child should direct its existence? If they do
not pass the early years of their lives in study, when should they
learn? At what period of their lives should the children of the Southern
mill-hand be educated? Long before they reach their teens their habits
are formed--ignorance is ingrained; indeed, after a few years they are
so vitally reduced that if you will you cannot teach them. Are these
little American children, then, to have no books but labour? No
recreation? To be crushed out of life to satisfy the ignorance and greed
of their parents, the greed of the manufacturers? Whatever else we are,
we are financiers _per se_. The fact that to-day, as for years past,
Southern cotton mills are employing the labour of children under tender
age--employing an army of them to the number of twenty thousand under
twelve--can only be explained by a frank admittal that infantile labour
has been considered advantageous to the cause of gain.

This gain, apparent by the facts that a mill can be run for thousands
of dollars less in the South than a like mill can be run in the North,
and its net surplus profits be the same as those of the Northern
manufactory, is one by which one generation alone will profit. The
attractiveness of the figures is fallacious. What I imply is
self-evident. The infant population (its numbers give it a right to this
dignity of term) whose cheap toil feeds the mills is doomed. I mean to
say that the rank and file of humanity are daily weeded out; that
thousands of possibly strong, healthy, mature labouring men and women
are being disease-stricken, hounded out of life; the cotton mill child
cannot develop to the strong normal adult working-man and woman. The
fiber exhausted in the young body cannot be recreated. Early death
carries hundreds out of life, disease rots the remainder, and the dulled
maturity attained by a creature whose life has been passed in this
labour is not fit to propagate the species.

The excessively low wages paid these little mill-hands keep under, of
necessity, the wage paid the grown labourer. It is a crying pity that
children are equal to the task imposed upon them. It is a crying pity
that machines (since they have appeared, with their extended,
all-absorbing power) should not do all! Particularly in the Southern
States do they evince, at a fatal point, their limit, display their
inadequacy. When babies can be employed successfully for thirteen hours
out of the twenty-four at all