"Lynn, Massachusetts."

"Did you-all git worried with the train? I only bin onto it onct, and it worried me for days!"

She tells me her simple annals with no question:

"My paw he married ag'in, and me stepmother peard like she didn't care for me; so one day I sez to paw, 'I'm goin' to work in the mills'—an' I lef home all alone and come here." After a little—"When I sayd good-by to my father peard like he didn't care neither. I'm all alone here. I bo'ds with that girl's mother."

I wore that day in the mill a blue-checked apron. So did Maggie, but mine was from Wanamaker's in New York, and had, I suppose, a certain style, for the child said:

"I suttenly dew think that yere's a awful pretty apron: where'd you git it?"

"Where I came from," I answered, and, I am sorry to say, it sounded brusque. For the little thing blushed, fearful lest she had been indiscreet....(Oh, I assure you the qualities of good breeding are there! Some of my factory and mill friends can teach the set in which I move lessons salutary!)

"I didn't mean jest 'xactly wherebouts," she murmurs; "I only meant it warn't from these parts."

* * * * *

During the afternoon the gay Jeannie returns and presents to me a tin box. It is filled with a black powder. "Want some?" Well, what is it? She greets my ignorance with shrieks of laughter. In a trice half a dozen girls have left their spooling and cluster around me.

"She ain't never seen it!" and the little creature fills her mouth with the powder which she keeps under her tongue. "It is snuff!"

They all take it, old and young, even the smallest children. Their mouths are brown with it; their teeth are black with it. They take it and smell it and carry it about under their tongues all day in a black wad, spitting it all over the floor. Others "dip," going about with the long sticks in their mouths. The air of the room is white with cotton, although the spool-room is perhaps the freest. These little particles are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs. Lung disease and pneumonia—consumption—are the constant, never-absent scourge of the mill village. The girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting and are adepts at it.

Over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind the next side is a child, not younger than eight, possibly, but so small that she has to stand on a box to reach her side. Only the very young girls show any trace of buoyancy; the older ones have accepted with more or less complaint the limitation of their horizons. They are drawn from the hill district with traditions no better than the loneliness, desertion and inexperience of the fever-stricken mountains back of them. They are illiterate, degraded; the mill has been their widest experience; and all their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl during the day and in the evenings the few moments before they go to bed in the mill-houses, where they either live at home with parents and brothers all working like themselves, or else they are fugitive lodgers in a boarding-house or a hotel, where their morals are in jeopardy constantly. As soon as a girl passes the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen, there is no hesitation in her reply when you ask her: "Do you like the mills?" Without exception the answer is, "I hate them."

Absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade, the time goes swiftly. Yet even the interest and excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from 12:45 to 6:45 seems interminable! Even when the whistle blows we are not all free—Excelsior is behindhand with her production, and those whom extra pay can beguile stay on. Maggie, my little teacher, walks with me toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine.

Neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did I take precaution to change my way of speaking—and not once had it been commented upon. To-day Maggie says to me:

"I reckon you-all is 'Piscopal?"

"Why?"

"Why, you-all talks 'Piscopal."

So much for a tribute to the culture of the church.

* * * * *

At Jones' supper is ready, spread on a bare board running the length of the room—a bare board supported by saw-horses; the seats are boards again, a little lower in height. They sag in the middle threateningly. One plate is piled high with fish—bones, skin and flesh all together in one odourous mass. Salt pork graces another platter and hominy another. I am alone in the supper room. The guests, landlord and landlady are all absent. Some one, as he rushes by me, gives me the reason for the desertion:

"They've all gone to see the fight; all the white fellers is after a nigger."

Through the window I can see the fleeing forms of the settlers—women, sunbonnets in hand, the men hatless. It appears that all the world has turned out to see what lawless excitement may be in store. The whirling dust and sand in the distance denote the group formed by the Negro and his pursuers. This, standing on the little porch of my lodging-house, I see and am glad to find that the chase is fruitless. The black man, tortured to distraction, dared at length to rebel, and from the moment that he showed spirit his life was not worth a farthing, but his legs were, and he got clear of Excelsior. The lodgers troop back. Molly, my landlady's niece, breathing and panting, disheveled, leads the procession and is voluble over the affair.

"They-all pester a po'r nigger's life out 'er him, ye'es, they dew so! Ef a nigger wants ter show his manners to me, why, I show mine to him," she said generously, "and ef he's a mannerly nigger, why, I ain't got nothin' ag'in him; no, sir, I suttenly ain't!"

It is difficult to conceive how broad and philanthropic, how generous and unusual this poor mill girl's standpoint is contrasted with the sentiment of the people with which she moves.

I slip into my seat at the table in the centre of the sagging board and find Molly beside me, the girl from Excelsior with the pretty hair on the other side. The host, Mr. Jones, honours the head of the table, and "grandmaw" waits upon us. Opposite are the three men operatives, flannel-shirted and dirty. The men are silent for the most part, and bend over their food, devouring the unpalatable stuff before them. I feel convinced that if they were not so terribly hungry they could not eat it. Jones discourses affably on the mill question, advising me to learn "speeding," as it pays better and is the only advanced work in the mill.

Molly, my elbow-companion, seems to take up the whole broad seat, she is so big and so pervading; and her close proximity—unwashed, heavy with perspiration as she is, is not conducive to appetite. She is full of news and chatter and becomes the leading spirit of the meal.

"I reckon you-all never did see anything like the fight to the mill to-day."

She arouses at once the interest of even the dull men opposite, who pause, in the applying of their knives and forks, to hear.

"Amanda Wilcox she dun tol' Ida Jacobs that she'd do her at noon, and Ida she sarst her back. It was all about a sport[5]—Bill James. He's been spo'tin' Ida Jacobs these three weeks, I reckon, and Amanda got crazy over it and 'clared she'd spile her game. And she tol' Ida Jacobs a lie about Bill—sayd he' been spo'tin' her down to the Park on Sunday.

[Footnote 5: A beau.]

"Well, sir, the whole spinnin'-room was out to see what they-all'd do at noon, and they jest resh'd for each other like's they was crazy; and one man he got between 'em and sayd, 'Now the gyrl what spits over my hand first can begin the fight.'

"They both them spit right, into each other's faces, they did so; and arter that yer couldn't get them apart. Ida Jacobs grabbed Amanda by the ha'r and Amanda hit her plump in the chest with her fist. They was suttenly like to kill each other ef the men hadn't just parted them; it took three men to part 'em."

Her story was much appreciated.

"Ida was dun fer, I can tell ye; she suttenly was. She can't git back to work fer days."

The spinning-room is the toughest room in the mill.

After supper the men went out on the porch with their pipes and we to the sitting-room, where Molly, the story-teller, seated herself in a comfortable chair, her feet outstretched before her. She made a lap, a generous lap, to which she tried to beguile the baby, Letty. Mrs. White had disappeared.

"You-all come here to me, Letty." She held out her large dirty hands to the blue-eyed waif. In its blue-checked apron, the remains of fish and ham around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering from face to face in search of the pale mother who had for a time left her, Letty stood for a moment motionless and on the verge of tears.

"You-all come to Molly and go By-O."

There was some magic in that word that at long past eight charmed the eighteen-months'-old baby. She toddled across the floor to the mill-girl, who lifted her tenderly into her ample lap. The big, awkward girl, scarcely more than a child herself, uncouth, untutored, suddenly gained a dignity and a grace maternal—not too much to say it, she had charm.

Letty leaned her head against Molly's breast and smiled contentedly, whilst the mill-girl rocked softly to and fro.

"Shall Molly sing By-O?"

She should. The little face, lifted, declared its request.

"Letty must sing, too," murmured the young girl. "Sing By-O! We'll all sing it together."

Letty covered her eyes with one hand-to feign sleep and sang her two words sweetly, "By-O! By-O!" and Molly joined her. Thus they rocked and hummed, a picture infinitely touching to see.

One of these two would soon be an unclaimed foundling when the unknown woman had faded out of existence. The other—who can say how to her maternity would come!

* * * * *

In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town—"the ketchin' kind"—that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[6]

[Footnote 6: There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of births, marriages or deaths in this State; it is less surprising that the mill village has none.]

In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ—luxuries: in these cases, objects of art. They are bought on the installment plan, and some of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in monthly payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is too busy to use the machine and too ignorant to play the organ.

Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy the comfortable seats, whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. I feel convinced that Jones thinks that Massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the social scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because, after being witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back steps, he said:

"Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; I'm goin' to fix up a wash-stand in that there loft." This is a triumph over the lax, uncleanly shiftlessness of the Southern settlement. Again:

"You-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it; 'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I met her at the North Pole—salla, pale, sickly."

I might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... doomed. But I listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from the kitchen and, unobserved, takes her place on a little low chair by the sewing machine behind Jones. Her baby rocks contentedly in Molly's arms.

Jones continues: "I worked in the mill fifteen years. I have done a little of all jobs, I reckon, and I ain't got no use for mill-work. If they'd pay me fifty cents a side to run the 'speeders' I'd go in fer an hour or two now and then. Why, I sell sewing machines and organs to the mill-hands all over the country. I make $60 a month, and I touch all my money," he said significantly. "It's the way to do. A man don't feel no dignity unless he does handle his own money, if it's ten cents or ten dollars." He then explains the corporation's methods of paying its slaves. Some of the hands never touch their money from month's end to month's end. Once in two weeks is pay-day. A woman has then worked 122 hours. The corporation furnishes her house. There is the rent to be paid; there are also the corporation stores from which she has been getting her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap stuff on sale may tempt her to purchase. There is a book of coupons issued by the mill owners which are as good as gold. It is good at the stores, good for the rent, and her time is served out in pay for this representative currency. This is of course not obligatory, but many of the operatives avail themselves or bind themselves by it. When the people are ill, Jones says, they are docked for wages. When, for indisposition or fatigue, they knock a day off, there is a man, hired especially for this purpose, who rides from house to house to find out what is the matter with them, to urge them to rise, and if they are not literally too sick to move, they are hounded out of their beds and back to their looms.

Jones himself, mark you, is emancipated! He has set himself free; but he is still a too-evident although a very innocent partisan of the corporation.



"I think," he says, "that the mill-hand is meaner to the corporation than the corporation is to the mill-hand."

"Why?"

"Why, they would strike for shorter hours and better pay."

Unconsciously with one word he condemns his own cause.

"What's the use of these hyar mill-hands tryin' to fight corporations? Why, Excelsior is the biggest mill under one roof in the world; its capital is over a million; it has 24,500 spindles. The men that run these mills have got all their stuff paid for; they've got piles of money. What do they care for a few penniless lot of strikers? They can shut down and not feel it. Why, these hyar people might just as well fight against a stone wall."

The wages of these people, remember, pay Jones for the organs upon which they cannot play and the machines which they cannot use. His home is a mill corporation house; he makes a neat sum by lodging the hands. He has fetched down from the hills Molly, his own niece, to work for him. He perforce will speak well. I do not blame him.

He is by all means the most respectable-looking member of the colony. He wears store clothes; he dresses neatly; he is shaven, brushed and washed.

"Don't you let the mill hands discourage you with lies about the mill. Any of 'em would be jealous of you-all." Then he warns, again forced to plead for another side: "You-all won't come out as you go in, I tell you! You're the picture of health. Why," he continues, a little later, "you ain't got no idea how light-minded the mill-girl is. Why, in the summer time she'll trolley four or five miles to a dance-hall they've got down to —— and dance there till four o'clock—come home just in time to get into the mills at 5:45." Which fact convinces me of nothing but that the women are still, despite their condition and their white slavery, human beings, and many of them are young human beings (Thank God, for it is a prophecy for their future!) not yet crushed to the dumb endurance of beasts.

Rather early I bid them all good-night and climb the attic stairs to my loft. There the three beds arrayed in soggy striped comforters greet me. Old boots and downtrodden shoes are thrown into the corners and the lines of clothing already describe fantastic shapes in the dark, suggesting pendant sinister figures. Windows are large, thank Heaven! In the mill district the air is heavy, singularly lifeless; the night is warm and stifling.

Close to an old trunk I sit down with a slip of paper on my knee and try to take a few notes. But no sooner have I begun to write than a step on the stair below announces another comer. Before annoyance can deepen too profoundly the big, awkward form of the landlady's niece slouches into sight. Sheepishly she comes across the room to me—sits down on the nearest bed. Molly's costume is typical: a dark cotton wrapper whose colours have become indistinct in the stains of machinery oil and perspiration. The mill girl boasts no coquetry of any kind around her neck and waist, but her headdress is a tribute to feminine vanity! Compactly screwed curl papers, dozens of them, accentuate the hard, unlovely lines of her face and brow. Her features are coarse, heavy and square, but her eyes are clear, frank and kind. She has an appealing, friendly expression; Molly is a distinctly whole-souled, nice creature. One elbow sinks in the bed and she cradles her crimped head in her large, dirty hand.

"My, ef I could write as fast as you-all I'd write some letters, I reckon. Ust ter write; like it good enough, tew; but I ain't wrote in months. I was thinkin' th' other day ef I didn't take out the pencile I'd dun forgit how to spell."

Without the window through which she gazes is seen the pale night sky and in the heavens hangs the thread of a moon. Its light is unavailing alongside of the artificial moon—an enormous electric light. This lifts its brilliant, dazzling circumference high in the centre of the mill street. I have but to move a trifle aside from the window coping's shelter to receive a blinding blaze. But Molly has been subtle enough to discover the natural beauty of the night. She sees, curiously enough, past this modern illumination: the young moon has charm for her. "Ain't it a pretty night?" she asks me. Its beauty has not much chance to enhance this room and the crude forms, but it has awakened something akin to sentiment in the breast of this young savage.

"I don't guess ever any one gets tired of hearing sweet music[7], does you-all?"

[Footnote 7: The Southern term for stringed instruments.]

"What is the nicest music you have ever heard, Molly?"

"Why, a gui-taar an' a mandolin. It's so sweet! I could sit for hours an' hyar 'em pick." Her curlpaper head wags in enthusiasm.

"Up to the hills, from whar I cum, I ust ter hyar 'em a serenadin' of some gyrl an' I ust ter set up in bed and lis'en tel it died out; it warn't for me, tho'!"

"Didn't they ever serenade you?"

"No, ma'am; I don't pay no 'tention to spo'tin'."

Without, the moon's slender thread holds in a silvery circle the half-defined misty ball that shall soon be full moon. Thank heavens I shall not see this golden globe form, wane, decline in this town, forgotten of gods and men! But the woman at my side must see it mark its seasons; she is inscrutably part of the colony devoted to unending toil! Here all she has brought of strong youth shall fade and perish; womanly sentiment be crushed; die out in sterility; or worse, coarsen to the animal like to those whose companion she is forced to be.

"I live to the Rockies, an' Uncle Tom he come up after me and carried me down hyar. My auntie died two weeks ago in the livin'-room; she had catchin' pneumonia. I tuk care of her all through her sickness, did every mite for her, and there was bo'ders, tew—I guess half a dozen of 'em—and I cooked and washed and everything for 'em all. When she died I went to work in the mill. Say, I reckon you-all didn't see my new hat?" It was fetched, done up with care in paper. She displayed it, a white straw round hat, covered with roses. At praise of it and admiration the girl flushed with pleasure.

"My, you dew like it? Why, I didn't think it pretty, much. Uncle Tom dun buy it for me."

She gives all her wages to Uncle Tom, who in turn brings her from time to time such stimulus to labour as some pretty feminine thing like this. This shall crown Molly's hair freed from the crimpers when the one day of the week, Sunday, comes! Not from Sunday till Sunday again are those hair crimpers unloosed.

Despite Uncle Tom's opposition to mill work for women, despite his cognizance of the unhealthfulness of the mills, he knew a thing or two when he put his strapping innocent niece to work thirteen hours a day and pocketed himself the spoils.

"I can't go to bade awful early, because I don't sleep ef I do; I'm too tired to sleep. When I feel real sick I tries to stay home a day, and then the overseer he rides around and worries me to git up. I declare ef I wouldn't near as soon git up as to be roused up. They don't give you no peace, rousing you out of bed when you can scarcely stand. I suttenly dew feel bade to-night; I suttenly can't scarcely get to bed!"

