s yet one thing which must be added
to the picture. Give the child-slave worker a tenement for a home in the
filthy streets of an ordinary factory city, with open spaces covered
with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters
running sewers, and the air foul with odors and black with factory
smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but
hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe "back of the
yards" in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the
picture would be even darker than the one given.

[Sidenote: The Shame of the Century]

Think of it, young people of Christian America! In the twentieth
century, in the country we like to think the most enlightened in the
world, after all our boasted advancements in civilization, child
slavery--more pitiful in some respects than African slavery ever
was--has its grip on the nation's childhood.

[Sidenote: An Appalling Record]

The record is amazing to one who has never thought about this subject.
Easily a hundred thousand children at work in New York, in all sorts of
employments unsuitable and injurious. Try to realize these totals, taken
from Mr. Hunter, of children under fifteen, compelled to work in
employments generally recognized as injurious: Over 7,000 in this
country in laundries; nearly 2,000 in bakeshops; 367 in saloons as
bartenders and other ways; over 138,000 at work as waiters and servants
in hotels and restaurants, with long hours and conditions morally bad;
42,000 employed as messengers, with work hours often unlimited and
temptations leading to immorality and vice; 20,000 in stores; 2,500 on
the railroads; over 24,000 in mines and quarries; over 5,000 in glass
factories; about 10,000 in sawmills and the wood-working industries;
over 7,500 in iron and steel mills; over 11,000 in cigar and tobacco
factories; and over 80,000 in the silk and cotton and other textile
mills.

[Sidenote: Soul Murder for Money]

Now, all of these industries are physically injurious to childhood. But
more than this, schooling has been made impossible, and immorality,
disease, and death reap a rich harvest from this seed-sowing. And why
are these helpless children thus engaged and enslaved, stunted,
crippled, and corrupted, deprived of education and a fair chance in
life? Simply because their labor is cheap. Mr. Hunter speaks none too
strongly when he calls this "murder, cannibalism, destruction of soul
and