machines with men and women; when infants
feeds mechanism with labour that has not one elevating, humanizing
effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence
below par and cheapens and distorts the nobler forms of toil. Not only
is it "no disgrace to work," but on the contrary it is a splendid thing
to be able to labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat of
their brow are not the servants of mankind in the sense of the term, but
the patriarchs and controllers of the world's march and the most subtle
signs of the times. But there are distinctly fitnesses of labour, and
the proper presentation to the working-man and woman and child is a
consideration.

No one to-day would be likely for an instant to concede that to replace
the treadmill horse with a child (a thing often seen and practised in
times past) would be an advantage. And yet the march of the child up and
down before its spooling frame is more suggestive of an animal--of the
dog hitched to the Belgian milk cart; of the horse on the
mill-tread--than another analogy.

Contrast this pallid automaton with the children of the poor in a New
York kindergarten, where the six-or seven-year-old child of the German,
the Hungarian, the Polish emigrant, may have its imagination stimulated,
its creative and individual faculties employed as it is taught to _make
things_--construct, combine, weave, sew, mould. Every power latent is
cajoled to expression, every talent encouraged. Thus work in its first
form is rendered attractive, and youth and individuality are encouraged.
In the South of this American country whose signet is individualism,
whose strength (despite our motto, "United we stand") is in the
individual freedom and vast play of original thought, here in the South
our purest born, the most unmixed blood of us, is being converted into
machines of labour when the forms of little children are bound in youth
to the spindle and loom.

In a certain mill in Alabama there are seventy-five child-labourers who
work twelve hours out of the twenty-four; they have a half-hour at noon
for luncheon. There is a night school in connection with this mill
corporation. Fancy it, a night school for the day-long child labourer!
Fifty out of seventy-five troop to it. Although they are so tired they
cannot keep awake on the benches, and the littlest of them falls asleep
over its letters, although they weep with fatigue, they are eager to
learn! Is there a mor