The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-06-26
The Rights of Childhood
How Many Bright Liues HaUe Been Snuffed Out


 it with this amendment--that # you are doing your duty if you have fought for the rights of childhood as you should and failed, then the law makers of this State. and the people of the State who send that kind every two years to this Capitol are fearfully, won- derfully and criminally derelict in their duty to the children of their own hresides. For l have it from the lips of your chairman himself. in a speech he delivered in Columbia last fall, that in all the forty-five members of the great United States. in numbers of nat ural born illiterates, North Carolina stands at the very bottom and Tennes- see, your own Tennessee. in which you are doing such noble, uplifting work, stands next to her, holding in her hand the black flag of illiteracy.
 voi,o Does n,1 the full force Pf this get into feathers of your immaculate conceIt2 l Great God. 1t hurts me to think of North Carolina, the birthplace of my father and all of his fathers before him | that l know anything of, the birth place of Polk and Shelby and Robert son and host of others as great sons as ever God gave to the republic, the land of the Anglo-Celt, of patriotism repeat, to learn that ahe stands at the foot, and Tennessee. her daughter and her equal in past grandeur. patriotism and principles. stands next!
 want to ioon ssar fl ms M.,s.r ss if yoq did not hear 1t. but 1t Is sometimes good for us | to hear the truth-the truth even to crucifixion.
 You may be ignorant. but God knows you will fight! Then fight for the white children of your State-fght 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 aboli- 1 fa stands in the column where its pedi- i gree and its past record entities 1t to | stand!
 For you will fight. thank the LordI l tourneyed last spring to New Or leans just to see the plain upon which Tennesseans stood and fought to a | bloody finish the bullies of beef eating England and secured by their victory | to our nation the Louisiana Purchase and century of foreign peace, which the memory of that battle strengthens vet in the minds of their children. The | ola ditch was & swamp of water lilies | the breastworks had gone back to the nlain; but the great Mississippi flowed on to the sea, unhampered by Spaniard or Briton. the great artery, of bound | less, unbroken and undivided country. And I stood upon soil made American by the blood of Tennesseans; looked up at sky purple. blue and beautiful. thrown over the landscape by the God | of our fathers, even as q king of old would throw his royal purple over the masterpieces of tho great master. And bosom oN tho mighty river read: Jackson-JaC ksoni
 As l stood there the fighting spirit ot my Irish .rires came back to me as Ternesseans standing behind that bloody ditch fighting for the country | wn,ch God had ordained should belong to them and the oppressed 0; the world. RSt of ooGS 'pged e5 fl Shesk as
 dren of the South and the 1000. .000 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 politi- clans and the low ignorance and lazy debasement of their own parents. steal. ing from them not only the rights of an education. but even the right of lifeI l And as the blood surged in my head, beating drumbeats in my brain and marshalling in the fine frenzy of pro phetic visions the gray host that stood shoulder to shouldersthere. saW again that sallow-faced leader withs1he form of a battre spear and the eyes or a god ridkug up and down the long lines bloody, blasphemous and brave-and forever settling with the invaders the Issue they had postponed, but not aban- doned, at Yorktown. And, seeing him saw again that pitiful picture in the ! Waxhaw Settlement-the Irish immi- ! grant mother, ner nuSDan0 put week l ago buried in @ poor whites grave, two babes at her knees and this one at her | breast, with no money and no home and no bread for their mouths, and ] said: Thank God. there were no cot ton mills in South Carolina then, or Andrew Jackson would have died there before hN --as grown. in the lint and the dust and the grind of them. robbed of his chilhood and of his chance in lifew q
 For he also was a "poor whitc," just the meat for a nice, religious director of cotton mill!
 I thought of another Tennessean, and this time I stood in the Alamo, and again I saw ghosts-for who that has | blood in his veins can stand there and Not see them? And this was another poor white who died there before he would pull down the flag that floated above him, or could notch on the stock | of his rife the dead Mexicans who were piled up before ehim--dead-giving l to his country an emprc end = her coming children an inspiratlon that is greater than land and gold, yea, than much fine gold" And I thanked God again that ip his youth there had been no cotton mills in Tennessee to do for Davy Crockett what the bear and pan ther and Indian could never do.
 For he. too, was poor white, and in his day would have been as good for a cotton mill as a coonskin for a pint of | vhfakev And his HffIa lIfa RvouId