THE MILL
By this time the morning has found us all, and unlovely it seems as regarded from this shanty environment. At 4:50 Excelsior has shrieked every settler awake. At half-past five we have breakfasted and I pass out of the house, one of the half-dozen who seek the mill from our doors.
We fall in with the slowly moving, straggling file, receiving additions from each tenement as we pass.
Beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown earth-coloured clothes. He is so thin that his bones threaten to pierce his vestments. He has a slender visage of the frailness I have learned to know and distinguish: it represents the pure American type of people known as "poor white trash," and with whose blood has been scarcely any admixture of foreign element. A painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful: it is the face of a martyr. His hat of brown felt slouches over bright red hair; one cuffless hand, lank and long, hangs down inert, the other sleeve falls loose; he is one-armed. His attitude and gait express his defrauded existence. Cotton clings to his clothes; his shoes, nearly falling off his feet, are red with clay stains. I greet him; he is shy and surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step with me. He is "from the hills," an orphan, perfectly friendless. He boards with a lot of men; evidently their companionship has not been any solace to him, for, as he is alone this day, I see him always alone.
He works from 5:45 to 6:45, with three-quarters of an hour at noon, and has his Saturday afternoons and his Sundays free. He is destitute of the quality we call joy and has never known comfort. He makes fifty cents a day; he has no education, no way
of getting an education; he is almost a man, crippled and condemned. At my exclamation when he tells me the sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint likeness to a smile comes about his thin lips: "It keeps me in existence!" he says in a slow drawl. He used just those words.
At the different doors of the mill we part. He is not unconscious of my fellowship with him, that I feel and know. A kindling light has come across his face. "Good luck to you!" I bid him, and he lifts his head and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, "I hope you-all will have good luck, tew."
As we come into the spooling-room from the hot air without the mill seems cold. I go over to a green box destined for the refuse of the floors and sit down, waiting for work. On this day I am to have my own "side"—I am a full-fledged spooler. Excelsior has gotten us all out of our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a chance to begin our money-making piece-work job at once! "Thar ain't likely to be no yarn for an hour to-day," Maggie tells me. She is no less dirty than yesterday, or less smelly, but also she is no less kind.
"I reckon you-all are goin' to make a remarkable spooler," she cheers me on. "You'll get tired out at first, but then I gets tired, tew, right along, only it ain't the same kind—it's not so sharp." Her distinction is clever.
Across the room at one of the "drawing-in frames" I see the figure of an unusally pretty girl with curly dark hair. She bends to her job in front of the frame she runs; it has the effect of tapestry, of that work with which women of another—oh, of quite another class—amuse their leisure, with which they kill their time. "Drawing-in,"[8] although a sitting job, is considered to be a back-breaker.The girls are ambitious at this work; they make good wages. They sit close to their frames, bent over, for twelve hours out of the day. This girl whom I see across the floor of the Excelsior is an object to rest the eyes upon; she is a beauty. There is not much beauty of any kind or description in sight. Maggie has noticed her esthetic effect. "You-all seen that girl; she's suttenly prob'ly am peart."
She is a new hand from a distance. This is her first day. What miserable chance has brought her here? If she stays the mill will claim her body and soul. The overseer has marked her out; he hovers in the part of the room where she works. She has colour and her difference to her pale companions is marked. Excelsior will not leave those roses unwithered. I can foretell the change as yellow unhealthfulness creeps upon her cheeks and the red forever goes. There are no red cheeks here, not one. She has chosen a sitting-down job thinking it easier. I saw her lean back, put her hands around her waist
and rest, or try to, after she has bent four hours over her close task. I go over to her.
"They say it's awful hard on the eyes, but they tell me, too, that I'll be a remarkable fine hand."
I saw her apply for work, and saw, too, the man's face as he looked at her when she asked: "Got any work?"
"We've got plenty of work for a good-looking woman like you," he said with significance, and took pains to place her within his sight.
