The Woman Who Toils Part 28

The excessively low wages paid these little mill-hands keep under, of necessity, the wage paid the grown labourer. It is a crying pity that children are equal to the task imposed upon them. It is a crying pity that machines (since they have appeared, with their extended, all-absorbing power) should not do all! Particularly in the Southern States do they evince, at a fatal point, their limit, display their inadequacy. When babies can be employed successfully for thirteen hours out of the twenty-four at all machines with men and women; when infants feeds mechanism with labour that has not one elevating, humanizing effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence below par and cheapens and distorts the n.o.bler forms of toil. Not only is it "no disgrace to work," but on the contrary it is a splendid thing to be able to labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat of their brow are not the servants of mankind in the sense of the term, but the patriarchs and controllers of the world's march and the most subtle signs of the times. But there are distinctly fitnesses of labour, and the proper presentation to the working-man and woman and child is a consideration.

No one to-day would be likely for an instant to concede that to replace the treadmill horse with a child (a thing often seen and practised in times past) would be an advantage. And yet the march of the child up and down before its spooling frame is more suggestive of an animal--of the dog hitched to the Belgian milk cart; of the horse on the mill-tread--than another a.n.a.logy.

Contrast this pallid automaton with the children of the poor in a New York kindergarten, where the six-or seven-year-old child of the German, the Hungarian, the Polish emigrant, may have its imagination stimulated, its creative and individual faculties employed as it is taught to _make things_--construct, combine, weave, sew, mould. Every power latent is cajoled to expression, every talent encouraged. Thus work in its first form is rendered attractive, and youth and individuality are encouraged.

In the South of this American country whose signet is individualism, whose strength (despite our motto, "United we stand") is in the individual freedom and vast play of original thought, here in the South our purest born, the most unmixed blood of us, is being converted into machines of labour when the forms of little children are bound in youth to the spindle and loom.

In a certain mill in Alabama there are seventy-five child-labourers who work twelve hours out of the twenty-four; they have a half-hour at noon for luncheon. There is a night school in connection with this mill corporation. Fancy it, a night school for the day-long child labourer!

Fifty out of seventy-five troop to it. Although they are so tired they cannot keep awake on the benches, and the littlest of them falls asleep over its letters, although they weep with fatigue, they are eager to learn! Is there a more conclusive testimony to the quality of the material that is being lost to the States and the country by the martyrdom of intelligent children?

One hears two points of view expressed on this subject. The capitalist advances that the greed of the parents forces the children into the mills; the people themselves tell you that unless they are willing to let their available children work, their own lives are made impossible by the overseers. A widow who has children stands a fair chance of having her rent free; if she refuses this t.i.the of flesh and blood she is too often thrust into the street. So I am told. Now, which of these facts is the truth? It seems to be clearly too much left to the decision of private enterprise or parental incapability. The Legislature is the only school in which to decide the question. During my stay in South Carolina I never heard one woman advocate the mills for children. One mother, holding to her breast her illegitimate child, her face dark with dislike, said: "_Them mills!_ I would not let _my_ little boy work in 'em! No, sir! He would go over my dead body." Another woman said: "_My_ little girl work? No, ma'am; she goes to school!" and the child came in even as she spoke--let me say the only cheerful specimen of childhood, with the exception of the few little creatures in the kindergarten, that I saw in the mill district.

South Carolina has become very haughty on this topic and has reached a point when she tells us she is to cure the sore in her own body without aid or interference. At a late session of the Legislature the bill for the restriction of child labour--we must call it this, since it legislates only for the child under ten--this bill was defeated by only two dissenting voices. A humane gentleman who laid claim to one of these voices was heard to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e as the bill failed to pa.s.s: "Thank G.o.d!" Just why, it is not easy to understand.

When I was so arrogant as to say to the editor of _The State_, the leading paper in South Carolina, that I hoped my article might aid the cause, I made an error clearly, for he replied:

"We need no aid. The people of South Carolina are aroused to the horror and will cure it themselves."

Georgia is not roused to the horror; Alabama is stirring actively; but the Northerners who own these mills--the capitalists, the manufacturers, the men who are building up a reputation for the wealth of South Carolina and Alabama mills, are the least aroused of all. We must believe that many directors of these mills are ignorant of the state of affairs, and that those who are enlightened willingly blind their eyes.

The mill prospectuses are humourous when read by the investigator. We are told "labour-unions cut no figure here!"

Go at night through the mills with the head of the Labour Federation and with the instigator of the first strikes in this district--with men who are the brain and fiber of the labour organization, and see the friendly looks flash forth, see the understanding with which they are greeted all through certain mills. Consider that not 200 miles away at the moment are 22,000 labourers on strike. Then greet these statements with a smile!

