take the matter up with him further, Hamilton strolled over to where the
glass-blowers were working. This particular factory was turning out
cheap glass bottles, and there was little of the fascination that exists
in factories where high-grade glass is made into many curious shapes and
blown with great skill into marvelous thinness. In the middle of the
room was a large round furnace containing a number of small doors not
quite four feet from the ground, and a glass-blower was stationed before
each of these. With long iron blowpipes these men, by giving the
blowpipe a little twirl as they thrust it into the semi-molten metal,
drew out on the end of it a small mass of glass, of about the
consistency of nearly melted sealing wax, and holding this mass on the
end of the blowpipe by keeping it in motion, they blew it into balls and
rolled the ball of soft, red-hot glass on their rolling boards. Then
they lifted the blowpipe and blew again, sharp and hard, forcing the
soft glass to its proper form. The now cooling glass was broken from the
end of the blowpipe with a sharp, snapping sound, and the blowpipe was
plunged in the furnace again for another bottle. The whole had taken
but a few seconds.

"Why do they have so many boys around these places?" queried Hamilton of
the workman he had been watching.

"Have to, they say," the glass-blower replied, "cheap bottles mean cheap
labor. No one ever expects to pay anything for a bottle--that is thrown
in with everything liquid you buy. The manufacturer's got to make his
little profit somewhere an' in a cheap bottle he makes it by employin'
young boys cheap an' workin' 'em till they drop."

"Is it done this way everywhere?"

The workman shook his head.

"No need to do it even here," he said. "It takes money, though, to put
in an endless belt to carry the bottles to the annealin' oven. The big
fact'ries mostly have 'em, but there are plenty o' places like this in
small towns where everythin' is done on a cheap scale, an' a boy's labor
is about the cheapes' thing in the United States--unless it's a girl's."

Seeing that the glass-blower was being delayed in his task, Hamilton
sauntered away, and went back to the place where the "crusader" worked.
The latter broke out again as soon as he saw the boy coming.

"I've been talkin' to you about children workin'," he said, "but you
haven't thought of babies bein' made to work?"

"Babies!"

"Of four an' five years old."

"But they