demoralising atmosphere of the mill towns...."

Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from
Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little
nephews and nieces, friends' sons and so forth brought in by them is
peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It was
a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little boy
of no ascertainable relationship....

In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were
hardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the tiniest
and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning and,
like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labour; and,
when they return home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, too
tired to take off their clothes." Many children work all night--"in the
maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary and
clouded with humidity and lint."

"It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter in his description, "before I forget
the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched forward
to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form already
showing the physical effects of labour. This child, six years of age,
was working twelve hours a day."

From Mr. Spargo's "Bitter Cry of the Children" I learn this much of the
joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:

"For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop over the
chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the coal as it
moves past them. The air is black with coal dust, and the roar of the
crushers, screens and rushing mill-race of coal is deafening. Sometimes
one of the children falls into the machinery and is terribly mangled, or
slips into the chute and is smothered to death. Many children are killed
in this way. Many others, after a time, contract coal-miners asthma and
consumption, which gradually undermine their health. Breathing
continually day after day the clouds of coal dust, their lungs become
black and choked with small particles of anthracite...."

In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F. Carey tells how little
naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York
millionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicals
that bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....

Altogether it would seem that at least one million and a half children
are growing up in the Un