The large families in this country to-day are to be found only
in the industrial centers. Greedy men have considered this their
opportunity, and have located great stocking and silk factories
in these places for the sake of employing the children of these
families.
I saw in the ill-ventilated rooms of these silk-factories girls
by the dozen under fourteen years of age. More than once I saw a
stoop-shouldered, anemic girl, apparently not more than eleven
years of age, standing all day before her machine so fatigued
that she stood on one foot while she rested the other by holding
it against the leg on which she was standing. To my inquiry as
to her age the reply was, “The affidavit said she was fourteen.”
A girl in whose machine the silk by chance became tangled was
approached by a foreman with the jaw of a bulldog and a face
whose every feature indicated brutality, and who poured out
a stream of profanity as he threatened to dismiss her if it
occurred again. These girls were the daughters of coal-miners or
of a coal-miner’s widow.
We are pretty generally agreed that society owes to every one
equal treatment with his fellows in an effort to get a living
and an equal protection in using the opportunities that exist.
When one looks into the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes of
veritable children to whom in so many cases the home was never
the holy of holies, and where instead of the gentle voice and
loving hearts of teachers there is the brutal taskmaster, one
feels the need of some new Declaration of Independence.
A railroad that owns and operates mines in this region, last
year, in addition to an already fat dividend on its stock,
declared a stock dividend of fifty per cent. Would that it were
possible to print on every share of that dividend a description
of the existence that is called life in this section of our
land! (Text.)--JESSE HILL, _Christian Endeavor
World_.
(1312)
See DISHONESTY; GAME OF GREED.
=Greed, Commercial=--See CRUELTY.