The superintendent looked at him curiously.

“I think you told me last evening that you were a New York boy,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Wharton,” answered Hamilton.

“I suppose you consider New York a fairly progressive city?”

“Greatest on earth!” affirmed the boy in true Gotham style.

“Yet that same progressive city,” the older man declared, “is the headquarters of several forms of industry in which large percentages of the workers are children under fourteen years of age.”

“What kinds of business can those be?” asked Hamilton in surprise.

“Making ostrich plumes and artificial flowers.  It’s not factory labor, of course, but that doesn’t alter the point that at least half the output of artificial flowers is made by the cramped fingers of children, generally after school and far into the night.  They are not officially reported, of course, but less than twenty per cent is done by men.  The disgraceful fact that the New York schools are so crowded that many of them can only give ‘half-time’ to the children and consequently teach them in two sections is a great help to the sweat-shop managers.  But every city has its own share of this child labor in the homes, although in some of the smaller places, civic associations and municipalities have taken the matter in hand with considerable success.  Even that is but a drop in the ocean.”

“Your ‘crusader’ will have to lead his crusade then, it seems,” the boy suggested.

“Poor lad!” sighed the superintendent.

“Why?” asked Hamilton.

“He will never lead that crusade,” the older man replied pensively.

“Why not?”

The man tapped his chest significantly.

“He is incurably ill,” he said, “partly glass-blowers’ disease from breathing the particles of glass dust.  Men don’t mind it so much, but it is fatal to children when the lungs are not yet strong.  We keep the ‘crusader’ here in order to help him as much as we can, although he gives a lot of trouble in the works with his revolutionary theories.  I haven’t the heart to send him away; he couldn’t get other work, and being all alone in the world, he might starve.”

“You mean—­”

“That he will not live six months.  That army of boys of which he speaks so often will never go on the march, the banners he has designed for it will wave over no other battalions than those he has seen in dreams, and the drums will sound the final ‘taps’ for him before they roll for the advance.  And in that sleep, the cries of the children shall all be happy ones.”

[Illustration:  EIGHT YEARS OLD AND “TIRED OF WORKING.”  Boy in Southern cotton mill who has been employed “two summers and a winter before that.”]

CHAPTER V

“DON’T DEPORT MY OLD MOTHER!”