During recent years much more has been done. Partly from an awakening
sense of social responsibility and partly from a realization that it is
good business to do so, the bigger mills have made large expenditures to
improve the condition of their operatives. They have provided reading
rooms and libraries, have opened many recreation rooms and playgrounds,
and have furnished other facilities for entertainment. Some of the mills
have athletic fields, and a few support semi-professional baseball
teams. At some mills community buildings have been erected, which
sometimes contain, in addition to public rooms, baths, and a swimming
pool, an office for a visiting nurse and rooms which an adviser in
domestic science may use for demonstration. The older women are hard to
teach, but not a few of the girls take an interest in the work. Nothing
is more needed than instruction in domestic science. The operatives
spend a large proportion of their income upon food--for the rent they
pay is trifling--but the items are not always well chosen, and the
cooking is often bad. To the monotonous dietary to which they were
accustomed on the farms they add many luxuries to be had in the mill
town, but these are often ruined by improper preparation. Owing to this
lack of domestic skill many operatives apparently suffer from
malnutrition, though they spend more than enough money to supply an
abundance of nourishing food.

Not many years ago the improvidence of the mill operatives was
proverbial. Wages were generally spent as fast as they were earned, and
often extravagantly. Little attempt was made to cultivate gardens or to
make yards attractive, with the result that a factory village with its
monotonous rows of unkempt houses was a depressing sight. The "factory
people," many of whom had been nomad tenant farmers seldom living long
in the same place, had never thought of attempting to beautify their
surroundings, and the immediate neighborhood of the mill to which they
moved was often bare and unlovely and afforded little encouragement to
beauty.

The improvident family is still common, and many ugly mill villages yet
exist, but one who has watched the development of the cotton industry in
the South for twenty-five years has seen great changes in these
respects. Thousands of families are saving money today. Some buy homes;
others set up one member of the family in a small business; and a few
buy farms. More than seventy-five families have left