stores from which she has been getting her food and coal and what gewgaws the cheap stuff on sale may tempt her to purchase.  There is a book of coupons issued by the mill owners which are as good as gold.  It is good at the stores, good for the rent, and her time is served out in pay for this representative currency.  This is of course not obligatory, but many of the operatives avail themselves or bind themselves by it.  When the people are ill, Jones says, they are docked for wages.  When, for indisposition or fatigue, they knock a day off, there is a man, hired especially for this purpose, who rides from house to house to find out what is the matter with them, to urge them to rise, and if they are not literally too sick to move, they are hounded out of their beds and back to their looms.

Jones himself, mark you, is emancipated!  He has set himself free; but he is still a too-evident although a very innocent partisan of the corporation.

[Illustration:  “THE SOUTHERN MILL HAND’S FACE IS UNIQUE, A FEARFUL TYPE”]

“I think,” he says, “that the mill-hand is meaner to the corporation than the corporation is to the mill-hand.”

“Why?”

“Why, they would strike for shorter hours and better pay.”

Unconsciously with one word he condemns his own cause.

“What’s the use of these hyar mill-hands tryin’ to fight corporations?  Why, Excelsior is the biggest mill under one roof in the world; its capital is over a million; it has 24,500 spindles.  The men that run these mills have got all their stuff paid for; they’ve got piles of money.  What do they care for a few penniless lot of strikers?  They can shut down and not feel it.  Why, these hyar people might just as well fight against a stone wall.”

The wages of these people, remember, pay Jones for the organs upon which they cannot play and the machines which they cannot use.  His home is a mill corporation house; he makes a neat sum by lodging the hands.  He has fetched down from the hills Molly, his own niece, to work for him.  He perforce will speak well.  I do not blame him.

He is by all means the most respectable-looking member of the colony.  He wears store clothes; he dresses neatly; he is shaven, brushed and washed.

“Don’t you let the mill hands discourage you with lies about the mill.  Any of ’em would be jealous of you-all.”  Then he warns, again forced to plead for another side:  “You-all won’t come out as you go in, I tell you!  You’re the picture of health.  Why,” he continues, a little later, “you ain’t got no idea how light-minded the mill-girl is.  Why, in the summer time she’ll trolley four or five miles to a dance-hall they’ve got down to ——­ and dance there till four o’clock—­come home just in time to get into the mills at 5:45.”  Which fact convinces me of nothing but that the women are still, despite their condition and their white slavery, human beings, and many of them are young human beings (Thank God, for it is a prophecy for their future!) not yet crushed to the dumb endurance of beasts.