On my return to the North I made an especial effort to see my New England friend. We lunched together this time, and at the end of the meal her three little children fluttered in to say a friendly word. I looked at them, jealous for their little defrauded fellows, whose twelve-hour daily labour served to purchase these exquisite clothes and to heap with dainties the table before us. But I was nevertheless rejoiced to see once again the forms of real childhood for whom air and freedom and wealth were doing blessed tasks. When we were alone I drew for my friend as well as I could pictures of what I had seen. She leaned forward, took a brandied cherry from the dish in front of her, ate it delicately and dipped her fingers in the finger-bowl; then she said:

"Dear friend, I am going to surprise you very much."

I waited, and felt that it would be difficult to surprise me with a tale of a Southern mill.

"Those little children--_love the mill!_ They _like_ to work. It's a great deal better for them to be employed than for them to run the streets!"

She smiled over her argument, and I waited.

"Do you know," she continued, "that I believe they are really very happy."

She had well presented her argument. She had said she would surprise me--and she did.

"You will not feel it a breach of affection and hospitality if I print what you say?" I asked her. "It's only fair that the capitalist's view should be given here and there first hand. You own one-half the mill in ----, Carolina?"

"Yes."

"What do you think of a model mill with only nine hours a day labour, holidays and all nights free, schools, where education is enforced by the State; reading-rooms open as well as churches--amus.e.m.e.nt 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-cla.s.s citizens. I quote from the ill.u.s.trated 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 Labour, although whipped by invisible scourge of Need. Without this incentive and spur, think you it would pursue a direction toward _thirteen hours of toil_, shut from air and sunlight and day, taking in its rank the women, the young girl and the little child?

The tone of the garments is somber and gray, blending with the gray of the dawn; or red, blending with the earth stains of the peculiar Southern soil; or claylike and pale yellow. Many of the faces are pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent, dulled by toil and yet not all unintelligent. Those who are familiar with the healthy type of the decent workmen of the West and East must draw their distinctions as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar cla.s.s. The Southern mill-hand's face is unique--a fearful type, whose perusal is not pleasant or cheerful to the character-reader, to the lover of humanity or to the prophet of the future. Thus they defile: men with felt hats drawn over their brows; women, sunbonneted or hatless; children barefoot, bareheaded, ragged, unwashed. Unwashed these labourers have gone to bed; unwashed they have arisen. To their garments cling the bits of cotton, the threads of cotton, the strands of roping, badges of their trade, brand of their especial toil. As they pa.s.s over the red clay, over the pale yellow sand, the earth seems to claim them as part of her unchanging phase; cursed by the mandate primeval--"by the sweat of thy brow"--Earth-Born!

In the early morning the giant mill swallows its victims, engorges itself with entering humanity; then it grows active, stirring its ponderous might to life, movement and sound. Hear it roar, shudder, shattering the stillness for half a mile! It is full now of flesh and blood, of human life and brain and fiber: it is content! Triumphantly during the long, long hours it devours the t.i.the of body and soul.

Behind lies the deserted, accursed village, dest.i.tute of life during the hours of day, condemned to the care of a few women, the old, the bedridden and the sick--of which last there are plenty.

Mighty Mills--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate; charnel houses, devastators, destructors of homes and all that mankind calls hallowed; breeders of strife, of strike, of immorality, of sedition and riot--buildings tremendous--you give your immutable faces, myriads-windowed, to the dust-heaps, to the wind-swept plains of sand.

When South Carolina shall have taken from you (as its honour and wisdom and citizenship is bound to do) the youngest of the children, do you think that you shall inevitably continue to devour what remains? There is too much resistance yet left in the ma.s.s of human beings. Youth will then rebel at a servitude beginning _at ten years of age_: and the women will lift their arms above their heads one day in desperate gesture of appeal and cry out--not for the millionaire's surplus; not a tirade anarchistic against capital.... What is this woman of the hills and woman of the mills that she should so demand? She will call for hours short enough to permit her to bear her children; for requital commensurate with the exigence of progressive civilization; for wages equal to her faithful toil.

This is not too fantastic a demand or too ideal a state to be divinely hoped for, believed in and brought to pa.s.s.[10]

[Footnote 10: Of the 21,000,000 spindles in the United States, the South has 6,000,000. $35,381,000 of Carolina's wealth is in cotton mills.

NOTE. I have seen, in Aragon, Georgia, hope for the future of the mill-hands. The Aragon Cotton Mills are an improvement on the South Carolina Mills and are under the direct supervision of an owner whose sole G.o.d is not gain. Mr. Walcott is an agitator of the nine-hours-a-day movement; he is opposed to Child Labour, and in all his relations with his hands he is humane and kindly. I look to the time when Aragon shall set a perfect pattern of what a mill-town should be. It is already quite the best I have seen.

Its healthfulness is far above the average, and its situation most fortunate.]

Not inapt here is the pagan idea of _Nous_, moving upon chaos, stirring the stagnant, unresponsive forces into motion; agitating these forces into action; the individual elements separate and go forth, each one on its definitely inspired mission. Some inevitable hour shall see the universal agitation of the vast body known as the "labouring cla.s.s." For the welfare of the whole world, may it not come whilst they are so ignorant and so down-pressed.