The yarn has come in, and I return to my part of the mill; Maggie flies to her spools and leaves me to seek my distant place far away from her. I set my work in order; whilst my back is turned some girl possesses herself of my hand-harness. Mine was a new one, and the one she leaves for me is broken. This delays, naturally, and the overseer, after proving to his satisfaction that I am hampered, gets me a new one and I set to work.
Many of the older hands come without breakfast, and a little later tin pails or paper parcels appear. These operatives crouch down in a Turkish fashion at the machines' sides and take a hasty mouthful of their unwholesome, unpleasant-looking food, eating with their fingers more like animals than human beings. By eight the full steam power is on, to judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools. Not one of the women near me but is degrading to look upon and odourous to
approach. These creatures, ill clad, with matted, frowsy hair and hands that look as though they had never, never been washed, smell like the byre. As for the children, I must pass them by in this recital. The tiny, tiny children! The girls are profane, contentious, foul-mouthed. There is much partisanship and cliqueism; you can tell it by the scowls and the low, insulting words as an enemy passes. To protect the hair from the flying pieces of cotton the more particular women, and oftentimes children as well, wear felt hats pulled down well over the eyes. The cotton, indeed, thistledown-like, flies without cessation through the air—spins off from the spools; it rises and floats, falling on the garments and in the hair, entering the nostrils and throat and lungs. I repeat, the expectoration, the coughing and the throat-cleaning is constant. Over there two girls have taken advantage of a wait for yarn to go to sleep on the floor; their heads are pillowed on each others' shoulders; they rest against a cotton bale. Maggie wanders over to me to see "how you-all is gettin' on." "Tired?" "Well, I reckon I am. Thank God we get out in a little while now."
One afternoon I went up to the loft to rest a few moments before going to the mill. Mrs. White was sitting on her bed, a slender figure in the blue-checked wrapper she always wore. Her head was close to
the window, her silhouette in the light, pale and slender. "I wa'n't sick when I come hyar, but them mills! They's suttinly tew hyard on a woman! Weave-room killed me, I guess. I couldn't hyar at all when I come out and scarcely could stan' on ma feet when I got home. Tew tyred to eat, tew; and the water hyar is regularly pisen; hev you-all seen it? It's all colours. Doctor done come to see me; ain't helpin' me any; 'pears like he-all ain't goin' to come no mo'!"
"If you have a husband, why don't you go to him and let him care for you?"
She was silent, turning her wedding-ringless hand over and over on her lap: the flies came buzzing in around us, and in the near distance Excelsior buzzed, the loudest, most insistent creature on this part of the earth.
"Seems like a woman ought to help a man—some," she murmured. Downstairs Mrs. Jones sums her up in a few words.
"She-all suttinly ain't no 'Mrs' in the world! Calls herself 'White.'" (The intonation is not to be mistaken.) "Pore thing's dyin'—knows it, tew! Come hyar to die, I reckon. She'll die right up thar in that baed, tew. Doctor don't come no mo'. Know she cayn't pay him nothin'. You-all come hyar to grandmaw, Letty!"
The child around whom the threads of existence are weaving fabric more intricate than any woof or
warp of the great mills goes confidingly to the old woman, who lifts her tenderly into her arms. With every word she speaks this aged creature draws her own picture. To these types no pen save Tolstoi's could do justice. Mine can do no more than display them by faithfully transcribing their simple dialect-speech.
"I am sixty-four years old, an' played out. Worked too hyard. Worked every day since I was a child, and when I wasn't workin' had the fevar. Come from the hills las' month. When his wife dyde, the son he come an' fetched me cross the river to help him."
How has she lived so long and so well, with life "so hyard on her"?
"I loved my husban', yes, ma'am, I regularly loved him; reckon no woman didn't ever love a man mo', and he loved me, tew, jest ez much. Seems tho' God couldn't bayr to see us-all so happy—couldn't las'; he dyde."