Here into our discourse, mounting the stairs, comes the pale mother and her little child. This ghost of a woman, wedding-ringless, who called herself Mrs. White, could scarcely crawl to her bed. She was whiter than the moon and as slender. Molly's bed is close to mine. The night toilet of this girl consisted of her divesting herself of her shoes, stockings and her cotton wrapper, then in all the other garments she wore during the day she turned herself into bed, nightgownless, unwashed.

Mrs. White undressed her child, giving it very good care. It was a tiny creature, small-boned and meager. Every time I looked over at it it smiled appealingly, touchingly. Finally when she went downstairs to the pump to get a drink of water for it, I went over and in her absence stroked the little hand and arm: such a small hand and such an infinitesimal arm! Unused to attention and the touch, but not in the least frightened, Letty extended her miniature member and looked up at me in marvel. Mrs. White on her return made herself ready for the night. She said in her frail voice: "Letty's a powerful hand for vegetubbles, and she eats everything."

Memory of the ham and the putrid fish I had seen this eighteen-months-old child devour not an hour ago came to my mind.

Mrs. White let down her hair—a nonchalance that Molly had not been guilty of. This woman's hair was no more than a wisp. It stood out thin, wiry, almost invisible in the semilight. This was the extent of her toilet. She slipped out of her shoes, but she did not even take off her dress. Then she turned in by her child. She was very ill; it was plain to be seen. Death was fast upon this woman's track; it should clutch her inevitably within the next few weeks at most, if that emaciated body had resistance for so long. Her languor was slow and indicative, her gray, ashen face like death itself.

"Lie still, Letty," she whispers to the baby; "don't touch mother—she can't stand it to-night."

My mattress was straw and billowy, the bed sheetless, and under the weight of the cotton comforter I tried to compose myself. There were five of us in the little loft. My bedfellow was peaceful and lay still, too tired to do anything else. In front of me was the open window, through which shone the electric light, blatant and insistent; behind this, the clock of Excelsior—brightly lit and incandescent—glared in upon us, giant hands going round, seeming to threaten the hour of dawn and frightening sleep and mocking, bugbearing the short hours which the working-woman might claim for repose.

It was well on to nine o 'clock and the mills were working overtime. Molly turned restlessly on her bed and murmured, "I suttenly dew feel bad to-night." A little later I heard her say over to herself: "My, I forgot to say my prayers." She was the sole member of the loft to whom sleep came; it came to her soon. I lay sleepless, watching the clock of Excelsior. The ladder staircase openly led to the kitchen: there was no door, no privacy possible to our quarters, and the house was full of men.

A little later Letty cries: "A drink, a drink!" and the tone of the mother, who replies, is full of patience, but fuller still of suffering.

"Hush, Letty, hush! Mother's too sick to get it." But the child continues to fret and plead. Finally with a groan Mrs. White stretches out her hand and gets the tin mug of water, of that vile and dirty water which has brought death to so many in the mill village. The child drinks it greedily. I can hear it suck the fluid. Then the woman herself staggers to her feet, rises with dreadful illness upon her, and all through the hot stuffy night in the close air of the loft growing momentarily more fetid, unwholesome, intolerable—she rises to be violently sick over and over again. It seems an indefinite number of times to one who lies awake listening, and must seem unceasing to the poor wretch who returns to her bed only to rise again.

She groans and suffers and bites her exclamations short. Twice she goes to the window and by the light of the electric lamp pours laudanum into a glass and takes it to still her pain and her need.

The odours become so nauseous that I am fain to cover my face and head. The child fed on salt ham and pork is restless and thirsty all night and begs for water at short intervals. At last the demand is too much for the poor agonized mother—she takes refuge in silencing unworthy, and to which one feels her gentleness must be forced. "Hark! The cat will get you, Letty! See that cat?" And the feline horror in nameless form, evoked in an awe-inspiring whisper, controls the little creature, who murmurs, sobs and subsides.

What spirit deeper than her character has hitherto displayed stirs the mill-girl in the bed next to me? Possibly the tragedy in the other bed; possibly the tragedy of her own youth. At all events, whatever burden is on her, her cross is heavy! She murmurs in her dreams, in a voice more mature, more serious than any tone of hers has indicated:

"Oh, my God!"

It is a strange cry—call—appeal. It rings solemn to me as I lie and watch and pity. Hours of night which should be to the labourer peaceful, full of repose after the day, drag along from nine o'clock, when we went to bed, till three. At three Mrs. White falls into a doze. I envy her. Over me the vermin have run riot; I have killed them on my neck and my arms. When it seemed that flesh and blood must succumb, and sleep, through sheer pity, take hold of us, a stirring begins in the kitchen below which in its proximity seems a part of the very room we occupy. The landlady, Mrs. Jones, has arisen; she is making her fire. At a quarter to four Mrs. Jones begins her frying; at four a deep, blue, ugly smoke has ascended the stairway to us. This smoke is thick with odours—the odour of bad grease and bad meat. Its cloud conceals the beds from me and I can scarcely pierce its curtain to look through the window. It settles down over the beds like a creature; it insinuates itself into the clothes that hang upon the wall. So permeating is it that the odour of fried food clings to everything I wear and haunts me all day. I can hear the sputtering of the saucepan and the fall and flap of the pieces of meat as she drops them in to fry. I know what they are, for I have seen them the night before—great crimson bits of flesh torn to pieces and arranged in rows by the fingers of a ragged Negro as he crouched by the kitchen table.

This preparation continues for an hour: it takes an abnormally long time to cook abnormally bad food! Long before five the clock of Excelsior rings and the cry of the mill is heard waking whomsoever might be lucky enough to be asleep. Mrs. Jones calls Molly. "Molly!" The girl murmurs and turns. "Come, you-all git up; you take so powerful long to dress yo'self!" Long to dress! It is difficult to see how that would be possible. She rises reluctantly, yawning, sighing; lifts her scarcely rested body, puts on her stockings and her shoes and the dirty wrapper. Her hair is untouched, her face unwashed, but she is ready for the day! Mrs. White has actually fallen asleep, the small roll, her baby, curled up close to her back.

Molly's summons is mine as well. I am a mill-hand with her. I rise and repeat my ablutions of the evening before. Unhooking the tin basin, possessing myself of a bit of soap on the kitchen stairs, I wash my face and hands. Although the water is dipped from the pail on which a scum has formed, still it is so much more cool, refreshing and stimulating than anything that has come in contact with me for hours that it is a positive pleasure.

* * * * *

THE MILL

By this time the morning has found us all, and unlovely it seems as regarded from this shanty environment. At 4:50 Excelsior has shrieked every settler awake. At half-past five we have breakfasted and I pass out of the house, one of the half-dozen who seek the mill from our doors.

We fall in with the slowly moving, straggling file, receiving additions from each tenement as we pass.

Beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown earth-coloured clothes. He is so thin that his bones threaten to pierce his vestments. He has a slender visage of the frailness I have learned to know and distinguish: it represents the pure American type of people known as "poor white trash," and with whose blood has been scarcely any admixture of foreign element. A painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful: it is the face of a martyr. His hat of brown felt slouches over bright red hair; one cuffless hand, lank and long, hangs down inert, the other sleeve falls loose; he is one-armed. His attitude and gait express his defrauded existence. Cotton clings to his clothes; his shoes, nearly falling off his feet, are red with clay stains. I greet him; he is shy and surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step with me. He is "from the hills," an orphan, perfectly friendless. He boards with a lot of men; evidently their companionship has not been any solace to him, for, as he is alone this day, I see him always alone.

He works from 5:45 to 6:45, with three-quarters of an hour at noon, and has his Saturday afternoons and his Sundays free. He is destitute of the quality we call joy and has never known comfort. He makes fifty cents a day; he has no education, no way of getting an education; he is almost a man, crippled and condemned. At my exclamation when he tells me the sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint likeness to a smile comes about his thin lips: "It keeps me in existence!" he says in a slow drawl. He used just those words.

At the different doors of the mill we part. He is not unconscious of my fellowship with him, that I feel and know. A kindling light has come across his face. "Good luck to you!" I bid him, and he lifts his head and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, "I hope you-all will have good luck, tew."

As we come into the spooling-room from the hot air without the mill seems cold. I go over to a green box destined for the refuse of the floors and sit down, waiting for work. On this day I am to have my own "side"—I am a full-fledged spooler. Excelsior has gotten us all out of our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a chance to begin our money-making piece-work job at once! "Thar ain't likely to be no yarn for an hour to-day," Maggie tells me. She is no less dirty than yesterday, or less smelly, but also she is no less kind.

