“I think,” she said keenly, “that united, concentrated action on the part of the cotton mill owners might make such a thing feasible; for us to try it alone would mean ruin.”

“Not ruin,” I amended; “a reduction of income.”

“Ruin,” she said, firing.  “We couldn’t compete.  To compete,” she said with the conviction of an intelligent, well-informed manufacturer, “I must have my sixty-six hours a week!”

The spirit of discontent is always abroad when false conditions exist.  Its restless presence is controlled by one spirit alone—­humanity—­when reasonably are weighed and justly decided the questions of balance between Capital and Labour.

We must believe that there is no unsolvable problem before us in considering the presence of the child in the Southern mills.

There is nothing in the essence of the subject to discourage the social economist.  The question should not be left to the decision of the private citizen.  This stuff is worth saving.  There is the making in these children of first-class citizens.  I quote from the illustrated supplement of the South Carolina State that you may see what the mill manufacturers think of the quality of the “poor white trash”: 

“The operatives in the South Carolina mills are the common people—­the bone and sinew who have left the fields to the Negroes.  They are industrious, intelligent, frugal, and have the native instincts of honesty and integrity and of fidelity which are essential to good citizenship.”

If such things are true of the mill-hands of South Carolina, it is worth while to save their children.

* * * * *

Henceforth, to my vision across the face of the modern history of labour and manufacture will eternally defile the gray, colourless column of the Southern mill-hands:  an earth-hued line of humanity—­a stream that divides not.

Here there are no stragglers.  At noon and night the pace is quick, eager.  Steady as a prison gang, it goes to food, rest and freedom.  But this alacrity is absent in the morning.  On the hem of night, the fringe of day, the march is slow and lifeless.  Many of the heads are bent and downcast; some of the faces peer forward, and sallow masks of human countenances lift, with a look set beyond the mill—­toward who can say what vain horizon!  The Stream wanders slowly toward the Houses of Labour, although whipped by invisible scourge of Need.  Without this incentive and spur, think you it would pursue a direction toward thirteen hours of toil, shut from air and sunlight and day, taking in its rank the women, the young girl and the little child?