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.
Pages:
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34