The tone of the garments is somber and gray, blending with the gray of the dawn; or red, blending with the earth stains of the peculiar Southern soil; or claylike and pale yellow.  Many of the faces are pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent, dulled by toil and yet not all unintelligent.  Those who are familiar with the healthy type of the decent workmen of the West and East must draw their distinctions as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar class.  The Southern mill-hand’s face is unique—­a fearful type, whose perusal is not pleasant or cheerful to the character-reader, to the lover of humanity or to the prophet of the future.  Thus they defile:  men with felt hats drawn over their brows; women, sunbonneted or hatless; children barefoot, bareheaded, ragged, unwashed.  Unwashed these labourers have gone to bed; unwashed they have arisen.  To their garments cling the bits of cotton, the threads of cotton, the strands of roping, badges of their trade, brand of their especial toil.  As they pass over the red clay, over the pale yellow sand, the earth seems to claim them as part of her unchanging phase; cursed by the mandate primeval—­“by the sweat of thy brow”—­Earth-Born!

In the early morning the giant mill swallows its victims, engorges itself with entering humanity; then it grows active, stirring its ponderous might to life, movement and sound.  Hear it roar, shudder, shattering the stillness for half a mile!  It is full now of flesh and blood, of human life and brain and fiber:  it is content!  Triumphantly during the long, long hours it devours the tithe of body and soul.

Behind lies the deserted, accursed village, destitute of life during the hours of day, condemned to the care of a few women, the old, the bedridden and the sick—­of which last there are plenty.

Mighty Mills—­pride of the architect and the commercial magnate; charnel houses, devastators, destructors of homes and all that mankind calls hallowed; breeders of strife, of strike, of immorality, of sedition and riot—­buildings tremendous—­you give your immutable faces, myriads-windowed, to the dust-heaps, to the wind-swept plains of sand.  When South Carolina shall have taken from you (as its honour and wisdom and citizenship is bound to do) the youngest of the children, do you think that you shall inevitably continue to devour what remains?  There is too much resistance yet left in the mass of human beings.  Youth will then rebel at a servitude beginning at ten years of age:  and the women will lift their arms above their heads one day in desperate gesture of appeal and cry out—­not for the millionaire’s surplus; not a tirade anarchistic against capital....  What is this woman of the hills and woman of the mills that she should so demand?  She will call for hours short enough to permit her to bear her children; for requital commensurate with the exigence of progressive civilization; for wages equal to her faithful toil.