In other words, within the Southern states the children under sixteen years of age constitute now, as they did twenty years ago, 25 per cent. of all the operatives employed: whereas, in the states outside the South the children under sixteen number less than 8 per cent. of all those employed. Therefore the situation which was justly considered so bad in Great Britain that it was reformed seventy years ago, and which has been reformed in most of the states outside of the South, is three times worse in the South than it is in any other portion of the Union, and is just as bad now as it was twenty years ago.
In The Tradesman, of Chattanooga, Tenn., August 15, 1902, the statement is made that the number of children under sixteen years of age now at work in the Southern mills approximated 50,000.
The 50,000 little ones who troop to the mill every morning, breathe the steam-heated, dust-laden, germ-infected atmosphere of the close rooms throughout the entire day, who light, with lanterns, their way home across the fields when darkness has fallen, are white children. During the same hours that these white boys and girls are finding their way to the factory where their energy and strength is offered up as a sacrifice to mammon, 50,000 black children are singing merrily on their way to school, where they are gaining what the white children are losing.
Glance forward twenty years and ask yourselves what will be the relative positions of the 50,000 white children and the 50,000 black children. It will be a miracle if most of those white children are not either in their graves, or in the hospitals, or in the slums, or in the prisons, while the 50,000 black children will be holding clerkships in some department of the Federal Government.
The kind of civilization which we are going to have in the future is being determined now. Race development and progress cannot be extemporized or bought ready-made. It is a matter of preparing the soil, planting the seed, cultivating the crop.
We shall reap as we shall have sown.
The most profoundly disgusting feature of the Southern political situation today is that the Democratic bosses who control our state legislatures will not allow us to give our white children as good treatment as the negro children are getting.
Almost universally the Southern mills are controlled by Northern capitalists; but it is the Southern politician, officeholder, editor or stockholder who rushes to the legislature saying that child slavery must continue because it is good for the child.
These Northern capitalists who own Southern mills are, to a large extent, Republicans in politics. The unprincipled Southern men who put up a plea in behalf of child slavery are almost exclusively Democratic.