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Show liABES OF f HEMTLLS7 8H00KIN0 CONDITION IN COTTON FACTORIES. M rhtldhoo Is Knslaveil Thai "" reatplre May ratios, hi MocfchoMcr Orow Rleh Aa BtU The! Cries u Hoove. (Special Letter.) Doe It surprise the reader to be told that In the cotton mllli of the country coun-try children or and 7 yeare are work-Inf work-Inf 11 houra a day; that In order to perform thtlr taaka with greater ease. fat which they are paid aa high aa 10 centa a day, they call upon younger brother! or alstera to help them, and 'iy anu aieepy with their taaka the din of the machinery and the heary atmosphere they are revived by baring cold water daahed Into their faces? The are the facta brought out by Irene M. Ash by, who Investigated the condition of the cotton mllle of Alabama. Ala-bama. "Often the whole family, except the bahy actually In the cradle, la In the mill," aaya the writer. "Two or three of f yean or older might be on the pay roll, but the youngeat paid worker can let. through her work at 10 centa a day with more eaae If ihe haa her little lit-tle brother of to help her. I bare en a boy under 4 beginning bla life of drudgery by pulling the yarn off bobblna to make banda. A manager courteously conducting me through the mill would often explain: 'The little lit-tle onea are not working; they are helping their brother and alitera.' I accepted the explanation until It . . dawned on me how numeroua were theee wee unpaid assistants, rt la a biting comment on the dehumanltlng nature of competition that generally kind-hearted and humane men ahould be willing to profit by the labor of llt-!tle llt-!tle children without even wage return re-turn for their work. "At one place I heard of children. t working on the night ahlft, turned out for soma fault at 1 o'clock In the morning, allowed by a companionate clerk to go to tleep on a bench In the office, aa they were afraid to go home. Ladle told me of a common alght In the mill cottagea; children lying face downward on the bed aleeplng from exhaustion, juit aa they had come In from the night ahlft, too utterly weary even to remove their clothe. A friend of mine In Atlanta, Oa., thinking of giving aorne of theae little children a treat, asked a number out to her place In the country and turned them Into the wood to play. What ( was her distress an 1 amazement to find they did not know what the wood or the thing meant. ' And dividend! from tb'.e mllla are ued probably for philanthropy, phi-lanthropy, temperance and mlaalona. I even beard of one mill Sunday echool where the children were told that Ood had put It Into the hearts of good men i- ' i AFTER THE DAY'S WOKK. (Too tired to undress, the little ones throw themselvea on their beds and fall asleep.) to open a cotton mill that they might earn money so as to be able to put a nickel Into the missionary box!" The North Is Celpable, Nor doea the culpability belong . wholly to the South. In 1887 a law waj paaaed In Alabama limiting the hours of children's work In factories to eight a day. At the instlgatlod of Massachusetts Massa-chusetts mill owners the law wea repealed re-pealed In December, 1894, on their promise to establish a factory In Alabama. Ala-bama. Today the mllla thus established estab-lished are working at least fifty children chil-dren under 12 years old for 11 hours a day. ! This Is not an Isolated Instance. Much of the opposition to the passage of a protective law through the Southern South-ern legislatures la made by representatives represen-tatives of Northern corporations, who are taking full advantage of the poi-slblllty poi-slblllty of child labor. When a bill regulating child labor waa before the Alabama legislature the mill owners' opposition to the measure In the senate sen-ate was represented by a lawyer, who waa also the president of a cotton mill, the owners of which are "phllanthorp.! lo" Northern people a corporation of clergymen and a railway uttorney! "In eleven mills I visited, owned by Northern capital," says the writer, "there were twice as many children under 12 as In thirteen mills owned by Southern capital. The total number of children under 12 In the mills of Alabama, Including the unpaid helpers, I computed to be 1 ,200. This number la not stationary or diminishing; on the contrary. It la steadily Increasing and the experience of other Southern states proves thut It Is. The Color Feature "The question has a graver conipll-ration conipll-ration In Alabama and throughout the South than It has In any other part of the world. It la Inseparably connected with the color problem. The rapidly growing mill population Is entirely composed of white people. The Illiterate Illit-erate negro sends his child to sc hool; the Illiterate white sends bis to the cotton mill. In most of the Southern tales an educational test for voting Is either In force or Inevitable In the aea future. The white man. to whom the jest Is not applied, has not the stlmu-lu stlmu-lu that the negro hue to learn to read. This aepect of the question would lift It out of the region of purely r.incmn'o or business consideration to a plane of the wlilest public concern. "In Alabama the proportion of young children to grown workers Is between 6 and 7 per cent. In Augusta, (la., a count waa made In June. 1K00, through eight mills and f.r, children under 12 were found working. Statistics bearing bear-ing on the subject are hard to obtain, but that child labor la a factor In the Industrial situation appears evident from the fact that thirty mill presl-denta presl-denta appeared before the (leorgla legislature In opposition to a measure regulating such labor." |