"I reckon you-all are goin' to make a remarkable spooler," she cheers me on. "You'll get tired out at first, but then I gets tired, tew, right along, only it ain't the same kind—it's not so sharp." Her distinction is clever.

Across the room at one of the "drawing-in frames" I see the figure of an unusally pretty girl with curly dark hair. She bends to her job in front of the frame she runs; it has the effect of tapestry, of that work with which women of another—oh, of quite another class—amuse their leisure, with which they kill their time. "Drawing-in,"[8] although a sitting job, is considered to be a back-breaker. The girls are ambitious at this work; they make good wages. They sit close to their frames, bent over, for twelve hours out of the day. This girl whom I see across the floor of the Excelsior is an object to rest the eyes upon; she is a beauty. There is not much beauty of any kind or description in sight. Maggie has noticed her esthetic effect. "You-all seen that girl; she's suttenly prob'ly am peart."

[Footnote 8: A good drawer-in makes $1.25 a day.]

She is a new hand from a distance. This is her first day. What miserable chance has brought her here? If she stays the mill will claim her body and soul. The overseer has marked her out; he hovers in the part of the room where she works. She has colour and her difference to her pale companions is marked. Excelsior will not leave those roses unwithered. I can foretell the change as yellow unhealthfulness creeps upon her cheeks and the red forever goes. There are no red cheeks here, not one. She has chosen a sitting-down job thinking it easier. I saw her lean back, put her hands around her waist and rest, or try to, after she has bent four hours over her close task. I go over to her.

"They say it's awful hard on the eyes, but they tell me, too, that I'll be a remarkable fine hand."

I saw her apply for work, and saw, too, the man's face as he looked at her when she asked: "Got any work?"

"We've got plenty of work for a good-looking woman like you," he said with significance, and took pains to place her within his sight.

The yarn has come in, and I return to my part of the mill; Maggie flies to her spools and leaves me to seek my distant place far away from her. I set my work in order; whilst my back is turned some girl possesses herself of my hand-harness. Mine was a new one, and the one she leaves for me is broken. This delays, naturally, and the overseer, after proving to his satisfaction that I am hampered, gets me a new one and I set to work.

Many of the older hands come without breakfast, and a little later tin pails or paper parcels appear. These operatives crouch down in a Turkish fashion at the machines' sides and take a hasty mouthful of their unwholesome, unpleasant-looking food, eating with their fingers more like animals than human beings. By eight the full steam power is on, to judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools. Not one of the women near me but is degrading to look upon and odourous to approach. These creatures, ill clad, with matted, frowsy hair and hands that look as though they had never, never been washed, smell like the byre. As for the children, I must pass them by in this recital. The tiny, tiny children! The girls are profane, contentious, foul-mouthed. There is much partisanship and cliqueism; you can tell it by the scowls and the low, insulting words as an enemy passes. To protect the hair from the flying pieces of cotton the more particular women, and oftentimes children as well, wear felt hats pulled down well over the eyes. The cotton, indeed, thistledown-like, flies without cessation through the air—spins off from the spools; it rises and floats, falling on the garments and in the hair, entering the nostrils and throat and lungs. I repeat, the expectoration, the coughing and the throat-cleaning is constant. Over there two girls have taken advantage of a wait for yarn to go to sleep on the floor; their heads are pillowed on each others' shoulders; they rest against a cotton bale. Maggie wanders over to me to see "how you-all is gettin' on." "Tired?" "Well, I reckon I am. Thank God we get out in a little while now."

* * * * *

One afternoon I went up to the loft to rest a few moments before going to the mill. Mrs. White was sitting on her bed, a slender figure in the blue-checked wrapper she always wore. Her head was close to the window, her silhouette in the light, pale and slender. "I wa'n't sick when I come hyar, but them mills! They's suttinly tew hyard on a woman! Weave-room killed me, I guess. I couldn't hyar at all when I come out and scarcely could stan' on ma feet when I got home. Tew tyred to eat, tew; and the water hyar is regularly pisen; hev you-all seen it? It's all colours. Doctor done come to see me; ain't helpin' me any; 'pears like he-all ain't goin' to come no mo'!"

"If you have a husband, why don't you go to him and let him care for you?"

She was silent, turning her wedding-ringless hand over and over on her lap: the flies came buzzing in around us, and in the near distance Excelsior buzzed, the loudest, most insistent creature on this part of the earth.

"Seems like a woman ought to help a man—some," she murmured. Downstairs Mrs. Jones sums her up in a few words.

"She-all suttinly ain't no 'Mrs' in the world! Calls herself 'White.'" (The intonation is not to be mistaken.) "Pore thing's dyin'—knows it, tew! Come hyar to die, I reckon. She'll die right up thar in that baed, tew. Doctor don't come no mo'. Know she cayn't pay him nothin'. You-all come hyar to grandmaw, Letty!"

The child around whom the threads of existence are weaving fabric more intricate than any woof or warp of the great mills goes confidingly to the old woman, who lifts her tenderly into her arms. With every word she speaks this aged creature draws her own picture. To these types no pen save Tolstoi's could do justice. Mine can do no more than display them by faithfully transcribing their simple dialect-speech.

"I am sixty-four years old, an' played out. Worked too hyard. Worked every day since I was a child, and when I wasn't workin' had the fevar. Come from the hills las' month. When his wife dyde, the son he come an' fetched me cross the river to help him."

How has she lived so long and so well, with life "so hyard on her"?

"I loved my husban', yes, ma'am, I regularly loved him; reckon no woman didn't ever love a man mo', and he loved me, tew, jest ez much. Seems tho' God couldn't bayr to see us-all so happy—couldn't las'; he dyde."

Mrs. Jones' figure is a case of bones covered with a brown substance—you could scarcely call it skin; a weather-beaten, tanned hide; nothing more. This human statue, ever responsive to the eternal moulding, year after year has been worked upon by the titan instrument, Labour: struggle, disease, want. But this hill woman has known love. It has transfigured her, illumined her. This poor deformed body is a torch only for an immortal flame. I know now why it seems good to be near her, why her eyes are inspired.... I rise to leave her and she comes forward to me, puts out her hand first, then puts both thin, old arms about me and kisses me.

In speaking of the settlement, it borders on the humourous to use the word sanitation. In the mill district, as far as my observation reached, there is none. Refuse not too vile for the public eye is thrown into the middle of the streets in front of the houses. The general drainage is performed by emptying pans and basins and receptacles into the backyards, so that as one stands at the back steps of one's own door one breathes and respires the filth of half a dozen shanties. Decaying vegetables, rags, dirt of all kinds are the flowers of these people, the decorations of their miserable garden patches. To walk through Granton (which the prospectus tells us is well drained) is to evoke nausea; to inhabit Granton is an ordeal which even necessity cannot rob of its severity.

These settlers, habitants of dwellings built by finance solely for the purpose of renting, are celebrated for their immorals—"a rough, lying, bad lot." "Oh, the mill-hands!" ... Sufficient, expressive designation. Nevertheless, these people, simple, direct and innocent, display qualities that we have been taught are enviable—a lack of curiosity, for the most part, in the affairs of others, a warm Southern courtesy, a human kindliness. I found these people degraded because of their habits and not of their tendencies, which statement I can justify; whatever may be their natural instincts, born, nurtured in their unlovely environment, they have no choice but to fall into the usages of poverty and degradation. They have seen nothing with which to compare their existences; they have no time, no means to be clean, and no stimulus to be decent.

A job at Granton was no more difficult to secure than was "spoolin'" at the other mill. I applied one Saturday noon, when Granton was silent and the operatives within their doors asleep, for the most part, leaving the village as deserted as it is on a workday. A like desolation pervades the atmosphere on holiday and day of toil. I was so lucky as to meet a shirt-sleeved overseer in the doorway. Preceding him were two ill-clad, pale children of nine and twelve, armed with a long, mop-like broom with which their task was to sweep the cotton from the floors—cotton that resettled eternally as soon as it was brushed away. The superintendent regarded me curiously, I thought penetratingly, and for the first time in my experience I feared detection. My dread was enhanced by the loneliness, the lawlessness of the place, the risk and boldness of my venture.

