The labor journal. [volume] (Everett, Wash.) 1909-1976, 1911-11-24

/
ing evils of the United States. Recent
ly the national child labor committee
has been holding a comprehensive ex-
| hibit in New York city of the horrors
and evils that follow the slavery of
I little children in our mills and mines.
! The evidence of the camera, the bald
facts of statistics and government re-
ports have told the story only too
truly. Few today realize that such
things can be.
Hundreds of thousands Of children
hundreds of thousands more have been
crippled for life at an age when they
ought to be running in the woods and
fields. Thousands have died before
they had even begun to live. And of
all the misery and injury and vice and
disease and death-it is too shocking
to be more than limited att
The exhibit has been doing its good
work all over the country since last
autumn-in fact, 1t has been travel.
ing exhibit. Miss Elizabeth Mem. Din
widdie, who is in charge of it, has
been from one end of the country to
the other, showing it where it could
do the most good at the psychological
moment
Better than words do the pictures
and posters tell their story of the TWEEN
tieth century crime against child life.
The boys in the coal breakers, the
girls in the cotton mills, the Riddles in
the night shifts at the glass works who
ought to have been in bed dreaming
of baseball and trout brooks, the amaze.
mic, understood, overworried. sickly
boys and girls who should have been
at school instead of at the machines
they all told their own stories by theii
faces alone.
Go to the glass works, the mines.
the cotton mills. the canneries. the
tenements-there you shall see them!
In some cases the rapacity of the en-
ployers is to blame; in others it is the
greed of the parents. In some cases
it is both.
"She just happened in" said the
burly overseer in a South Carolina cot
ton mill when an investigator ran
across a baby girl of eight tending her
''sides" like a veteran. He was lying
The child was just as handy and use
full as grownup and cost only half as
much for her labor.
In a Pennsylvania coal breaker they
photographed nine-year-old Leo. He
was toiling nine hours day in CRIME
and dirt for a pitiful wage. And there
was found on a musty. dusty school
file the sworn affidavit of his parents
that he was too sickly to stay in school
-Four years" answered good look
ing twelve-year-old boy in a South
Carolina cotton mill when asked how
long he had been there. He couldn't
tell the letter IA from the letter 81
and didn't know how to spell his own
name
One of the saddest cases was that
of little Savannah. a frail eleven-year
old
The boss says she's a crackerjack
at spinnin'." declared her gaunt ia
lltI lllbuulS sue am SdliNuttl uH-
less she's in the mill"
Poor little Savannah owned up that
she had never had doll and never
played on Sundays because she was
too tired Her tense, drawn face was
that of an Old woman
The grueling labor of the mold boys
in the glass works was really awful.
Here were tender youngsters down in
cellars guiltless of sunlight. sitting in
rramped positions and tending molds
all day long and all night. Other boys
worked the molten glass at the fur
mace maws in heat unbearable by
those unaccustomed to it, One baby
boy of five was found earning his few
! pennies a day in the mill where his
mother worked. He was too young to
/ go to school. And he was such gold
en- haired. blue eyed rosy checked boy
/ that it seemed a shame he was doom
/ ed there so soon in life.
OF course fatalities among child toll
! ers are far more numerous than
among adults. Obviously youth is less
cautious than experience. Not a day
! passes that death does not take its
toll of the child workers and passes
along many more to the ranks of the
crippled and helpless. New York
World