couldn't do any real work!" exclaimed Hamilton.

"Do you know what one factory owner in the South said, not knowin' he
was talkin' to a member o' the child-labor commission? He said 'A kid
three year old can soon learn to straighten out tobacco leaves for
wrappers, and a little worker of four is good help in stripping.'"

"In a cigar factory?"

"Of course,--an' the children find it so hard to keep up that they are
taught to chew snuff--as a stimulant--before they are six year old. Jane
Addams, writin' o' the torture chambers they call cotton mills in parts
o' the South, said she saw on the night shift, with her teeth all
blackened and decayed from excessive snuff chewin', a little girl o'
five year old, busily and clumsily tyin' threads in coarse muslin, an'
answerin' a question she said she had been there every night throughout
the hot summer excep' two, when 'her legs and back wouldn't let her get
up.' An' what do you suppose the fact'ry owner did--send a physician?
No, he docked her the two days' wages for the time she'd been away ill,
an' another day's fine as a punishment."

"That's brutal!" cried Hamilton. "Didn't the parents protest?"

"The parents? That's where the mill-owners have their strongest help.
They threaten to discharge the parents if the children don't work an'
work hard, and they force the father or mother into whippin' the child
to compel it to stay at the loom. The whole country went to war once
over the question of a negro havin' to work under compulsion,--or at
least, that had quite a bit to do with the war,--but you can enslave
white children, you can starve 'em, you can shut 'em up in rooms without
air, you can surround 'em with dangerous machinery, you can force 'em to
be whipped, you can snatch 'em from their cradles in their homes, you
can snap your fingers at the schools, an' you can fill churchyards with
a worse Massacre o' the Innocents than history ever tells about, an' the
men and women of America don't care."

[Illustration: "I 'AIN'T SEEN DAYLIGHT FOR TWO YEARS." Trapper boy
working a twelve-hour day below ground, often too tired to go up in the
cage at the end of the day and sleeping on the ground beside the track.
(_Courtesy of the Ridgway Co._)]

"Oh, yes, they do," again protested Hamilton. "It must be that they
don't know."

"How can they help but know? There are a few that have heard what Spargo
calls 'The Bitter Cry of the Children,' but those few are very few, an'
th