By this I was most thoroughly a mill-girl in appearance, at least; my clothes were white with cotton, my hair far from tidy; fatigue and listlessness unassumed were in my attitude. I had not heard the Southern dialect for so long not to be able to fall into it with little effort. I told him I had been a "spooler" and did not like it—"wanted to spin." He listened silently, regarding me with interest and with what I trembled to fear was disbelief. I desperately pushed back my sunbonnet and in Southern drawl begged for work.

"Spinnin'?" he asked. "What do you want to spin for?"

He was a Yankee, his accent sharp and keen. How clean and decent and capable he appeared, the dark mill back of him; shantytown, vile, dirty, downtrodden, beside him!

I told him that I was tired of spooling and knew I could make more by something else.

He thrust his hands into his pockets. "To-night is Saturday; alone here?"

"Yes."

"Where you going to stay in Granton?"

"I don't know yet."

"Don't learn spinnin'," he said decidedly. "I am head of the speedin'-room. I'll give you a job in my room on Monday morning."

My relief was immense. His subsequent questions I parried, thanked him, and withdrew to keep secret from Excelsior that I had deserted for Granton.

Although these mills are within three hundred feet of each other, the villagers do not associate. The workings of Granton are unknown to Excelsior and vice versa.

The speeding-room in Granton is second only in noise to the weave-room. Conversation must be entrancing and vital to be pursued here! The speeder has under her care as many machines as her skill can control.

My teacher, Bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six speeders on a side, her work being regulated by a crank that marked the vibrations. To the lay mind the terms of the speeding-room can mean nothing. This girl made from $1.30 to $1.50 a day. She controlled in all 704 speeders; these she had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear with her own hands; to oil the steel, even to bend and clean under the lower shelf and come into contact with the most dangerous parts of the mechanism. The girl at the speeder next to me had just had her hand mashed to a jelly. The speeder watches her ropers run out; these stand at the top and back of the line. The ropers are refilled and their ends attached to the flying speeders by a quick motion. The yarn from the ropers is wound off on to the speeders. When the speeders are full of yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls themselves. Speeding is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling and cleaning is only fit for a man to do.

The girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered the factory at eight. She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and capable, and, as far as I could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly respectable.

There are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life. On tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather contrive to make ourselves heard. She has a sweet, gentle face; she is courtesy and kindness itself.

"What do you think about all day?"

"Why, I couldn't even begin to tell all my thoughts."

"Tell me some."

"Why, I think about books, I reckon. Do you-all like readin'?"

"Yes."

"Ain't nuthin' I like so good when I ain't tyrd."

"Are you often tired?" And this question surprises her. She looks up at me and smiles. "Why, I'm always tyrd! I read novels for the most part; like to read love stories and about fo'ran travel."

(For one short moment please consider: This hemmed-in life, this limited existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day, vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side. Before her the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year after year. It is not an experience to this woman who works beside me so patiently; it is her life. The forms she sees are warped and scarred; the intellects with which she comes in contact are dulled and undeveloped. All they know is toil, all they know of gain is a fluctuation in a wage that ranges from cents to a dollar and cents again, never touching a two-dollar mark. The children who, barefooted, filthy, brush past her, sweeping the cotton from the infected floors, these are the only forms of childhood she has ever seen. The dirty women around her, low-browed, sensual, are the forms of womanhood that she knows; and the men? If she does not feed the passion of the overseer, she may find some mill-hand who will contract a "mill marriage" with this daughter of the loom, a marriage little binding to him and which will give her children to give in time to the mill. This is the realism of her love story: She reads books that you, too, may have read; she dares to dream of scenes, to picture them—scenes that you have sought and wearied of. A tithe of our satiety would mean her banquet, her salvation!... Her happiness? That question who can answer for her or for you?)

She continues: "I'm very fond of fo'ran travel, only I ain't never had much occasion for it."

This pathos and humour keep me silent. A few ropers have run out; she rises. I rise, too, to replace, to attach, and set the exhausted line taut and complete again.

Ten years! Ten years! All her girlhood and youth has been given to keeping ropers supplied with fresh yarn and speeders a-whirling. During this travail she has kept a serenity of expression, a depth of sweetness at which I marvel. Her voice is peculiarly soft and, coupled with the dialect drawl, is pleasant to hear.

"I hate the mills!" she says simply.

"What would you be if you could choose?" I venture to ask. She has no hesitation in answering.

"I'd love to be a trained nurse." Then, turn about is fair play in her mind, I suppose, for she asks:

"What would you-all be?"

And ashamed not to well repay her truthfulness I frankly respond: "I'd like to write a book."

"I dee-clare." She stares at me. "Why, you-all is ambitious. Did you ever write anything?"

"A letter or two."

She is interested and kindles, leaning forward. "I suttenly ain't so high in my ambitions," she says appreciatively. "Wish you'd write a love story for me to read," and she ponders over the idea, her eyes on my snowy flying speeders.

"Look a-hyar, got any of your scrappin's on writin' hyar? Ef you don't mind anybody's messin' with your things, bring your scrappin's to me an' I'll soon tell you ef you can write a book er not," she whispered to me encouragingly, confidentially, a whisper reaching farther in the mills than a loud sound.

I thanked her and said: "Do you think that you'd know?"

"Well, I guess I would!" she said confidently. "I ain't read all my life sense I was eight years old not to know good writin' from bad. Can you-all sing?"

"No."

"Play sweet music?"

"No."

"I jest love it." She enthuses. "Every Saturday afternoon I take of a music teacher on the gee-tar. It costs me a quarter."

I could see the scene: a shanty room, the tall, awkward figure bending over her instrument; the type that the teacher made, the ambition, the eagerness—all of which qualities we are so willing to deny to the slaves of toil.

"They ain't much flowers here in Granton," she said again. "'Tain't no use to try to have even a few geraneums; it's so dry; ain't no yards nor gardens, nuther."

Musing on this desolation as she walks up and down the line, she says: "I dew love flowers, don't you?"

* * * * *

Over and over again I am asked by those whose wish I suppose is to prove to themselves and their consciences that the working-girl is not so actively wretched, her outcry is not so audible that we are forced to respond:

"The working people are happy? The factory girls are happy, are they not? Don't you find them so?"

Is it a satisfaction to the leisure class, to the capitalist and employer, to feel that a woman poorly housed, ill-fed, in imminent moral danger, every temptation rampant over barriers down, overworked, overstrained by labour varying from ten to thirteen hours a day, by all-night labour, and destruction of body and soul, is happy?

Do you wish her to be so? Is the existence ideal?

I can speak only for the shoe manufacturing girl of Lynn and for the Southern mill-hand.

I thank Heaven that I can say truthfully, that of all who came under my observation, not one who was of age to reflect was happy. I repeat, the working-woman is brave and courageous, but the most sane and hopeful indication for the future of the factory girl and the mill-hand is that she rebels, dreams of something better, and will in the fullness of time stretch toward it. They have no time to think, even if they knew how. All that remains for them in the few miserable hours of relief from labour and confinement and noise is to seek what pastime they may find under their hand. We have never realized, they have never known, that their great need—given the work that is wrung from them and the degradation in which they are forced to live—is a craving for amusement and relaxation. Amusements for this class are not provided; they can laugh, they rarely do. The thing that they seek—let me repeat: I cannot repeat it too often—in the minimum of time that remains to them, is distraction. They do not want to read; they do not want to study; they are too tired to concentrate. How can you expect it? I heard a manufacturer say: "We gave our mill-hands everything that we could to elevate them—a natatorium, a reading library—and these halls fell into disuse." I ask him now, through these pages, the questions which I did not put to him then as I listened in silence to his complaint. He said he thought too much was done for the mill-hands. What time would he suggest that they should spend in the reading-room, even if they have learned to read? They rise at four; at a quarter before six they are at work. The day in winter is not born when they start their tasks; the night has fallen long before they cease. In summer they are worked long into their evenings. They tell me that they are too tired to eat; that all they want to do is to turn their aching bones on to their miserable mattresses and sleep until they are cried and shrieked awake by the mill summons. Therefore they solve their own questions. Nothing is provided for them that they can use, and they turn to the only thing that is within their reach—animal enjoyment, human intercourse and companionship. They are animals, as are their betters, and with it, let us believe, more excuse.

