cut in a few minutes. I was covered from head to foot with coal-dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed. I could not do that work and live; but there were boys of 10 and 12 years of age doing it for 50 and 60 cents a day. Some of them had never been inside a school; few of them could read a child's primer. . . . From the breakers the boys graduate to the mine depth, where they become door tenders, switch boys or mule drivers. Here, far below the surface, the work is still more dangerous.

(b)

Here are three of them three of the little slaves of capital, typical of the 20,000 children under 14 now toiling out their lives in the textile mills of the South. Mattie, the little one standing beside me, is 6 years old. She is a spinner. Inside a cotton mill for 12 hours a day she stands in the 4-foot passageway between the spinning frames where the cotton is spun from coarser into fine threads. As it comes down from the roping above now and then it breaks at some part of the long frame, and her baby fingers join the thread and set the bobbin moving again. From daylight to dark she is in the midst of the ceaseless throb and racket of machinery. When I first met her it was Christmas eve - the eve of the children's festival, when the whole of Christendom celebrates the birth of the Child whose coming was to bring freedom to mankind, not to speak of freedom to children. She was crying, and when I asked her the reason, said, between her sobs, that she wanted a doll that would open and shut its eyes. "When would you play with it?" I asked the little toiler, whose weary eyelids were ready to close over her tired eyes directly the long day's work was over.

"I should have time a-plenty on Sunday," replied the little slave, whose daily wage of 10 cents helped to swell the family income. There are thousands like her in the South.

Sally is only 9. Look into her worn face; not a trace of childhood's glad insouciance about it. It never changes from that fixed expression save when a wan smile crosses it in response to a kind word. For three long years she has done the same

thing that little Mattie is only beginning. A few weeks before this picture was taken she broke down completely with nervous collapse. Continuous work, the hot, unhealthy mill atmosphere, proved too much for her childish brain. She could neither stand nor speak, and her limbs were shaken by convulsive movements. When this picture was taken she was slowly regaining a feeble kind of health, and in a week or two more would be back at her endless toil. There are thousands like her in the South.

I do not know how old Jack is. He does not know himself. He does not know anything except that he has worked ever since he can remember. I think he may be about 11....

This is the horror and wrong which is hidden behind the cold, printed words, child-labor legislation." These are American children, dragged into mills when scarcely out of their babyhood, without education, without opportunity, being robbed of health, morally and physically; forced to labor as in the days of negro slavery negro children never were. With their baby hands these little slaves are undermining the liberty of the future, not only of the cotton operatives of the South, but of the American working people. . . .

A clerk in a cotton mill told me that little boys turned out at 2 in the morning for some trivial fault, afraid to go home, would beg him to allow them to sleep on the office floor.

In Georgia it is a common sight to see the children of cotton operatives stretched on the bed dressed as they came from the mills in the morning, too weary to do anything but fling themselves down for a rest. . . . Only a few weeks ago I stood at 10.30 at night in a mill in Columbia, S.C., controlled and owned by Northern capital, where children who did not know their own ages were working from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. without a moment for rest or food, or a single cessation of the maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary and clouded with humidity and lint.

The physical, mental and moral effects of these long hours of toil and confinement on the children are indescribably sad. Mill children are so stunted that every foreman, as you enter the mill, will tell you that you cannot judge their ages. . . . A doctor in a city mill, who has made a special study of the subject, tells

me that 10 per cent of the children who go to work before 12 years of age, after five years contract active consumption. The lint forms in their lungs a perfect cultivating medium for tuberculosis, while the change from the hot atmosphere of the mill to the chill night or morning air often brings on pneumonia, which frequently, if not the cause of death, is the forerunner of consumption. . . .

The number of accidents to those poor little ones who do not know the danger of machinery is appalling. . . . In one mill city in the South a doctor told a friend that he had personally amputated more than a hundred babies' fingers mangled in the mill. A cotton merchant in Atlanta told me he had frequently seen mill children without fingers or thumb and sometimes without the whole hand. So frequent are these accidents that in some mills applicants for employment have to sign a contract that in case of injury in the mill the company will not be held responsible, and parents or guardians sign for minors. . . .

