Its strength not brick, nor stone, nor wood,
But justice, love and brotherhood.
—Author Unknown.
(1311)
Greatness Unrecognized—See [Help, Unexpected].
GREED
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.