formed—­ignorance is ingrained; indeed, after a few years they are so vitally reduced that if you will you cannot teach them.  Are these little American children, then, to have no books but labour?  No recreation?  To be crushed out of life to satisfy the ignorance and greed of their parents, the greed of the manufacturers?  Whatever else we are, we are financiers per se.  The fact that to-day, as for years past, Southern cotton mills are employing the labour of children under tender age—­employing an army of them to the number of twenty thousand under twelve—­can only be explained by a frank admittal that infantile labour has been considered advantageous to the cause of gain.

This gain, apparent by the facts that a mill can be run for thousands of dollars less in the South than a like mill can be run in the North, and its net surplus profits be the same as those of the Northern manufactory, is one by which one generation alone will profit.  The attractiveness of the figures is fallacious.  What I imply is self-evident.  The infant population (its numbers give it a right to this dignity of term) whose cheap toil feeds the mills is doomed.  I mean to say that the rank and file of humanity are daily weeded out; that thousands of possibly strong, healthy, mature labouring men and women are being disease-stricken, hounded out of life; the cotton mill child cannot develop to the strong normal adult working-man and woman.  The fiber exhausted in the young body cannot be recreated.  Early death carries hundreds out of life, disease rots the remainder, and the dulled maturity attained by a creature whose life has been passed in this labour is not fit to propagate the species.

The excessively low wages paid these little mill-hands keep under, of necessity, the wage paid the grown labourer.  It is a crying pity that children are equal to the task imposed upon them.  It is a crying pity that machines (since they have appeared, with their extended, all-absorbing power) should not do all!  Particularly in the Southern States do they evince, at a fatal point, their limit, display their inadequacy.  When babies can be employed successfully for thirteen hours out of the twenty-four at all machines with men and women; when infants feeds mechanism with labour that has not one elevating, humanizing effect upon them physically or mentally, it places human intelligence below par and cheapens and distorts the nobler forms of toil.  Not only is it “no disgrace to work,” but on the contrary it is a splendid thing to be able to labour, and those who gain their bread by the sweat of their brow are not the servants of mankind in the sense of the term, but the patriarchs and controllers of the world’s march and the most subtle signs of the times.  But there are distinctly fitnesses of labour, and the proper presentation to the working-man and woman and child is a consideration.

No one to-day would be likely for an instant to concede that to replace the treadmill horse with a child (a thing often seen and practised in times past) would be an advantage.  And yet the march of the child up and down before its spooling frame is more suggestive of an animal—­of the dog hitched to the Belgian milk cart; of the horse on the mill-tread—­than another analogy.