“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 here, an’ even an Indian chief that they were showin’ the sights of our great cities to, when asked what had surprised him most, answered, ‘Little—­children—­workin’.’”

“You mean it is peculiar to America?  That there is really more of it here than in Europe?” asked Hamilton incredulously.

“More?  There’s none there like there is here.  An’ it’s gettin’ worse all the time, worse this year than last year, worse last year than ten years ago.  ‘Child-labor,’ somebody says, ’has about it no halo of antiquity.  It is a thing of yesterday, a sudden toadstool in the infernal garden.’  It is all our own,” he laughed harshly, “let us be proud of it.”

“How many children did you say?” asked Hamilton tersely, staggered and shocked by this statement of the facts of the case.

“Enough to sink the land in shame,” the speaker declared.  “There were a trifle over a hundred thousand children between the ages of six and fourteen workin’ in the fact’ries of America last year.  The figures showed that over half of ’em were workin’ more’n eight hours a day, that a large percentage were workin’ twelve to sixteen hours, an’ twenty-two thousand of ’em are at night work.”