In order to keep up with the work, the boys had to run, for it could not be done at a walk, and thus were alternately greatly overheated and chilled with icy draughts.
Seeing that the "crusader" would be busy for a while, but wanting to take the matter up with him further, Hamilton strolled over to where the glass-blowers were working. This particular factory was turning out cheap glass bottles, and there was little of the fascination that exists in factories where high-grade glass is made into many curious shapes and blown with great skill into marvelous thinness. In the middle of the room was a large round furnace containing a number of small doors not quite four feet from the ground, and a glass-blower was stationed before each of these. With long iron blowpipes these men, by giving the blowpipe a little twirl as they thrust it into the semi-molten metal, drew out on the end of it a small mass of glass, of about the consistency of nearly melted sealing wax, and holding this mass on the end of the blowpipe by keeping it in motion, they blew it into balls and rolled the ball of soft, red-hot glass on their rolling boards. Then they lifted the blowpipe and blew again, sharp and hard, forcing the soft glass to its proper form. The now cooling glass was broken from the end of the blowpipe with a sharp, snapping sound, and the blowpipe was plunged in the furnace again for another bottle. The whole had taken but a few seconds.
"Why do they have so many boys around these places?" queried Hamilton of the workman he had been watching.
"Have to, they say," the glass-blower replied, "cheap bottles mean cheap labor. No one ever expects to pay anything for a bottle—that is thrown in with everything liquid you buy. The manufacturer's got to make his little profit somewhere an' in a cheap bottle he makes it by employin' young boys cheap an' workin' 'em till they drop."
"Is it done this way everywhere?"
The workman shook his head.
"No need to do it even here," he said. "It takes money, though, to put in an endless belt to carry the bottles to the annealin' oven. The big fact'ries mostly have 'em, but there are plenty o' places like this in small towns where everythin' is done on a cheap scale, an' a boy's labor is about the cheapes' thing in the United States—unless it's a girl's."
Seeing that the glass-blower was being delayed in his task, Hamilton sauntered away, and went back to the place where the "crusader" worked. The latter broke out again as soon as he saw the boy coming.
"I've been talkin' to you about children workin'," he said, "but you haven't thought of babies bein' made to work?"
"Babies!"