Keowee courier. [volume] (Pickens Court House, S.C.) 1849-current, 1907-07-24
EDUCATION AND CHILD LABOR.
Address of John Trotwood Moore Before Tennessee
County Superintendents and Teachers

~~FrSS~ s-AS ASoAAoAyS WOuuOE>
fully and criminally derelict in their
duty to the children of their own
fresides. For ! have it from the
lips of your chairman himself, in a
speech he delivered in Columbia last
fall, that in all the As members of
the great United States, in numbers
OF natural born illiterates, North
Carolina stands at the very bottom
and Tennessee, your own Tennessee,
In which you are doing such noble,
uplifting work, stands next to her,
holding in her hand the black flag of
illiteraoy.
Does the full force of this get into
your peripatetic souls to ruffle the
feathers of your Immaculate conceit ?
Great God, it hurts me to think of
North Carolina, the birthplace of
my father and all his fathers before
him that l know anything of, the
birthplace of Polk and Shelby and
Robertson and host of others as
great sons as ever God gave to the
republic, the land of the Anglo
Celts, of patriotism and tar-heel
gameness-it hurts me, repeat, to
learn that she stands at the foot, and
Tennessee, her daughter and hor
equal in past grandeur, patriotism
and principles, stands next!
Don't look at me as if you did not
want to hear it! Neither do l want
to hear it, but it is sometimes good
for us to hear the truth--the truth
even to cruoifxion.
You may be ignorant, but God
knows you will fight! Then fight for
the white children of your State
fight these laws and the politicians
who made them with strings to them
made them to be evaded. Fight
for more and better schools and the
abolition of child labor until your
State atands in the columns where
it's pedigree and its past record en-
title it to stand!
For you will fight, thank the Lord
/ journeyed last spring to New
Orleans just to see the plain upon
which Tennesseeans stood and fought
to bloody finish the bu!!ies of
beef-eating England and secured by
their bravery 70 our nation the Lou
isiana purchase and century of for.
eign peace, which the memory of
that battle strengthens yet in the
minds of their children. The old
ditch was a swamp of water lilies /;
the breastworks had gone back to
the plain, but the great Mississippi
flowed on to the sea, unhampered
by Spaniard or Briton-the great
artery of boundless, unbroken and
undivided country. And stood
upon soil made American by the
blood of Tennesseeans. l looked up
at sky purple, blue and beautiful,
thrown over the landscape by the
blood OF our fathers, even as a king
of the old world would throw his
royal purple over the masterpieces
of the great master. And on the
sky and on the land and on the
bosom of the mighty river I read ::
Observation-Disclosures
As stood there the fighting
spirit of my Irish sires came back to
me as | saw the ghosts of those long
haired Tennesseeans standing be-
hind that bloody ditch fighting for
the country which God had ordained
should belong to them and the op-
pressed of the world. The hot blood
surged in my cheek as I thought of
the 10000 little white children of
the South and the 2,OO0,0OO in the
cotton mills and factories and mines
and sweatshops of the nation, robbed
of their rights of childhood by the
greed of gold, the graft of politicians
and the low ignorance and lazy de-
basement of their own parents,
stealing from them not only the
rights of an education, but even the
right of life! And as the blood
surged in my head, beating drum