THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS

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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.