All holidays are "made up" in South Carolina. A strike occurred in one mill among some organized employees because they were required to make up Labor Day beforehand. They were locked out and starved into submission. In Alabama the children in the mills are required to work Thanksgiving Day. In Georgia a child missing Saturday a short day - loses onesixth of her week's wages. The wages paid to these children bear out what I have said in regard to child labor keeping wages low. Many toil for 10 cents a day. The average wage in North Carolina of the children under 14 is 22 cents a day. . . . I know of babies working for 5 and 6 cents a day. . . . In one large mill worked by Northern capital, in Alabama, a widow and three children, aged respectively 12, 9, and 8, worked for 47 cents a day between them.

It is a serious charge to make that the mill owners of the South, a cultured and frequently religious class, are perpetuating this horrible system, but I am afraid there is no doubt of it. I started my investigations with a good deal of sympathy with those captains of industry, who are facing all the risks of the establishment and upbuilding of a great trade. The personal courtesy and kindness many of them showed me almost blinded

121. The platform of

sive party, Chicago, August 5,

1912

[616]

me at first to the meaning of their opposition to the enactment of any child-labor law. My sympathy, however, has been worn very thin by the deceptions and evasions to which they lend themselves on this subject. Some, no doubt, honestly believe in the validity of the reasons they advance for child labor—it is so easy to believe a theory very much to our own interest-but the majority know better, especially men from the North and East. . . .

For eighteen months I have acted as the special agent for the American Federation of Labor on child-labor legislation in the Southern States. . . . I visited twenty-four mills in Alabama before the . . . end of January, 1901. The state of affairs I discovered was truly appalling. In every one of these mills there were children under 12 years of age working from 11 to 12 hours a day. Six mills out of the twenty-four had worked within a year at night. In the spinning rooms, brilliantly lighted with electric lights, fitted with the latest machinery, turning out hour after hour the product which is making huge profits, were to be found little children working from dark until long past dawn, kept awake by cold water being dashed into their faces.

The insurgent movement began in the protest of Senathe Progres- tor La Follette and a group of reformers in Congress against President Taft, whose complete surrender to the legislative reactionary program of Aldrich and Cannon. and the discredited representatives of special interests who had so long managed congressional legislation, rendered it utterly impossible for the Progressive Republicans of the country to support him for reëlection." In January, 1911, these men formed the National Progressive Republican League. The movement gathered strength rapidly. In April the league decided to enter the contest for the presidential nomination of 1912 with a candidate 2 opposed

1 Robert M. La Follette, Autobiography, 1913, p. 476.

2 La Follette, whose "Autobiography" is a full source for the early history of the Progressive movement, was the "logical" candidate, and was publicly indorsed for the presidency by the Progressives in October, 1911. But when Roosevelt, in a speech at Columbus, Ohio, in February,

to Taft. When they failed to get control of the Republican convention at Chicago, in June, 1912, they seceded under Roosevelt's leadership and formed the new Progressive party, which carried seven states and polled 4,123,206 votes at the election in November. The platform of the party, adopted at the convention in Chicago, August 5, 1912, is the best statement of the principles of the radical reformers of the new century.

The conscience of the people in a time of grave national problems has called into being a new party, born of the nation's awakened sense of justice.

We of the Progressive Party here dedicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the duty laid upon us by our fathers to maintain that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, whose foundations they laid.

We hold, with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, that the people are the masters of their Constitution, to fulfill its purposes and to safeguard it from those who, by perversion of its intent, would convert it into an instrument of injustice. In accordance with the needs of each generation the people must use their sovereign powers to establish and maintain equal opportunity and industrial justice, to secure which this government was founded and without which no republic can endure.

This country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions, and its laws should be utilized, maintained, or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.1 It is time to set the public welfare in the first place.

1912, came out for the Progressive program, his greater prestige and popularity carried him to the fore as the standard bearer of the new movement. La Follette's bitter comments on his "demagogism" and "mock heroics" may be read in the "Autobiography," especially pp. 480, 543, 551, 700, 740.

1 For the most radical proposition for the alteration of the institutions and laws of a state since the foundation of our government, see the plan of Mr. W. S. U'Ren and the Peoples Power League of Oregon outlined in Herbert Croly, Progressive Democracy, pp. 291–302.