The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-07-29
ncW Book ncWS

the hungry children must be taught to eat healthful food. As the reason that lentil soup now given out in an Eng fish station, the charity of an indivtds ual it was stated that the stomachs of the children could not retain good soup of animal stock. "A starving child cannot take anything good, It's stomach rejects 1t at once. We gave good soup at first. It had to be found out by experiment what they would stand" MalnIjtion Is given as cause for the 1000 children in New York of defective vision. Malnutrition must be charged with many of the physically degenerate children that become crin- inals.
 The children of the better classes at thirteen years of age exceed those of the artisan class by an average of three inches in height. exceed also in weight and in chest girth.
 Fortunately these serious problems have not reached us of the South as yet Our kind climate and generous soil assures the proper food and air to every living creature. with but medium of work in many cases.
 There is no malnutrition with us except from ignorance in preparation of foods. this ignorance in some parts of our country is deplorable but the free. pure air of such sections some what mitigates the evil consequences of poor preparation of good food.
 MT. Spargos view of the problems of all countries seems a broad and just one. He gives an appalling pic- ture of factory children of England literally taking the husks that the swine did leave the apprentices used to be fed upon the same coarse food as that given to the masters pigs the pigs were often given meat balls, or dumplings, in their wash. the ap- prentices who were kept near the pig these used to slip away and slyly steal as many of these dumplings from the pigs as possible. hastening away with them to a hiding place. where they were greediiy devoured."
 Mr. Spargo, after giving more as wretched pictures of the treatment of English work children adds: And all this while British philanthropists were agitating the question oi negro emancipation, and raising funds for that objectr'
 Though we have not the problem of children dying and launched as wrecks upon life's rough sea for lack of food
 we have the serious problem with us | of child labor in our mills and facto-
 ries Here we indeed grind the seed corn of our nation" For with us the
 evil of child labor falls not upon the alien black race among us, but upon the white. No negro children are em- ployed in mines, mills, or factories It Is the child of the sturdy mountain ger, the erstwhile flower of hill acres
 that has its lungs stuffed with the lient of our textile industries. It Is
 the descendant of the men who helped
 make America. who is today stunted
 in mind and body in our mills.
 l Of our factories give Mir. Spargo's | stateuents: Tn Columbia, s. C.. and
 Montgomery. Ala, I have seen hun dreds of children, who did not appear to be more than nine or ten years of
 age, at work in the mills. by night as well as by day.
 "In Alabama the proportion of em- ployes under sixteen years of age m | 1900 was nearly 30 per cent. At the beginning of 1903 a very conservative estimate placed the number of children under fourteen employed in the cotton