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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
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