CHAPTER IX
THE CHILD IN 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.
"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]
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.
FOOTNOTES
[1] George Engelman, M.D., "The Increasing Sterility of American Women," from the Journal of the American Medical Association, October 5, 1901.
[2] An expert presser can do as many as 400 shoes a day. This is rare and maximum.
[3] At Plant's, Boston, fresh air cylinders ventilate the shop.
[4] Lynn's average wages are $8 per week.
[5] A beau.
[6] There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of births, marriages or deaths in this State; it is less surprising that the mill village has none.
[7] The Southern term for stringed instruments.
[8] A good drawer-in makes $1.25 a day.
[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.
[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.