companionship.

During the period of most rapid growth in the textile industry,
agriculture, or at least agriculture as practiced by this class, was
unprofitable. During the decade from 1890 to 1900 the price of all kinds
of farm produce was exceedingly low, and the returns in money were very
small. Even though a farmer more farsighted than the average did produce
the greater part of his food on the farm, his "money crop"--cotton or
tobacco--hardly brought the cost of production. The late D.A. Tompkins, of
Charlotte, North Carolina, a close student of cotton, came to the
conclusion, about 1910, that cotton had been produced at a loss in the
South considered as a whole, at least since the Civil War. Many farmers,
however, were in a vicious economic circle and could not escape. If they
had bought supplies at the country store at inflated prices, the crops
sometimes were insufficient to pay the store accounts, and the balance was
charged against the next year's crop. Men who did not go heavily into debt
often handled less than $200 in cash in a year, and others found difficulty
in obtaining money even for their small taxes. To such men the stories of
$15 to $25 earned at a mill by a single family in a week seemed almost
fabulous. The whole family worked on the farm, as farmers' families have
always done, and it seemed the natural thing that, in making a change,
all should work in the mill.

To those families moved by loneliness and those other families driven by
an honest ambition to better their economic condition were added the
families of the incapable, the shiftless, the disabled, and the widowed.
In a few cases men came to the mills deliberately intending to exploit
their children, to live a life of ease upon their earnings. There were
places for the younger members of all these families, but a man with
hands calloused and muscles stiffened by the usual round of farm work
could seldom learn a new trade after the age of forty, no matter how
willing. Often a cotton mill is the only industrial enterprise in the
village, and the number of common laborers needed is limited. Too many
of the fathers who had come to the village intending themselves to work
gradually sank into the parasite class and sat around the village store
while their children worked.

During the early expansion of the industry, the wages paid were low
compared with New England standards, but they were sufficient to draw
the people from the farms and to