as churches--amusement halls,
music, recreation and pleasure, as well as education and religion?"

"I think," she said keenly, "that united, concentrated action on the
part of the cotton mill owners might make such a thing feasible; for us
to try it alone would mean ruin."

"Not ruin," I amended; "a reduction of income."

"Ruin," she said, firing. "We couldn't compete. To compete," she said
with the conviction of an intelligent, well-informed manufacturer, "I
must have my sixty-six hours a week!"

The spirit of discontent is always abroad when false conditions exist.
Its restless presence is controlled by one spirit alone--humanity--when
reasonably are weighed and justly decided the questions of balance
between Capital and Labour.

We must believe that there is no unsolvable problem before us in
considering the presence of the child in the Southern mills.

There is nothing in the essence of the subject to discourage the social
economist. The question should not be left to the decision of the
private citizen. This stuff is worth saving. There is the making in
these children of first-class citizens. I quote from the illustrated
supplement of the South Carolina _State_ that you may see what the mill
manufacturers think of the quality of the "poor white trash":

"The operatives in the South Carolina mills are the common
people--the bone and sinew who have left the fields to the
Negroes. They are industrious, intelligent, frugal, and have
the native instincts of honesty and integrity and of fidelity
which are essential to good citizenship."

If such things are true of the mill-hands of South Carolina, it is worth
while to save their children.

* * * * *

Henceforth, to my vision across the face of the modern history of labour
and manufacture will eternally defile the gray, colourless column of the
Southern mill-hands: an earth-hued line of humanity--a stream that
divides not.

Here there are no stragglers. At noon and night the pace is quick,
eager. Steady as a prison gang, it goes to food, rest and freedom. But
this alacrity is absent in the morning. On the hem of night, the fringe
of day, the march is slow and lifeless. Many of the heads are bent and
downcast; some of the faces peer forward, and sallow masks of human
countenances lift, with a look set beyond the mill--toward who can say
what vain horizon! The Stream wanders slowly toward the Houses of
La