Abbeville progress. (Abbeville, Vermilion Parish, La.) 1913-1944, 1920-03-27

| dren to work or starve. AS THESE
men grew older their families grew IN
size and demand, while their ability
10 earn decreased. The tragedy reg
istered in their pay envelopes. Ihey
were being ground between growing
needs and diminishing wages. Inc
grinding not only hurt their bodies, It
furrowed their brain.
They lived in dread of poverty. II
had been their nurse, they feared 1t
would be their pallbearcr Poverty
had taken its revenge upon them.
They We're resolving that If they couId
help ii it would not put its lash upon
their children. They knew poverty
intimately. 1t wasn't a word, name
it was a living hateful. cruel compan-
ion. 1t was the devil that recruited
the MaryS of Scarlet Hall, the Magda-
lens of the slumS. and always the
army was modified from the shanties
of the poor Children who had been
robbed Of their youth. who had never
owned a flower, poorly fed and mis-
erably clad, dragged out of bed 10y
alarm clocks, sounding the call to toll,
when they should have been answer
ing the school bell, children physical
~ unfit for the breadWinner'S StruS-
gle, children without the moral en-
durance necessary for the fight, were
driven into No Woman's land, the
rotten scum under the world.
Light in Education.
Before the war men we're brOOding
on these things. papers. books maya
zines mirroring life, pictured these
horrors. They were the subject of
public discussion and DEBATE. Men re-
turning from a hard days work talked
these things over with their wives aft
er the children had gone to bed, and
many a man left his supper table to
peek through the half-closed door into
the room where his Riddles were sleep
ing, tiptoeing back, only to look into
the eyes of mother, and see reflected
there the fears he felt.
The invention of the typesetting ma
chine, the cheap manufacture of paper,
the growth of public school systems,
and public libraries, brought light to
the dark minds of the wOrkmen. In
that light they saw more clearly their
needs and more completely realized
their rights. 1t is the natural ambition
of man to climb. He wants to get on
and up. Ignorance had kept him from
climbing. Ignorance is darkness. Men
stumble when they try to go forward
in the dark. Education Is the light In
the road. They sought to make haste,
to make up for the lost time. Education
taught them to want things for them
selves and their families that their
fathers and mothers never thought OF
wanting. The homes which satisfied
their parents depressed and irritated
them. The bathtub and tooth brush are
acquired habits. The desire to straight
en- the back that has been bent In toll
too long. is put there by education.
One thing stood in the way-it OBJ
structed the path upward to decent
living. They saw the barrier clearly
and distinctly-poverty. They saw this
impossible obstacle was made out of
poor wages. They saw more. They saw
that poor wages built the poorhouses
and filed them, organized the bread
lines, introduced the soup house. Out
of their thoughts, in their experience,
they carved truth. "As long as some
people have more than they can pos
sibly use. while others through no
fault of their own have less than they
absolutely need. something is wrong"
and when the call to arms came these
thoughts were living in the mass mind
of the world. Many not concerned with
the problem of the other seven-eighths,
knowing nothing of what was happen
ing In the minds Of the men and
women of toll, and caring less, they
did not know that these men were
uniting and planning to tear down the
wall of poverty.
Copyright. 1870. Western Newspaper union)