“Is it done this way everywhere?”

The workman shook his head.

“No need to do it even here,” he said.  “It takes money, though, to put in an endless belt to carry the bottles to the annealin’ oven.  The big fact’ries mostly have ’em, but there are plenty o’ places like this in small towns where everythin’ is done on a cheap scale, an’ a boy’s labor is about the cheapes’ thing in the United States—­unless it’s a girl’s.”

Seeing that the glass-blower was being delayed in his task, Hamilton sauntered away, and went back to the place where the “crusader” worked.  The latter broke out again as soon as he saw the boy coming.

“I’ve been talkin’ to you about children workin’,” he said, “but you haven’t thought of babies bein’ made to work?”

“Babies!”

“Of four an’ five years old.”

“But they couldn’t do any real work!” exclaimed Hamilton.

“Do you know what one factory owner in the South said, not knowin’ he was talkin’ to a member o’ the child-labor commission?  He said ’A kid three year old can soon learn to straighten out tobacco leaves for wrappers, and a little worker of four is good help in stripping.’”

“In a cigar factory?”

“Of course,—­an’ the children find it so hard to keep up that they are taught to chew snuff—­as a stimulant—­before they are six year old.  Jane Addams, writin’ o’ the torture chambers they call cotton mills in parts o’ the South, said she saw on the night shift, with her teeth all blackened and decayed from excessive snuff chewin’, a little girl o’ five year old, busily and clumsily tyin’ threads in coarse muslin, an’ answerin’ a question she said she had been there every night throughout the hot summer excep’ two, when ’her legs and back wouldn’t let her get up.’  An’ what do you suppose the fact’ry owner did—­send a physician?  No, he docked her the two days’ wages for the time she’d been away ill, an’ another day’s fine as a punishment.”

“That’s brutal!” cried Hamilton.  “Didn’t the parents protest?”

“The parents?  That’s where the mill-owners have their strongest help.  They threaten to discharge the parents if the children don’t work an’ work hard, and they force the father or mother into whippin’ the child to compel it to stay at the loom.  The whole country went to war once over the question of a negro havin’ to work under compulsion,—­or at least, that had quite a bit to do with the war,—­but you can enslave white children, you can starve ’em, you can shut ’em up in rooms without air, you can surround ’em with dangerous machinery, you can force ’em to be whipped, you can snatch ’em from their cradles in their homes, you can snap your fingers at the schools, an’ you can fill churchyards with a worse Massacre o’ the Innocents than history ever tells about, an’ the men and women of America don’t care.”

[Illustration:  “I ’AIN’T SEEN DAYLIGHT FOR TWO YEARS.”  Trapper boy working a twelve-hour day below ground, often too tired to go up in the cage at the end of the day and sleeping on the ground beside the track. (Courtesy of the Ridgway Co.)]