Mrs. Jones' figure is a case of bones covered with a brown substance—you could scarcely call it skin; a weather-beaten, tanned hide; nothing more. This human statue, ever responsive to the eternal moulding, year after year has been worked upon by the titan instrument, Labour: struggle, disease, want. But this hill woman has known love. It has transfigured her, illumined her. This poor deformed body is a torch only for an immortal flame. I know now why it seems good to be near her, why her
eyes are inspired.... I rise to leave her and she comes forward to me, puts out her hand first, then puts both thin, old arms about me and kisses me.
In speaking of the settlement, it borders on the humourous to use the word sanitation. In the mill district, as far as my observation reached, there is none. Refuse not too vile for the public eye is thrown into the middle of the streets in front of the houses. The general drainage is performed by emptying pans and basins and receptacles into the backyards, so that as one stands at the back steps of one's own door one breathes and respires the filth of half a dozen shanties. Decaying vegetables, rags, dirt of all kinds are the flowers of these people, the decorations of their miserable garden patches. To walk through Granton (which the prospectus tells us is well drained) is to evoke nausea; to inhabit Granton is an ordeal which even necessity cannot rob of its severity.
These settlers, habitants of dwellings built by finance solely for the purpose of renting, are celebrated for their immorals—"a rough, lying, bad lot." "Oh, the mill-hands!" ... Sufficient, expressive designation. Nevertheless, these people, simple, direct and innocent, display qualities that we have been taught are enviable—a lack of curiosity, for the most part, in the affairs of
others, a warm Southern courtesy, a human kindliness. I found these people degraded because of their habits and not of their tendencies, which statement I can justify; whatever may be their natural instincts, born, nurtured in their unlovely environment, they have no choice but to fall into the usages of poverty and degradation. They have seen nothing with which to compare their existences; they have no time, no means to be clean, and no stimulus to be decent.
A job at Granton was no more difficult to secure than was "spoolin'" at the other mill. I applied one Saturday noon, when Granton was silent and the operatives within their doors asleep, for the most part, leaving the village as deserted as it is on a workday. A like desolation pervades the atmosphere on holiday and day of toil. I was so lucky as to meet a shirt-sleeved overseer in the doorway. Preceding him were two ill-clad, pale children of nine and twelve, armed with a long, mop-like broom with which their task was to sweep the cotton from the floors—cotton that resettled eternally as soon as it was brushed away. The superintendent regarded me curiously, I thought penetratingly, and for the first time in my experience I feared detection. My dread was enhanced by the loneliness, the lawlessness of the place, the risk and boldness of my venture.
By this I was most thoroughly a mill-girl in
appearance, at least; my clothes were white with cotton, my hair far from tidy; fatigue and listlessness unassumed were in my attitude. I had not heard the Southern dialect for so long not to be able to fall into it with little effort. I told him I had been a "spooler" and did not like it—"wanted to spin." He listened silently, regarding me with interest and with what I trembled to fear was disbelief. I desperately pushed back my sunbonnet and in Southern drawl begged for work.
"Spinnin'?" he asked. "What do you want to spin for?"
He was a Yankee, his accent sharp and keen. How clean and decent and capable he appeared, the dark mill back of him; shantytown, vile, dirty, downtrodden, beside him!
I told him that I was tired of spooling and knew I could make more by something else.
He thrust his hands into his pockets. "To-night is Saturday; alone here?"
"Yes."
"Where you going to stay in Granton?"
"I don't know yet."
"Don't learn spinnin'," he said decidedly. "I am head of the speedin'-room. I'll give you a job in my room on Monday morning."
My relief was immense. His subsequent questions I parried, thanked him, and withdrew to keep secret from Excelsior that I had deserted for Granton.
Although these mills are within three hundred feet of each other, the villagers do not associate. The workings of Granton are unknown to Excelsior and vice versa.
The speeding-room in Granton is second only in noise to the weave-room. Conversation must be entrancing and vital to be pursued here! The speeder has under her care as many machines as her skill can control.