The mill marriage is a farce, and yet they choose to call their unions now and again a marriage. Many a woman has been a wife several times in the same town, in the same house. The bond-tying is a form, and, of course, mostly ignored. The settlements swarm with illegitimate children. Next to me work two young girls, both under seventeen, both ringless and with child.

* * * * *

Let me picture the Foster household, where I used to call Saturday evenings.

Mrs. Foster herself, dirty, slipshod, a frowzy mass, hugs her fireside. Although the day is warm, she kindled a fire to stimulate the thin, poor blood exhausted by disease and fevers. Two flatirons lie in a dirty heap on the floor. As usual, the room is a nest of filth and untidiness.

Mrs. Foster is half paralyzed, but her tongue is free. She talks fluently in her soft Southern drawl, more Negro than white as to speech and tone. Up to her sidles a dirty, pretty little boy of four.

"This yere is too little to go to the mill, but he's wild to go; yes, ser, he is so. Las' night he come to me en say, 'Auntie, you-all wake me up at fo' 'clock sure; I got ter go ter the mill.'"

Here the little blond child, whose mouth is set on a pewter spoon dripping over with hominy, grins appreciatively. He throws back his white and delicate little face, and his aunt, drawing him close to her, caresses him and continues: "Yes, ma'am, to-day he dun wake up after they-all had gone and he sayd, 'My goodness, I dun oversleep mase'f!' He sha'n't go to the mill," she frowned, "not ef we can help it. Why, I don't never let him outen my sight; 'fraid lest those awful mill children would git at him."

Thus she sheltered him with what care she knew—care that unfortunately could not go far enough back to protect him! His mother came in at the noon hour, as we sat there rocking and chatting. She was a straight, slender creature, not without grace in her shirt-waist and her low-pulled felt hat that shadowed her sullen face. She was very young, not more than twenty-two, and her history indicative and tragic. With a word only and a nod she passes us; she has now too many vital things and incidents in her own career to be curious regarding a strange mill-hand. She goes with her comrade—and cousin—Mamie, into the kitchen to devour in as short a time as possible the noon dinner, served by the grandmother: cabbage and hominy. "They don't have time 'nough to eat," the aunt says; "no sooner then they-all come in and bolt their dinner then it is time to go back." Her child has followed her. Minnie was married at thirteen; in less than a year she was a grass widow. "My goodness, there's lots of grass widows!" my frowsled hostess nods. "Why, in one weave-room hyar there ain't a gyrl but what's left by her husband. One day a new gyrl come for to run a loom and they yells out at her, 'Is you-all a grass widow? Yer can't come in hyar ef you ain't.'"

But it was after her grass widowhood that Minnie's tragedy began. The mill was her ruin. So much grace and good looks could not go, cannot go, does not go unchallenged by the attentions of the men who are put there to run these women's work. The overseer was father of her child, and when she tried to force from him recognition and aid he threw over his position and left Columbia and this behind him. This, one instance under my own eyes observed. There are many.

"Mamie works all night" (she spoke of the other girl)—"makes more money. My, but she hates the mills! Says she ain't ever known a restful minute sence she left the hills."

My hostess has drawn the same conclusion from my Northern appearance that the Joneses drew.

"You-all must eat good where you come from! you look so healthy.' Do you-all know the Banks girl over to Calcutta?"

"No."

"They give her nine months." (Calcutta is the roughest settlement round here.) "Why, that gyrl wars her hair cut short, and she shoots and cuts like a man. She drew her knife on a man last week—cut his face all up and into his side through his lung. Tried to pass as she was his wife, but when they had her up, ma'am, they proved she had been three men's wives and he four gyrl's husbands. He liked to died of the cut. They've given her nine months, but he ain't the only man that bears her marks. Over to Calcutta it's the knife and the gun at a wink. This yere was an awful pretty gyrl. My Min seed her peekin' out from behind the loom in the weave-room, thought she was a boy, and said: 'Who's that yere pretty boy peekin' at me?' And that gyrl told Min that she couldn't help knife the men, they all worried on her so! 'Won't never leave me alone; I jest have to draw on 'em; there ain't no other way.'"...

For the annals of morality and decency do not take up this faithful account and picture the cotton-mill village. You will not find it in these scenes drawn from the life as it is at this hour, as it is portrayed by the words that the very people themselves will pour into your ears. Under the walls of Calcutta Negroes are engaged in laying prospective flower beds, so that the thirteen-hour workers may look out from time to time and see the forms of flowers. On the other side rise some twenty shanties. These houses of Calcutta village are very small, built from the roughest unpainted boards. Here it is, in this little settlement, that the knife comes flashing out at a word—that the women shoot as well as men, and perhaps more quickly.

* * * * *

"Richmond aint so bad as the other!" I can hear Mrs. Foster drawl out this recommendation to us. "They ain't so much chills here. We dun move up from town first; had to—too high rents for we-all; now we dun stay hyar. Why, some of the gyrls and boys works to Granton and bo'ds hyar; seems like it's mo' healthy."

Moving, ambulant population! tramping from hill to hill, from sand-heap to sand-heap to escape the slow or quick death, to prolong the toiling, bitter existence—pilgrims of eternal hope; born in the belief, in the sane and wholesome creed that, no matter what the horror is, no matter what the burden's weight must be, one must live! It takes a great deal to wake in these inexpressive, indifferent faces illumination of interest. At what should they rejoice?

I have made the destitution of beauty clear. I believe there is an absolute lack of every form or sight that might inspire or cause a soul to awake. There is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from labour. There should be a complete readjustment of this system. I have been interested in reading in the New York Sun of April 20th of the visit of the bishops to the model factories in Ohio. I am constrained to wish that bishops and clergy and philanthropists and millionaires and capitalists might visit in bodies and separately the mills of South Carolina and their tenement population. It is difficult to know just what the ideas are of the people who have constructed these dwellings. They tell us in this same prospectus, which I have read with interest after my personal experience, that these villages are "picturesque." This is the only reference I find to the people and their conditions. I have seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these places without prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the Southern country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's existence. The ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to destruction before the scales swing even.



* * * * *



THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS



* * * * *



CHAPTER IX

THE CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS

In the week before I left for the South I dined in —— with a very charming woman and her husband. Before a table exquisite in its appointments, laden with the best the market could offer and good taste display, sat the mistress, a graceful, intelligent young woman, full of philanthropic, charitable interests, and one whom I know to be devoted to the care and benefiting of little children in her city. During the meal I said to her casually:

"Do you know that in your mills in South Carolina to-night, as we sit here, little children are working at the looms and frames—little children, some of them not more than six years old?"

She said, in astonishment, "I don't know it; and I can't believe it."

I told her I should soon see just how true the reports were, and when I returned to New York I would tell her the facts. She is not alone in her ignorance. Not one person, man or woman, to whom I told the facts of the cases I observed "dreamed that children worked in any mills in the United States!" After my experience amongst the working class, I am safe in saying that I consider their grievances to be the outcome of the ignorance and greed of the manufacturer abetted, aided and made possible by the ignorance and poverty of the labourer.

There is nothing more conscience-silencing than to accuse the writers of the different articles on child-labour of sentimentality. The comfort in which we live makes it easy to eliminate thoughts that torture us to action in the cause of others. I will be delighted to meet an accusation of sentimentality and exaggeration by any man or woman who has gone to a Southern mill as an operative and worked side by side with the children, lived with them in their homes. It is defamation to use the word "home" in connection with the unwholesome shanty in the pest-ridden district where the remnant of the children's lives not lived in the mill is passed. This handful of unpainted huts, raised on stilts from the soil, fever-ridden and malarious; this blank, ugly line of sun-blistered shanties, along a road, yellow-sand deep, is a mill village. The word village has a cheerful sound. It summons a country scene, with the charms of home, however simple and unpretentious. There is nothing to charm or please in the villages I have already, in these pages, drawn for you to see and which with veritable sick reluctance I summon again before your eyes. Every house is like unto its neighbour—a shelter put up rapidly and filled to the best advantage.

