e with an old and weary face, carrying trays of hot glass
from furnace to bench and bench to furnace, but at the word he turned.
The air of weariness fell from him, his back straightened, life and
passion flamed into his eyes, and despite the grime and sordidness of
his surroundings, despite the rags in which he was clothed, under the
dull glow of the furnaces and the flickering violet play of a distant
arc light he seemed the bearer of some high message as his boyish
treble, rich in the tones of a familiar despair, rang through the
factory.

"The land is filled with the voice o' cryin'," he began, "an' no one
seems to hear. Tens o' thousands o' children cry themselves to sleep
every night, knowin' that the mornin' only brings another day o' misery.
Think of a little boy or girl o' ten years old, sufferin' already so
much that hope is gone, an' tired enough to die! There are twenty-five
thousand children less than ten years old in the fact'ries of America."

"Perhaps the people who could help don't know about it," suggested
Hamilton.

"They know," the other continued, "but they don't care. They stop their
ears to the cryin' o' the children an' talk about America as the land of
opportunity. It _is_ the land of opportunity--opportunity for the
children to starve, opportunity to suffer, opportunity to die wretched
an' to be glad to die. There's no country in the world where children
are tortured as they are in the fact'ries of the United States."

"Oh, surely it can't be as bad as that," protested Hamilton.

The objection only increased the "crusader's" vehemence.

"There don't any children have to work anywhere as they do here," he
fairly shouted, "here where they rob the cradle for workers, where the
little voices become sad and bitter 'most as soon as they can lisp,
where the brightness o' childhood fades out before its time, an' where
its only world is the mill, the shop, an' the fact'ry. Their tiny bones
unset, they make them stand in one position all day long until you hear
the children moanin' hour after hour, moanin' and no one hears, or
hearin', cares.

"They send missionaries to China," cried the lad further, "but there's
no child labor there; they try to reform the 'unspeakable Turk' but
there's no atrocity upon the children there; they call the heathen lost,
though in the worst an' wildes' tribes the children have a home an'
lovin', if savage care; Russia cries shame on what goes on in our
fact'ries her