New-York tribune., 1901-11-11
CHILD LABOR N THE SOUTH.

Every manufacturing community has to
face the question of child labor. For a hundred
years England. In her factories and mines,
drained the life out of her little children until.
under the leadership of the Earl Of Shaftesbury,
the awful white slavery stopped. The
mills of New England long employed boys and
girls OF tender years. but the popular coG-
science finally aroused to realize that the
liberation Of such a system meant deterioration
Of population, mentally, morally and physically.
Now the Southern States are confronted by the
problem of saving their children from the grind
ing of the fast developing cotton mills
The manufacturers have gone into the South
ahead of the laws which protected the young
where they had previously been operating. The
chance TO use cheap labor is attractive that
they take advantage of this license afforded
them On the other hand, the communities
where they are established are poor and the
chance TO turn the children's capacity for work
into ready money offers a temptation wellnigh
irresistible. But it must be resisted and the
mill owners must be restricted. or the indus
trial Development of which the South is so
proud will prove to be a curse instead of
blessing. The wise men of the South are al
ready awake to the danger to their region and
to the whole country in the large percentage OF
white illiteracy. The only hope Of a democracy
is an intelligent population, and if the children.
already insufficiently schooled. are to be in in
creasing numbers worn out in the mills instead
of being taught, degraded community must be
the result Few realize how great the evil has
grown. In South Carolina twelve thousand. or
% per cent, of the cotton mill operatives, work
ing sixty-siX hours week, are children under
fourteen years old. In Georgia, Alabama and
other States the proportion is not so large. but
it is alarming. In some mills children of eight
and nine years are employed. working long
hours and children's wages range from 10 to
80 cents a day. In some instances families of
adults have been found living in dleness on
the labor of young children. Nor are these
shiftless colored people. for the factory opera
tives are almost all white
Of course such unnatural parents, and others
who work themselves but In their ignorance do
not see why their children should not share
their hard lot, object to prohibitive laws. The
manufacturers who with the aid of child labor
are able to declare so per cent dividends also
object Defenders of the system declare that it
does not hurt the children The experience of
the whole world testiies to the contrary. The
full measure of harm is not yet seen in the
South. The present child workers have natu-
rally vigorous constitutions Their fathers and
mothers led healthy outdoor lives. The boys
and girls may not yet be broken down. though
investigators find many individual cases of in
validism; but If their vitality is sapped by long
hours of factory work when they should be at
play and in school, their children will pay the
penalty, and II they in turn set to work in
childhood the South will reproduced the
sickly, miserable, crime breeding race which
has dsgraced every manufacturing country that
long tolerated child labor
Louisiana and Tennessee have enacted laws
to protect children but In the other States little
or nothing has been done. Nor is it entirely
their fanlt though the responsibility for tolerat
ing the vicious system rests primarily on their
own people To the shame of the North be 1t
| said the chief obstacle to the passage of re-
form legislation is Northern money and inf1u-
| ence. At the last session of the Alabama legis-
lature bill to give children such protection as
they have in Massachusetts was aggressively
opposed and defeated by the salaried agent Of
Massachusetts capital interested in Southern