In the United States 80,000 children are toiling out their lives in the textile mills alone.  In the South they work twelve-hour shifts.  They never see the day.  Those on the night shift are asleep when the sun pours its life and warmth over the world, while those on the day shift are at the machines before dawn and return to their miserable dens, called “homes,” after dark.  Many receive no more than ten cents a day.  There are babies who work for five and six cents a day.  Those who work on the night shift are often kept awake by having cold water dashed in their faces.  There are children six years of age who have already to their credit eleven months’ work on the night shift.  When they become sick, and are unable to rise from their beds to go to work, there are men employed to go on horseback from house to house, and cajole and bully them into arising and going to work.  Ten per cent of them contract active consumption.  All are puny wrecks, distorted, stunted, mind and body.  Elbert Hubbard says of the child-labourers of the Southern cotton-mills: 

“I thought to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain his weight.  Straightaway through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bones there ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken thread.  I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a silver dime.  He looked at me dumbly from a face that might have belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of pain it was.  He did not reach for the money—­he did not know what it was.  There were dozens of such children in this particular mill.  A physician who was with me said that they would all be dead probably in two years, and their places filled by others—­there were plenty more.  Pneumonia carries off most of them.  Their systems are ripe for disease, and when it comes there is no rebound—­no response.  Medicine simply does not act—­nature is whipped, beaten, discouraged, and the child sinks into a stupor and dies.”

So fares modern man and the child of modern man in the United States, most prosperous and enlightened of all countries on earth.  It must be remembered that the instances given are instances only, but they can be multiplied myriads of times.  It must also be remembered that what is true of the United States is true of all the civilized world.  Such misery was not true of the caveman.  Then what has happened?  Has the hostile environment of the caveman grown more hostile for his descendants?  Has the caveman’s natural efficiency of 1 for food-getting and shelter-getting diminished in modern man to one-half or one-quarter?

On the contrary, the hostile environment of the caveman has been destroyed.  For modern man it no longer exists.  All carnivorous enemies, the daily menace of the younger world, have been killed off.  Many of the species of prey have become extinct.  Here and there, in secluded portions of the world, still linger a few of man’s fiercer enemies.  But they are far from being a menace to mankind.  Modern man, when he wants recreation and change, goes to the secluded portions of the world for a hunt.  Also, in idle moments, he wails regretfully at the passing of the “big game,” which he knows in the not distant future will disappear from the earth.