I must qualify a little.  One member of the working class there was on whom my cheap clothes had a chilling effect—­the spoiled creature of the traveling rich, a Pullman car porter on the train from Boston to New York!  Although I called him first and purposely gave him my order in time, he viewed me askance and served me the last of all.  As I watched my companions in their furs and handsome attire eat, whilst I sat and waited, my woolen gloves folded in my lap, I wondered if any one of the favoured was as hungry, as famished as the presser from Parsons’, the cleaner from Marches’.

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THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

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CHAPTER VIII

THE SOUTHERN COTTON MILLS

THE MILL VILLAGE

Columbia, South Carolina, of course is conscious that there are mills without its city precincts.  It is proud of the manufacture that gives the city precedence and commercial value all over the world.  The trolley runs to the mills empty, as a rule, after the union depot is passed.

Frankly, what is there to be seen in these dusty suburbs?  Entry to the mills themselves is difficult, if not absolutely impossible.  And that which forms the background for the vast buildings, the Mill Village, is a section to be shunned like the plague.  Plague is not too strong a word to apply to the pest-ridden, epidemic-filled, filthy settlement where in this part of the country the mill-hand lives, moves and has his being, horrible honeycomb of lives, shocking morals and decency.

Around Columbia there lie five mills and their respective settlements—­Excelsior, the Granton, Calcutta, the Richland and the Capital City.  Each of these mills boasts its own so-called town.  When these people are free on Saturday afternoon and Sunday they are too exhausted to do anything but turn into their hovels to sleep.  At most on Saturday afternoons or Sundays they board a trolley and betake themselves to a distant park which, in the picturesque descriptions of Columbia, reads like an Arcadia and is in reality desolation.

The mill-hands are not from the direct section of Columbia.  They are strangers brought in from “the hills” by the agents of the company, who go hither and thither through the different parts of the country describing to the poor whites and the hill dwellers work in the mills as a way to riches and success.  Filled with dreams of gain and possessions, with hopes of decent housing and schooling for their children, they leave their distant communities and troop to the mills.  These immigrants are picturesque, touching to see.  They come with all they own in the world on their backs or in their hands; penniless; burrs and twigs often in the hair of the young girls.  They are hatless, barefooted, ignorant; innocent for