There is not a garden within miles, not a flower, scarcely a tree. Arid, desolate, beautyless, the pale sand of the State of South Carolina nurtures as best it can a stray tree or shrub—no more. At the foot of the shanties' black line rises the cotton mill. New, enormous, sanitary (!!). Its capital runs into millions; its prospectuses are pompous; its pay-roll mysterious. You will not be able to say how many of the fifteen hundred odd hands at work in this mill are adults, how many children. In the State of South Carolina there are statistics of neither births, marriages nor deaths. What can you expect of a mill village!

At 5:45 we have breakfasted—the twelve of us who live in one small shanty, where we have slept, all five of us in one room, men to the right of the kitchen, women and children on the left. To leave the pestilence of foul air, the stench of that dwelling, is blessed, even if the stroke that summons is the mill whistle.

As we troop to work in the dawn, we leave behind us the desert-like town; all day it drowses, haunted by a few figures of old age and infirmity—but the mill is alive! We have given up, in order to satisfy its appetite, all manner of flesh and blood, and the gentlest morsel between its merciless jaws is the little child.

So long as I am part of its food and triumph I will study the mill.

Leaving the line of flashing, whirling spools, I lean against the green box full of cotton refuse and regard the giant room.

It is a wonderful sight. The mill itself, a model of careful, well-considered building, has every facility for the best and most advantageous manufacture of textiles. The fine frames of the intricate "warping," the well-placed frames of the "drawing-in" all along the window sides of the rooms; then lines upon lines of spool frames. Great piles of stuff lie here and there in the room. It is early—"all the yarn ain't come yet." Two children whose work has not been apportioned lie asleep against a cotton bale. The terrible noise, the grinding, whirling, pounding, the gigantic burr renders other senses keen. By my side works a little girl of eight. Her brutal face, already bespeaking knowledge of things childhood should ignore, is surrounded by a forest of yellow hair. She goes doggedly at her spools, grasping them sullenly. She walks well on her bare, filthy feet. Her hands and arms are no longer flesh colour, but resemble weather-roughened hide, ingrained with dirt. Around the tangle of her hair cotton threads and bits of lint make a sort of aureole. (Her nimbus of labour, if you will!) There is nothing saint-like in that face, nor in the loose-lipped mouth, whence exudes a black stain of snuff as between her lips she turns the root she chews.

"She's a mean girl," my little companion says; "we-all don't hev nothin' to say to her."

"Why?"

"Her maw hunts her to the mill; she don't want to go—no, sir—so she's mad most the time."

Thus she sets her dogged resistance in scowling black looks, in quick, frantic gestures and motions against the machinery that claims her impotent childhood. The nimbus around her furze of hair remains; there are other heads than saints—there are martyrs! Let the child wear her crown.

Through the looms I catch sight of Upton's, my landlord's, little child. She is seven; so small that they have a box for her to stand upon. She is a pretty, frail, little thing, a spooler—"a good spooler, tew!" Through the frames on the other side I can only see her fingers as they clutch at the flying spools; her head is not high enough, even with the box, to be visible. Her hands are fairy hands, fine-boned, well-made, only they are so thin and dirty, and her nails—claws; she would do well to have them cut. A nail can be torn from the finger, is torn from the finger frequently,[9] by this flying spool. I go over to Upton's little girl. Her spindles are not thinner nor her spools whiter.

[Footnote 9: In Huntsville, Alabama, a child of eight lost her index and middle fingers of the right hand in January, 1902. One doctor told me that he had amputated the fingers of more than a hundred babies. A merchant told me he had frequently seen children whose hands had been cut off by the machinery.—American Federationist.]

"How old are you?"

"Ten."

She looks six. It is impossible to know if what she says is true. The children are commanded both by parents and bosses to advance their ages when asked.

"Tired?"

She nods, without stopping. She is a "remarkable fine hand." She makes forty cents a day. See the value of this labour to the manufacturer—cheap, yet skilled; to the parent it represents $2.40 per week.

I must not think that as I work beside them I will gain their confidence! They have no time to talk. Indeed, conversation is not well looked upon by the bosses, and I soon see that unless I want to entail a sharp reproof for myself and them I must stick to my "side." And at noon I have no heart to take their leisure. At twelve o'clock, Minnie, a little spooler, scarcely higher than her spools, lifts her hands above her head and exclaims: "Thank God, there's the whistle!" I watched them disperse: some run like mad, always bareheaded, to fetch the dinner-pail for mother or father who work in the mill and who choose to spend these little legs and spare their own. It takes ten minutes to go, ten to return, and the little labourer has ten to devote to its own food, which, half the time, he is too exhausted to eat.

I watch the children crouch on the floor by the frames; some fall asleep between the mouthfuls of food, and so lie asleep with food in their mouths until the overseer rouses them to their tasks again. Here and there totters a little child just learning to walk; it runs and crawls the length of the mill. Mothers who have no one with whom to leave their babies bring them to the workshop, and their lives begin, continue and end in the horrible pandemonium.

One little boy passes by with his broom; he is whistling. I look up at the cheery sound that pierces fresh but faint and natural above the machines' noise. His eyes are bright; his good spirits surprise me: here is an argument for my comfortable friends who wish to prove that the children "are happy!" I stop him.

"You seem very jolly!"

He grins.

"How long have you been working?"

"Two or three days."

The gay creature has just begun his servitude and brings into the dreary monotony a flash of the spirit which should fill childhood.

I think it will be granted that it takes a great deal to discourage and dishearten a child. The hopefulness of the mill communities lies in just those elements that overwork in the adult and that child labour will ultimately destroy. When hope is gone in the adult he must wreak some vengeance on the bitter fate that has robbed him. There is no more tragic thing than the hopeless child. The adult who grows hopeless can affiliate with the malcontents and find in the insanity of anarchy what he calls revenge.

It seems folly to insult the common sense of the public by asking them whether they think that thirteen hours a day, with a half to three-quarters of an hour for recreation at noon, or the same amount of night-work in a mill whose atmosphere is vile with odours, humid with unhealthfulness, filled with the particles of flying cotton, a pandemonium of noise and deafening roar, so deafening that the loss of hearing is frequent and the keenness of hearing always dulled ... whether the atmosphere combined with the association of men and women whose morals or lack of morals is notorious all over the world, is good for a growing child? Is it conducive to progressive development, to the making of decent manhood or womanhood? What kind of citizen can this child—if he is fit enough in the economic struggle of the world to survive—turn out to be? Not citizens at all: creatures scarcely fit to be called human beings.

I asked the little girl who teaches me to spool who the man is whom I have seen riding around on horseback through the town.

"Why, he goes roun' rousin' up the hands who ain't in their places. Sometimes he takes the children outen thayre bades an' brings 'em back to the mill."

And if the child can stand, it spins and spools until it drops, till constitution rebels, and death, the only friend it has ever known, sets it free.

Besides being spinners and spoolers, and occasionally weavers even, the children sweep the cotton-strewed floors. Scarcely has the miserable little object, ragged and odourous, passed me with his long broom, which he drags half-heartedly along, than the space he has swept up is cotton-strewn again. It settles with discouraging rapidity; it has also settled on the child's hair and clothes, and his eyelashes, and this atmosphere he breathes and fairly eats, until his lungs become diseased. Pneumonia—fatal in nearly all cases here—and lung fever had been a pestilence, "a regular plague," before I came. There were four cases in the village where I, lived, and fever and ague, malaria and grippe did their parts.

"Why, thar ain't never a haouse but's got somebody sick," my little teacher informed me in her soft Southern dialect. "I suttinly never did see a place like this for dyin' in winter time. I reckon et's funerals every day."

Here is a little child, not more than seven years old. The land is a hot enough country, we will concede, but not a savage South Sea Island! She has on one garment, if a tattered sacking dress can so be termed. Her bones are nearly through her skin, but her stomach is an unhealthy pouch, abnormal. She has dropsy. She works in a new mill—in one of the largest mills in South Carolina. Here is a slender little boy—a birch rod (good old simile) is not more slender, but the birch has the advantage: it is elastic—it bends, has youth in it. This boy looks ninety. He is a dwarf; twelve years old, he appears seven, no more. He sweeps the cotton off the floor of "the baby mill." (How tenderly and proudly the owners speak of their brick and mortar.) He sweeps the cotton and lint from the mill aisles from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. without a break in the night's routine. He stops of his own accord, however, to cough and expectorate—he has advanced tuberculosis.

At night the shanties receive us. On a pine board is spread our food—can you call it nourishment? The hominy and molasses is the best part; salt pork and ham are the strong victuals.

