The Connecticut labor news., 1923-07-27
By HAROLD CARY IN GOLFERS, THE NATIONAL WEEKLY, FOR JULY 28.

There were three men around li- brary table. King Tut was a person they pitied because he lived in the time before men knew how to live. They talked about it.
 "The advance of civilization, the climb out of the Dark Ages, is the greatest achievement thinkable No man can deny"
 One of the other two interrupted him: Deny that little boys and girls, true slaves, give up body and soul to us for these pleasures he asked cynically. With wave of his hand he included practically everything that made up the comfort and pleas antness of the room
 "Child labor" The first man spoke again, smiling tolerantly. "Pshaw, it doesn't exist in the United Statesl happen to know that every single state in the Union has law against children working That is one of our greatest advances!" He was compla- cent, triumphant He was presenting typical, well-informed American opin- ion. He didn't know he was wrong. He was ignorant. He is fooled. He uttered the great American child-la- Dor lie.
 The shirt on his back-it may be cotton picked by baby, perhaps sev- en years old; the cloth woven in the North, processed by a I4-year-old; i; tailored in a tenement by soft little fingers, wrapped by a child, delivered by another, and then worn by man.
 The food on his table was almost surely cultivated, picked and packed by tiny, aching hands; strawberries, l. furnace was sorted by a kid, black
 Child labor! Why, 1t does not ex- istl Or, if it does, only in few backward communities. It will be wiped out even there in a year or two. They are after 1t now That's what thought, and it is my business to be informed That's what almost everyone thinks And now the very feel of my clothes and the taste of my food are bad Oh, you and 1 are so well fed and well groomed, so happy and prosperous, while the outrage goes on even in the most progressive states of the North!
 Who Made Your Shirt?
 The floor of the great cotton mill vibrated under my feet; the power 
 life that in this great, rich common wealth is sweet. Fall River, Mass, close by Boston, in one of our B oldest states, Is one of our. greatest mill towns in one of our most en- frightened states. The weaver beside me as I stood watching the shuttle shooting back and forth was kid in short pants. He was little. He seem ed dull. He was very busy.
 You and l aren't sentimentalists. We don't know much about that kid. We don't care about him. In such a great world we cannot stop to listen to the story of such I4-year-old worker. We smile when some softly speaks tearfully of tiny wage slaves. !" But I'll go this far with the tender, pitying fellow: 1 don't want to wear a shirt that kid or any other kid helped make And I can't help it! How can I tell? There are two or three thousand boys and girls work ing in that Massachusetts center
 You would come away from Fall River, New Bedford. or any textile center in Massachusetts, mad, old fashioned mad, sore as boil because of this thing that IS being put over on us. But you might feel impotent, you might mutter imprecat1ons against the system, the state, the em- ployers, and try to forget all about it. You might say special case" bad, Again you are wrong on every count This is no attack on special case, or a single state, or a group of wicked employers. Massachusetts is one of the best states in the whole broad land that is the United States, in the matter of anti-child-labor laws. It IS one of the comparatively few states in which those particular laws are we'll enforced, perhaps almost perfect ly enforced.
 So this is the kind of thing that is going on i'll this modern age of eff ciency in American manufacturing, this in the enlightened twentieth cen tury! I pounded up the stairs to the office of the king of them all in Fall River, not the biggest employer of labor, but the most influential. An ger, impatience, and disil1usionment went with me as 1 faced the kind of man we have in the past been so ready to indict, man who has been an employer for SO years.
 "As a matter of fact" Simeon B.. Chase said to me-and there was nothing controversial Tn his tone at all-"I have never opposed child labor law. When the child-labor amendment was before Congress last winter, I made a special trip to see Senator Lodge to ask him to vote for it. He agreed that it should be given the most careful consideration. l do not know at what age labor ceases to be that of child, but wish to accept the verdict of those who have studied it and are better informed than am. :,
 He pointed out to me that there had heerl nd serious strike in the Fall