The farmer and mechanic. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 18??-19??, 1902-01-07
CHILD LABOR IN THE MILLS.

In Massachusetts, in the campaign last
fall the Republicans pledged them
selves to get the Constitution SO amend
ed as to put the power to regulate labor
into the hands of Congress-. With that
done, they promised to stop the employ
nent of children in the factories in the
South. In writing of those pledges a Bos-
ton paper said that the real desire of
Massachusetts factory men was to secure
the repeal Of the labor laws there. The
Baltimore Sun, in a we'll considered edi-
torial upon this subject says:
In point of fact, the chief seat of child
labor in the South is in those mills owned
by New Englanders. A statement is
made in an appeal to the people of New
England and published in the Boston
papers, in behalf of actor children in
the South, to the effect that while the
relative number of children in the North
ern and Southern factories is about the
same, yet in the Southern mills owned
by Northern men twice as many young
children are employed as in the South
ern mills owned by Southern men.
THE Philadelphia Record says that
the child labor law of Alabama was re-
pealed upon the demand Of the Massa-
chusetts mill owners, who eXacted it as
the price of building mills in the State.
It is not creditable to the State Of Ala
bama that it should be willing to barter
the lives and happiness Of innocent chill
dren as the price of industrial develop
mcnt. The mill industry is new to the
Southern people and they do not as yet
fully appreciate the appalling sign!h-
canoe Of the problem which has con-
fronted for many years the people OF
older manufacturing communities. But
public conscience in the South is aroused
and everywhere there is a movement for
the rescue Of these innocent victims Of
the Moloch Of greed. Mr.. L. B. Ellis, of
Atlanta, in an article in the Independent,
predicts that child labor in Southern fac
tories will be an evil Of the past when
another decade is gone. And behind the
laws prohibiting child labor, he adds,
compulsory education bills are pressing.
1.-The class of people in the South who
hire their children to the mills are, as a
rule, illiterate. They do not understand
the harm they are doing; they do not un-
derstand the Importance Of education, and
that the new election laws may in time
disfranchise these white people, while
the negroes who are attending school at
the expense of the whites may be the
future voters. Many parents, it is de-
clared, put their little children to work
that they may live in idlenesS upon the
fruit Of their labor. Such parents resent
laws prohibiting child labor as heenly as
the mill owners.
LAS to the evils Of child labor no pen
-
can picture them. To realize them one
must see the sickly forms, the joyless
faces, the haggard eyes of these little
workers, who give their lives that the
rich mill owner may increase his hoard
and add gain to gain-little children with
all the JOY and grace and beauty and hope
Of childhood gone. Let one who has a
little girl Of eight years in his home
imagine how he would feel if this child
should be taken from home, from school,
from the playground and shut up within
dull walls eleven hours a day for six
days in the week, toiling as a slave. In
South Carolina there are 700 children
under IA years of age in the mills. In
one Georgia town, says Mr.. Ellis, there
are eight mills, one-third Of whose en-
ployes are under IA years Of age, receiv-
ing from 10 to so cents a day. These
mills declared dividends two years ago
ranging from 50 to IS per cent. He calls
this blood money.
But even with such dividends it would
pay the mill owners better to employ
adult labor, and let the children be edu-
Gated and grow up into capable and in
telligent laborers, than for present gain
to nave in the next generation a factory
population Of mental, physical and moral
weaklings, incapable Of honest labor, but
capable Of any crime.
Come, stand at the Southern factory
gates writes Mr.. Ellis, as Shaftesbury
stood Of old at those Of Lancaster, and
watch the i~istless little children coming
forth. You cannot have forgotten the
picture which the great Earl painted to
move his Parliament to cotion; the vivid
word-picture Of the detected, cadaverous
little ones issuing from the walls that
daily shut them in from light and life.
the numerous crippled, distorted forms
among them, the uniform hopelessness of
the weakened faces"