My teacher, Bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six speeders on a side, her work being regulated by a crank that marked the vibrations. To the lay mind the terms of the speeding-room can mean nothing. This girl made from $1.30 to $1.50 a day. She controlled in all 704 speeders; these she had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear with her own hands; to oil the steel, even to bend and clean under the lower shelf and come into contact with the most dangerous parts of the mechanism. The girl at the speeder next to me had just had her hand mashed to a jelly. The speeder watches her ropers run out; these stand at the top and back of the line. The ropers are refilled and their ends attached to the flying speeders by a quick motion. The yarn from the ropers is wound off on to the speeders. When the speeders are full of yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls themselves. Speeding
is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling and cleaning is only fit for a man to do.
The girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered the factory at eight. She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and capable, and, as far as I could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly respectable.
There are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life. On tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather contrive to make ourselves heard. She has a sweet, gentle face; she is courtesy and kindness itself.
"What do you think about all day?"
"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts."
"Tell me some."
"Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all like readin'?"
"Yes."
"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."
"Are you often tired?" And this question surprises her. She looks up at me and smiles. "Why, I'm always tyrd! I read novels for the most part; like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel."
(For one short moment please consider: This hemmed-in life, this limited existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of
maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day, vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. Before her the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after year. It is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are warped and scarred; the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and undeveloped. All they know is toil, all they know of gain is a fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The children who, barefooted, filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors, these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. The dirty women around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she knows; and the men? If she does not feed the passion of the overseer, she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with this daughter of the loom, a marriage little binding to him and which will give her children to give in time to the mill. This is the realism of her love story: She reads books that you, too, may have read; she dares to dream of scenes, to picture them—scenes that you have sought and wearied of. A tithe of our satiety would mean her banquet, her salvation!... Her happiness? That question who can answer for her or for you?)
She continues: "I'm very fond of fo'ran travel, only I ain't never had much occasion for it."
This pathos and humour keep me silent. A few ropers have run out; she rises. I rise, too, to replace, to attach, and set the exhausted line taut and complete again.
Ten years! Ten years! All her girlhood and youth has been given to keeping ropers supplied with fresh yarn and speeders a-whirling. During this travail she has kept a serenity of expression, a depth of sweetness at which I marvel. Her voice is peculiarly soft and, coupled with the dialect drawl, is pleasant to hear.
"I hate the mills!" she says simply.
"What would you be if you could choose?" I venture to ask. She has no hesitation in answering.
"I'd love to be a trained nurse." Then, turn about is fair play in her mind, I suppose, for she asks:
"What would you-all be?"
And ashamed not to well repay her truthfulness I frankly respond: "I'd like to write a book."
"I dee-clare." She stares at me. "Why, you-all is ambitious. Did you ever write anything?"
"A letter or two."
She is interested and kindles, leaning forward. "I suttenly ain't so high in my ambitions," she says appreciatively. "Wish you'd write a love story for me to read," and she ponders over the idea, her eyes on my snowy flying speeders.
"
Look a-hyar, got any of your scrappin's on writin' hyar? Ef you don't mind anybody's messin' with your things, bring your scrappin's to me an' I'll soon tell you ef you can write a book er not," she whispered to me encouragingly, confidentially, a whisper reaching farther in the mills than a loud sound.
I thanked her and said: "Do you think that you'd know?"
"Well, I guess I would!" she said confidently. "I ain't read all my life sense I was eight years old not to know good writin' from bad. Can you-all sing?"
"No."
"Play sweet music?"
"No."
"I jest love it." She enthuses. "Every Saturday afternoon I take of a music teacher on the gee-tar. It costs me a quarter."
I could see the scene: a shanty room, the tall, awkward figure bending over her instrument; the type that the teacher made, the ambition, the eagerness—all of which qualities we are so willing to deny to the slaves of toil.
"They ain't much flowers here in Granton," she said again. "'Tain't no use to try to have even a few geraneums; it's so dry; ain't no yards nor gardens, nuther."
Musing on this desolation as she walks up and
down the line, she says: "I dew love flowers, don't you?"
Over and over again I am asked by those whose wish I suppose is to prove to themselves and their consciences that the working-girl is not so actively wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are forced to respond:
"The working people are happy? The factory girls are happy, are they not? Don't you find them so?"
Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked, overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, is happy?
Do you wish her to be so? Is the existence ideal?
I can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl of Lynn and for the Southern mill-hand.
I thank Heaven that I can say truthfully, that of all who came under my observation, not one who was of age to reflect was happy. I repeat, the working-woman is brave and courageous, but the most sane and hopeful indication for the future of the factory girl and the mill-hand is that she rebels, dreams of something better, and will in the fullness of time stretch toward it. They
have no time to think, even if they knew how. All that remains for them in the few miserable hours of relief from labour and confinement and noise is to seek what pastime they may find under their hand. We have never realized, they have never known, that their great need—given the work that is wrung from them and the degradation in which they are forced to live—is a craving for amusement and relaxation. Amusements for this class are not provided; they can laugh, they rarely do. The thing that they seek—let me repeat: I cannot repeat it too often—in the minimum of time that remains to them, is distraction. They do not want to read; they do not want to study; they are too tired to concentrate. How can you expect it? I heard a manufacturer say: "We gave our mill-hands everything that we could to elevate them—a natatorium, a reading library—and these halls fell into disuse." I ask him now, through these pages, the questions which I did not put to him then as I listened in silence to his complaint. He said he thought too much was done for the mill-hands. What time would he suggest that they should spend in the reading-room, even if they have learned to read? They rise at four; at a quarter before six they are at work. The day in winter is not born when they start their tasks; the night has fallen long before they cease. In summer they are worked long into their evenings. They tell me that
they are too tired to eat; that all they want to do is to turn their aching bones on to their miserable mattresses and sleep until they are cried and shrieked awake by the mill summons. Therefore they solve their own questions. Nothing is provided for them that they can use, and they turn to the only thing that is within their reach—animal enjoyment, human intercourse and companionship. They are animals, as are their betters, and with it, let us believe, more excuse.
The mill marriage is a farce, and yet they choose to call their unions now and again a marriage. Many a woman has been a wife several times in the same town, in the same house. The bond-tying is a form, and, of course, mostly ignored. The settlements swarm with illegitimate children. Next to me work two young girls, both under seventeen, both ringless and with child.
Let me picture the Foster household, where I used to call Saturday evenings.
Mrs. Foster herself, dirty, slipshod, a frowzy mass, hugs her fireside. Although the day is warm, she kindled a fire to stimulate the thin, poor blood exhausted by disease and fevers. Two flatirons lie in a dirty heap on the floor. As usual, the room is a nest of filth and untidiness.
Mrs. Foster is half paralyzed, but her tongue is free. She talks fluently in her soft Southern drawl,
more Negro than white as to speech and tone. Up to her sidles a dirty, pretty little boy of four.
"This yere is too little to go to the mill, but he's wild to go; yes, ser, he is so. Las' night he come to me en say, 'Auntie, you-all wake me up at fo' 'clock sure; I got ter go ter the mill.'"
Here the little blond child, whose mouth is set on a pewter spoon dripping over with hominy, grins appreciatively. He throws back his white and delicate little face, and his aunt, drawing him close to her, caresses him and continues: "Yes, ma'am, to-day he dun wake up after they-all had gone and he sayd, 'My goodness, I dun oversleep mase'f!' He sha'n't go to the mill," she frowned, "not ef we can help it. Why, I don't never let him outen my sight; 'fraid lest those awful mill children would git at him."
Thus she sheltered him with what care she knew—care that unfortunately could not go far enough back to protect him! His mother came in at the noon hour, as we sat there rocking and chatting. She was a straight, slender creature, not without grace in her shirt-waist and her low-pulled felt hat that shadowed her sullen face. She was very young, not more than twenty-two, and her history indicative and tragic. With a word only and a nod she passes us; she has now too many vital things and incidents in her own career to be curious regarding a strange mill-hand. She goes with her comrade—and cousin—
Mamie, into the kitchen to devour in as short a time as possible the noon dinner, served by the grandmother: cabbage and hominy. "They don't have time 'nough to eat," the aunt says; "no sooner then they-all come in and bolt their dinner then it is time to go back." Her child has followed her. Minnie was married at thirteen; in less than a year she was a grass widow. "My goodness, there's lots of grass widows!" my frowsled hostess nods. "Why, in one weave-room hyar there ain't a gyrl but what's left by her husband. One day a new gyrl come for to run a loom and they yells out at her, 'Is you-all a grass widow? Yer can't come in hyar ef you ain't.'"
