For the annals of morality and decency do not take up this faithful account and picture the cotton-mill village.  You will not find it in these scenes drawn from the life as it is at this hour, as it is portrayed by the words that the very people themselves will pour into your ears.  Under the walls of Calcutta Negroes are engaged in laying prospective flower beds, so that the thirteen-hour workers may look out from time to time and see the forms of flowers.  On the other side rise some twenty shanties.  These houses of Calcutta village are very small, built from the roughest unpainted boards.  Here it is, in this little settlement, that the knife comes flashing out at a word—­that the women shoot as well as men, and perhaps more quickly.

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“Richmond aint so bad as the other!” I can hear Mrs. Foster drawl out this recommendation to us.  “They ain’t so much chills here.  We dun move up from town first; had to—­too high rents for we-all; now we dun stay hyar.  Why, some of the gyrls and boys works to Granton and bo’ds hyar; seems like it’s mo’ healthy.”

Moving, ambulant population! tramping from hill to hill, from sand-heap to sand-heap to escape the slow or quick death, to prolong the toiling, bitter existence—­pilgrims of eternal hope; born in the belief, in the sane and wholesome creed that, no matter what the horror is, no matter what the burden’s weight must be, one must live!  It takes a great deal to wake in these inexpressive, indifferent faces illumination of interest.  At what should they rejoice?

I have made the destitution of beauty clear.  I believe there is an absolute lack of every form or sight that might inspire or cause a soul to awake.  There is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from labour.  There should be a complete readjustment of this system.  I have been interested in reading in the New York Sun of April 20th of the visit of the bishops to the model factories in Ohio.  I am constrained to wish that bishops and clergy and philanthropists and millionaires and capitalists might visit in bodies and separately the mills of South Carolina and their tenement population.  It is difficult to know just what the ideas are of the people who have constructed these dwellings.  They tell us in this same prospectus, which I have read with interest after my personal experience, that these villages are “picturesque.”  This is the only reference I find to the people and their conditions.  I have seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these places without prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the Southern country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people’s existence.  The ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to destruction before the scales swing even.

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