 spindles in the United States, the
South has 6,000,000. $35,381,000 of Carolina's wealth is in
cotton mills.
NOTE. I have seen, in Aragon, Georgia, hope for the future of the
mill-hands. The Aragon Cotton Mills are an improvement on the
South Carolina Mills and are under the direct supervision of an
owner whose sole God is not gain. Mr. Walcott is an agitator of
the nine-hours-a-day movement; he is opposed to Child Labour, and
in all his relations with his hands he is humane and kindly. I
look to the time when Aragon shall set a perfect pattern of what
a mill-town should be. It is already quite the best I have seen.
Its healthfulness is far above the average, and its situation
most fortunate.]
* * * * *
Not inapt here is the pagan idea of _Nous_, moving upon chaos, stirring
the stagnant, unresponsive forces into motion; agitating these forces
into action; the individual elements separate and go forth, each one on
its definitely inspired mission. Some inevitable hour shall see the
universal agitation of the vast body known as the "labouring class." For
the welfare of the whole world, may it not come whilst they are so
ignorant and so down-pressed.