served "_dreamed that children worked in any mills in the
United States_!" After my experience amongst the working class, I am
safe in saying that I consider their grievances to be the outcome of the
ignorance and greed of the manufacturer abetted, aided and made possible
by the ignorance and poverty of the labourer.

There is nothing more conscience-silencing than to accuse the writers of
the different articles on child-labour of sentimentality. The comfort in
which we live makes it easy to eliminate thoughts that torture us to
action in the cause of others. I will be delighted to meet an accusation
of sentimentality and exaggeration by any man or woman who has gone to a
Southern mill as an operative and worked side by side with the children,
lived with them in their homes. It is defamation to use the word "home"
in connection with the unwholesome shanty in the pest-ridden district
where the remnant of the children's lives not lived in the mill is
passed. This handful of unpainted huts, raised on stilts from the soil,
fever-ridden and malarious; this blank, ugly line of sun-blistered
shanties, along a road, yellow-sand deep, is a mill village. The word
_village_ has a cheerful sound. It summons a country scene, with the
charms of home, however simple and unpretentious. There is nothing to
charm or please in the villages I have already, in these pages, drawn
for you to see and which with veritable sick reluctance I summon again
before your eyes. Every house is like unto its neighbour--a shelter put
up rapidly and filled to the best advantage.

There is not a garden within miles, not a flower, scarcely a tree. Arid,
desolate, beautyless, the pale sand of the State of South Carolina
nurtures as best it can a stray tree or shrub--no more. At the foot of
the shanties' black line rises the cotton mill. New, enormous, sanitary
(!!). Its capital runs into millions; its prospectuses are pompous; its
pay-roll mysterious. You will not be able to say how many of the fifteen
hundred odd hands at work in this mill are adults, how many children. In
the State of South Carolina there are statistics of neither births,
marriages nor deaths. What can you expect of a mill village!

At 5:45 we have breakfasted--the twelve of us who live in one small
shanty, where we have slept, all five of us in one room, men to the
right of the kitchen, women and children on the left. To leave the
pestilence of foul air, the stench of that dwelling, is bl