It is eight o'clock when the children reach their homes—later if the mill work is behindhand and they are kept over hours. They are usually beyond speech. They fall asleep at the table, on the stairs; they are carried to bed and there laid down as they are, unwashed, undressed; and the inanimate bundles of rags so lie until the mill summons them with its imperious cry before sunrise, while they are still in stupid sleep:

"What do you do on Sundays?" I asked one little girl.

"Why, thare ain't nothing much to dew. I go to the park sometimes."

This park is at the end of a trolley line; it is their Arcadia. Picture it! A few yellow sand hills with clusters of pine trees and some scrubby undergrowth; a more desolate, arid, gloomy pleasure ground cannot be conceived. On Sundays the trolleys bring those who are not too tired to so spend the day. On Sundays the mill shanties are full of sleepers.

The park has a limited number of devotees. Through the beautyless paths and walks the figures pass like shadows. There come three mill girls arm in arm; their curl papers, screwed tight all the week, are out on Sunday, in greasy, abundant curls. Sunday clothes are displayed in all their superbness. Three or four young men, town fellows, follow them; they are all strangers, but they will go home arm in arm.

Several little children, who have no clothes but those, they wear, cling close to the side of a gaunt, pale-faced man, who carries in his arms the youngest. The little girl has become a weight to be carried on Sundays; she has worked six days of the week—shall she not rest on the seventh? She shall; she claims this, and lies inert on the man's arm, her face already seared with the scars of toil.

I ran such risk taking pictures that I relinquished the task, and it was only the last day at the mill, while still in my working clothes with a camera concealed in my pocket, that I contrived to get a picture or two. I ventured to ask two little boys who swept the mill to stand for their pictures.

"I don't kyar to," the older one said. I explained that it would not hurt them, as I thought he was afraid; but his little companion vouchsafed: "We-all ain't got no nickel." When they understood it was a free picture they were as delighted as possible and posed with alacrity, making touching apologies for their greasy, dirty condition.

When I asked one of them if he was ever clean, he said: "On Sunday I wash my hands."

It was noon, on the day I chose to leave ——, turning my back on the mill that had allured me to its doors and labour. In South Carolina early April is torrid, flies and mosquitoes are rampant. What must this settlement be in midsummer heat? There is no colour in the Southern scene; the clothes of the mill-hands, the houses, the soil are of one tone—and, more strange, there is not one line of red, one dash of life, in the faces of the hundreds of women and children that pass me on their way back to work.

Under the existing circumstances they have no outlook, these people, no hope; their appearance expresses accurately the changeless routine of an existence devoted to eternal ignorance, eternal toil.

From their short half-hour of mid-noon rest, the whistle, piercing, inanimate call, has dared to command the slavish obedience of animate and intelligent beings. I pause by the trestle over which rumble the cars, heavily laden with the cotton cloth whose perfection has made this Southern mill justly famous.

The file of humanity that passes me I shall never forget! The Blank Mill claims 1,500 of these labourers; at least 200 are children. The little things run and keep step with the older men and women; their shaggy, frowzled heads are bent, their hands protrude pitifully from their sleeves; they are barefooted, bareheaded. With these little figures the elements wanton; they can never know the fullness of summer or the proper maturity of autumn. Suns have burned them, rains have fallen upon them, as unprotected through storms they go to their work. The winter winds have penetrated the tatters with blades like knives; gray and dusty and earth-coloured the line passes. These are children? No, they are wraiths of childhood—they are effigies of youth! What can Hope work in this down-trodden soil for any future harvest? They can curse and swear; they chew tobacco and take snuff. When they speak at all their voices are feeble; ears long dulled by the thunder of the mill are no longer keen to sound; their speech is low and scarcely audible. Over sallow cheeks where the skin is tightly drawn their eyes regard you suspiciously, malignantly even, never with the frank look of childhood. As the long afternoon goes by in its hours of leisure for us fatigue settles like a blight over their features, their expressions darken to elfish strangeness, whilst sullen lines, never to be eradicated, mark the distinctive visages of these children of labour.

At certain seasons of the year they actually die off like flies. They fall subject, not to children's diseases exactly—nothing really natural seems to come into the course of these little existences—they fall a prey to the maladies that are the outcomes of their conditions. They are always half-clad in the winter time; their clothes differ nothing at all from their summer clothes; they have no overcoats or coats; many of them go barefoot all winter long. They come out from the hot mills into cold, raw winds and fall an easy prey to pneumonia, scourge of the mill-town. Their general health is bad all the year round; their skins and complexions have taken the tone of the sandy soil of the Southern country in which they are bred and in which their martyrdom is accomplished. I never saw a rosy cheek nor a clear skin: these are the parchment editions of childhood on which Tragedy is written indelibly. You can there read the eternal condemnation of those who have employed them for the sake of gain.

It is a melancholy satisfaction to believe that mill labour will kill off little spinners and spoolers. Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. There are constitutions that survive all the horrors of existence. I have worked both in Massachusetts and the South beside women who entered the mill service at eight years of age. One of these was still in her girlhood when I knew her. She was very strong, very good and still had some illusions left. I do not know what it goes to prove, when I say that at twenty, in spite of twelve years of labour, she still dreamed, still hoped, still longed and prayed for something that was not a mill. If this means content in servitude, if this means that the poor white trash are born slaves, or if, on the contrary, it means that there is something inherent in a woman that will carry her past suicide and past idiocy and degradation, all of which is around her, I think it argues well for the working women.

The other woman was forty. She had no illusions left—please remember she had worked since eight; she had reached, if you like, the idiot stage. She had nothing to offer during all the time I knew her but a few sentences directly in connection with her toil.

It is useless to advance the plea that spooling is not difficult. No child (we will cancel under twelve!) should work at all. No human creature should work thirteen hours a day. No baby of six, seven or eight should be seen in the mills.

It is also useless to say that these children tell you that they "like the mill." They are beaten by their parents if they do not tell you this, and, granted that they do not like their servitude, when was it thought expedient that a child should direct its existence? If they do not pass the early years of their lives in study, when should they learn? At what period of their lives should the children of the Southern mill-hand be educated? Long before they reach their teens their habits are formed—ignorance is ingrained; indeed, after a few years they are so vitally reduced that if you will you cannot teach them. Are these little American children, then, to have no books but labour? No recreation? To be crushed out of life to satisfy the ignorance and greed of their parents, the greed of the manufacturers? Whatever else we are, we are financiers per se. The fact that to-day, as for years past, Southern cotton mills are employing the labour of children under tender age—employing an army of them to the number of twenty thousand under twelve—can only be explained by a frank admittal that infantile labour has been considered advantageous to the cause of gain.

This gain, apparent by the facts that a mill can be run for thousands of dollars less in the South than a like mill can be run in the North, and its net surplus profits be the same as those of the Northern manufactory, is one by which one generation alone will profit. The attractiveness of the figures is fallacious. What I imply is self-evident. The infant population (its numbers give it a right to this dignity of term) whose cheap toil feeds the mills is doomed. I mean to say that the rank and file of humanity are daily weeded out; that thousands of possibly strong, healthy, mature labouring men and women are being disease-stricken, hounded out of life; the cotton mill child cannot develop to the strong normal adult working-man and woman. The fiber exhausted in the young body cannot be recreated. Early death carries hundreds out of life, disease rots the remainder, and the dulled maturity attained by a creature whose life has been passed in this labour is not fit to propagate the species.

The excessively low wages paid these little mill-hands keep under, of necessity, the wage paid the grown labourer. It is a crying pity that children are equal to the task imposed upon them. It is a crying pity that machines (since they have appeared, with their extended, all-absorbing power) should not do all! Particularly in the Southern States do they evince, at a fatal point, their limit, display their inadequacy. When babies can be employed successfully for thirteen hours out of the twenty-four at all machines with men and women; when infants feeds mechanism with labour that has not one elevating, humanizing effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence below par and cheapens and distorts the nobler forms of toil. Not only is it "no disgrace to work," but on the contrary it is a splendid thing to be able to labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat of their brow are not the servants of mankind in the sense of the term, but the patriarchs and controllers of the world's march and the most subtle signs of the times. But there are distinctly fitnesses of labour, and the proper presentation to the working-man and woman and child is a consideration.