But it was after her grass widowhood that Minnie's tragedy began. The mill was her ruin. So much grace and good looks could not go, cannot go, does not go unchallenged by the attentions of the men who are put there to run these women's work. The overseer was father of her child, and when she tried to force from him recognition and aid he threw over his position and left Columbia and this behind him. This, one instance under my own eyes observed. There are many.
"Mamie works all night" (she spoke of the other girl)—"makes more money. My, but she hates the mills! Says she ain't ever known a restful minute sence she left the hills."
My hostess has drawn the same conclusion from my Northern appearance that the Joneses drew.
"
You-all must eat good where you come from! you look so healthy.' Do you-all know the Banks girl over to Calcutta?"
"No."
"They give her nine months." (Calcutta is the roughest settlement round here.) "Why, that gyrl wars her hair cut short, and she shoots and cuts like a man. She drew her knife on a man last week—cut his face all up and into his side through his lung. Tried to pass as she was his wife, but when they had her up, ma'am, they proved she had been three men's wives and he four gyrl's husbands. He liked to died of the cut. They've given her nine months, but he ain't the only man that bears her marks. Over to Calcutta it's the knife and the gun at a wink. This yere was an awful pretty gyrl. My Min seed her peekin' out from behind the loom in the weave-room, thought she was a boy, and said: 'Who's that yere pretty boy peekin' at me?' And that gyrl told Min that she couldn't help knife the men, they all worried on her so! 'Won't never leave me alone; I jest have to draw on 'em; there ain't no other way.'"...
For the annals of morality and decency do not take up this faithful account and picture the cotton-mill village. You will not find it in these scenes drawn from the life as it is at this hour, as it is portrayed by the words that the very people themselves will pour into your ears. Under the walls of
Calcutta Negroes are engaged in laying prospective flower beds, so that the thirteen-hour workers may look out from time to time and see the forms of flowers. On the other side rise some twenty shanties. These houses of Calcutta village are very small, built from the roughest unpainted boards. Here it is, in this little settlement, that the knife comes flashing out at a word—that the women shoot as well as men, and perhaps more quickly.
"Richmond aint so bad as the other!" I can hear Mrs. Foster drawl out this recommendation to us. "They ain't so much chills here. We dun move up from town first; had to—too high rents for we-all; now we dun stay hyar. Why, some of the gyrls and boys works to Granton and bo'ds hyar; seems like it's mo' healthy."
Moving, ambulant population! tramping from hill to hill, from sand-heap to sand-heap to escape the slow or quick death, to prolong the toiling, bitter existence—pilgrims of eternal hope; born in the belief, in the sane and wholesome creed that, no matter what the horror is, no matter what the burden's weight must be, one must live! It takes a great deal to wake in these inexpressive, indifferent faces illumination of interest. At what should they rejoice?
I have made the destitution of beauty clear. I believe there is an absolute lack of every form or
sight that might inspire or cause a soul to awake. There is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from labour. There should be a complete readjustment of this system. I have been interested in reading in the New York Sun of April 20th of the visit of the bishops to the model factories in Ohio. I am constrained to wish that bishops and clergy and philanthropists and millionaires and capitalists might visit in bodies and separately the mills of South Carolina and their tenement population. It is difficult to know just what the ideas are of the people who have constructed these dwellings. They tell us in this same prospectus, which I have read with interest after my personal experience, that these villages are "picturesque." This is the only reference I find to the people and their conditions. I have seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these places without prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the Southern country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's existence. The ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to destruction before the scales swing even.