The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-08-21


 Man With the Hoe" begins a series of articles. The Hoe Man in the Mak- ing in the September Cosmopolitan Magazine This first article of the ser- ies which promises to be a most thrill- ing and interesting one he calls The Child at the Loom"
 Every man. woman and child in the State of Alabama Shouid read every line of 1t and see If we cannot learn thing from the peoples not called civili- zed. It Is in the power of the men selected to fix our laws to remedy this awful evil Child labor in the mills. And yet the number of baby bones ground Into money for the leisure class goes on from year to year in- ereasing. That physician alluded to by Mir. Markham Is an Alabama man and the baby fingers he amputated were for Alabama children and the mill in which they were ground of was an Alabama mill. The physician told of it to Miss Irene Ashby. but would not allow her to use 1t in her work for legislation to regulate child labor in this state.
 Here is the Edwin Markham story:
 We must not grind the seed corn
 Once. So the story goes. an old In- dian chieftatn was shown the ways and wonders of New York. He saw the tenements, the blaring mansions. the crowded circus, the airy span of Brook lyn Bridge. What Is the most sur pr,sinS thing yoq have r,.t.sn sssny si,s asked men of this benighted pagan whose worship was flowing down to stocks and stones. The savage shifted his slow words. Little children work ing"
 1t has remained. then. for civiliza- tion to give the world an abominable custom which shocks the social ethics of even an unregenerate savage. For the Indian father does not ask his chil- dren to work, but leaves them free are ss ushsred i s with solemn rites n into S ans obligations of their elders. Some of us are wondertng why our savage friends do not send their medicine men as missionaries. to shed upon our Christian darkness the light of barbar- ism.
 Child-labor is a new thing in human anairs. Anccient history records no no such must not be taken from the schols even to rebuild the Temple" In Greece and Rome the children of both slaves and master fared alike in a common nursery The trainers worked to build up strong and beautiful bodies, care less of the accident of lineage of for- tune. Bnt how different is our Chris,
 
 thousand children at work! Does the enumeration bring any Significance to our minds when we say that an army of children are at work in our land of the free? This was the figure in 1900; now there are hundreds of thou sands more. Any many of them work bq day or by. night, with only a mIs- erable dime for waget Can the heart take in the enorn1ity?
 enough to people a modern Babylon -@al1 held from the green fields, barred from school shut out of home, dragged from play and sleep and rest, and set the mills and mines and shops ana of- fees In this our Americar-the land whose other name we have been told is oRportSnity vs,oofn We of the Soo upper beauty by day. and fold them Into white beds at night; and we feel all this caretaking to be only the natural two million children who--in free Anerica--are pushed out as little bur- dem bearers to share the tolls and strains and dangers of the world of
 Let us glance into the weaving rooms of the cotton mills and behold in tn ehot, damp. decaying atmos- hideous cotflion among looms aud wheels--children choked and blinded by clouds of lint forever moftinE from the webs. childfen deafened by N the jar and uproar of an eternal Niagara of machines, children silenced utterly in the desert desolation in the heart of the never-ceasing clamor, children to silence and done with life, beck oning to one another across some thunder-ehal1en Inferno.
 Is # not shameful, is It not astound- lng. that this craft that was. known to the toilers of Memphis and Shushan, of Sardis and Tadmor, should nowa after all the advance of the ages, be loaded cd bodies of little children? To what purpose then is our "age of inventiQnY' Why these machines at all If they do not help to lift care from the soul and burden from the back? To what pur- pose is our "age of enlishtenment," if, just to cover our nakedness, we estab- fish among us barbarism that over shadows the barbarism of the savage Is this the Christianity we boast of and parade in benighted Madagascar and unsaved Malbar? Is this what our orators mean when they jubilate over ''civilization" and "the progress of the speciesY
 After all these ages, more children are crowded into this limbo of the loom than into any other cavern of our in- dustrtal abyss. In the Southern cotton mills, where the doors smut out the odor of the magnolia and shut in the reek-
 
 the mocking bird outside keep obli- gato to the whlrring wheels within, we find gaunt goblin army of children keeping their forced march on the fac- -floors--an army that outwatches the sun by day and the stars by night. Eighty thousand children, mostly girls, are at work in the textile mills of the United States. The South. the center of the cotton industry, happens to have the bad eminence of being the leader In this social infamy. At the beginning of 1908 there were in the South twenty thousand children at the spindles. The ''Tradesman," of Chattanooga, estimates that with the springing up of new mills there must nov be fifty thousand chill dren at the Southern looms, This Is thirty per cent. of all the cotton work CTS of the South-a spectral army of pigmy people sucked in from the hills to dance beside the crazing wheel
 Let us again reckon up this Devils toll In the North (where, God knows, conditions are bad enough), for every one thousand workers over sixteen years of age there are eighty three workers under sixzeen Chat young old4 age of the worklng-child); while in the South, for every one thousand workers in the mills over sixteen years of age there are three hundred and fifty-three under sixteen. Some of these are