This station is fourteen miles east of Tampa, on the Florida Central and Peninsula Railroad.
Truly your friend,
Clementine Averill.”
CHAPTER IX.
THE COTTON-FACTORY OF TO-DAY.
God has not gone to some distant star;
He’s in the mill where the toilers are.
Anna J. Grannis.
I should not feel that the whole purpose of this book had been fulfilled unless I added a word in behalf of the factory population of to-day.
It will probably be said that the life I have described cannot be repeated, and that the modern factory operative is not capable of such development. If this is a fact, there must be some reason for it. The factory of to-day might and ought to be as much of a school to those who work there as was the factory of fifty or sixty years ago. If the mental status of these modern operatives is different, then the opportunities of development should be adapted correspondingly to their needs. The same results, perhaps, cannot be reached, because the children of New England ancestry had inherited germs of intellectual life. But is it not also possible that the children of the land of Dante, of Thomas Moore, of Racine, and of Goethe may be something more than mere clods? I do not despair of any class of artisans or operatives, because I believe that there is in them all some germ of mental vigor, some higher idea of living, waiting for a chance to grow; and the same encouragement on the part of employers, the same desire to lift them to a higher level, would soon show of what the present class of operatives is capable.
What these poor people need is time, and a great deal of help, before it can be decided what either they or their descendants can make of themselves. Before an infallible decision can be given, there must be, perhaps, two or three generations of growth under free institutions, and under employers who think of something besides coining the bodies and souls of their employees into dollars and cents.