If you fail to get your Monthly promptly, be sure to write and let us know. The Monthly comes out on the 15th of each month. We always have extra numbers for those which miscarry in the mails. Drop us a postal if you fail to get yours promptly.
Mr. A. D. Shamel, physiologist in charge of Tobacco Breeding In the Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., sends the following appreciative letter: “I appreciate the high character of your Monthly, and know that it will be of great service in promoting the best interests of the agricultural interests which it represents. In the great agricultural awakening taking place in the South and the development of her great resources, there is certainly a great field of valuable work.” Prof. Schumel will favor us soon with a valuable paper.
Men seem to be animals which would not only betray other men, but their own children, if there was no higher power to prevent. One of the curses of the South is child labor—another form of slavery and race suicide. In the new era dawning in the South, this curse has come in with the spindle and the money behind it has been so great that in some Southern States, like South Carolina and Georgia, the friends of the child and of humanity have been unable to pass child labor laws. The legislators are bought by the money of the corporations. The South is making a strenuous effort to correct this evil, but it is met by graft and bribery, evasion and contempt of the law, and the shame goes on. Take from anyone’s life its untrammeled childhood, and what is left? Not even the memory of a sweetness. White child slavery in the cotton mills of the country to-day is worse than negro slavery ever was. After many fruitless efforts, Alabama, which has rapidly taken first rank among all the Southern States, succeeded two years ago in passing a child labor law, the age limit being twelve years. On the day this law went into effect, one hundred and twenty-five children, all white, walked out of one mill at Lannett, Ala. The most of the children, perhaps, had never been to school in their lives and never would have had the opportunity. Not only that, but half of them would never have lived to maturity, and these, at twenty, would look like middle-aged, decrepit, ambitionless folks from whom the life had been crushed. The use of child labor not only promotes race suicide and all manner of narrow injustice, but encourages laziness in the parents, as in nearly all cases the children support the parents in idleness. The law is now rendered almost null by the fact that the parents do not hesitate to swear falsely to the age of their children in order to put them to work in the mills.
What is a thought—an idea? The most valuable asset in the brain of man. Not common, ordinary thinking, but a new thought—a thought which no one else ever originated. There is such a thought in the letter below, and I am publishing it, taken from many other letters to Trotwood, because of that particular thought and not on account of the nice things the author is kind enough to say. I have underscored the thought I have selected. Read it and tell me, are you doing your work because you must do something, or are you doing it because it is the something you must do. Think and find out, for on it depends whether your life will be a success or failure:
Medicine Lodge, Kan., Oct. 30, 1905.
Dear Trotwood: