One little boy passes by with his broom; he is whistling.  I look up at the cheery sound that pierces fresh but faint and natural above the machines’ noise.  His eyes are bright; his good spirits surprise me:  here is an argument for my comfortable friends who wish to prove that the children “are happy!” I stop him.

“You seem very jolly!”

He grins.

“How long have you been working?”

“Two or three days.”

The gay creature has just begun his servitude and brings into the dreary monotony a flash of the spirit which should fill childhood.

I think it will be granted that it takes a great deal to discourage and dishearten a child.  The hopefulness of the mill communities lies in just those elements that overwork in the adult and that child labour will ultimately destroy.  When hope is gone in the adult he must wreak some vengeance on the bitter fate that has robbed him.  There is no more tragic thing than the hopeless child.  The adult who grows hopeless can affiliate with the malcontents and find in the insanity of anarchy what he calls revenge.

It seems folly to insult the common sense of the public by asking them whether they think that thirteen hours a day, with a half to three-quarters of an hour for recreation at noon, or the same amount of night-work in a mill whose atmosphere is vile with odours, humid with unhealthfulness, filled with the particles of flying cotton, a pandemonium of noise and deafening roar, so deafening that the loss of hearing is frequent and the keenness of hearing always dulled ... whether the atmosphere combined with the association of men and women whose morals or lack of morals is notorious all over the world, is good for a growing child?  Is it conducive to progressive development, to the making of decent manhood or womanhood?  What kind of citizen can this child—­if he is fit enough in the economic struggle of the world to survive—­turn out to be?  Not citizens at all:  creatures scarcely fit to be called human beings.

I asked the little girl who teaches me to spool who the man is whom I have seen riding around on horseback through the town.

“Why, he goes roun’ rousin’ up the hands who ain’t in their places.  Sometimes he takes the children outen thayre bades an’ brings ’em back to the mill.”

And if the child can stand, it spins and spools until it drops, till constitution rebels, and death, the only friend it has ever known, sets it free.

Besides being spinners and spoolers, and occasionally weavers even, the children sweep the cotton-strewed floors.  Scarcely has the miserable little object, ragged and odourous, passed me with his long broom, which he drags half-heartedly along, than the space he has swept up is cotton-strewn again.  It settles with discouraging rapidity; it has also settled on the child’s hair and clothes, and his eyelashes, and this atmosphere he breathes and fairly eats, until his lungs become diseased.  Pneumonia—­fatal in nearly all cases here—­and lung fever had been a pestilence, “a regular plague,” before I came.  There were four cases in the village where I, lived, and fever and ague, malaria and grippe did their parts.