In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were hardly worse than those now existing in the South.  Children, the tiniest and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning and, like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day’s labour; and, when they return home, “wearily fling themselves on their beds, too tired to take off their clothes.”  Many children work all night—­“in the maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere insanitary and clouded with humidity and lint.”

“It will be long,” adds Mr. Hunter in his description, “before I forget the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched forward to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form already showing the physical effects of labour.  This child, six years of age, was working twelve hours a day.”

From Mr. Spargo’s “Bitter Cry of the Children” I learn this much of the joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania: 

“For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop over the chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the coal as it moves past them.  The air is black with coal dust, and the roar of the crushers, screens and rushing mill-race of coal is deafening.  Sometimes one of the children falls into the machinery and is terribly mangled, or slips into the chute and is smothered to death.  Many children are killed in this way.  Many others, after a time, contract coal-miners asthma and consumption, which gradually undermine their health.  Breathing continually day after day the clouds of coal dust, their lungs become black and choked with small particles of anthracite....”

In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F.  Carey tells how little naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York millionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats, in a bath of chemicals that bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....

Altogether it would seem that at least one million and a half children are growing up in the United States of America stunted and practically uneducated because of unregulated industrialism.  These children, ill-fed, ill-trained mentally benighted, since they are alive and active, since they are an active and positive and not a negative evil, are even more ominous in the American outlook than those five and sixty million of good race and sound upbringing who will now never be born.

Sec. 5

It must be repeated that the American tradition is really the tradition of one particular ingredient in this great admixture and stirring up of peoples.  This ingredient is the Colonial British, whose seventeenth century Puritanism and eighteenth century mercantile radicalism and rationalism manifestly furnished all the stuff out of which the American tradition is made.  It is this stuff planted in virgin soil and inflated to an immense and buoyant optimism by colossal and