and Pennsyvlania, for the reason that on account of the low wages of the textile industries, as compared with the skilled trades where the labor of adult men is desired, there has been a series of changes in the nationality of the cotton mill operatives. The native Americans soon left the cotton mills for industries presenting better conditions as to hours and wages. Their place was taken by English and Irish and Scotch immigrants. These in turn have gone into other employments and have been succeeded by the French Canadians, the Portuguese and the Greeks.

But in the South, it is the same English stock that has degenerated in England with which we are concerned. The negro has proved a failure thus far as a mill operative. There is no immediate prospect of foreign immigration for the South. And the process of deterioration is now going on. There has already developed a cotton-mill type. Lieutenant-Governor Winston, of North Carolina, has said that in his career on the bench, as a Superior Court Judge, he could recognize a man from the cotton mills as soon as he came into the court room, and he personally opposed the erection of a cotton mill in his home town as a detriment to the community under the existing child labor system.

A young South Carolinian, recently returned from military service in the Philippines, has the same story to tell about the inability of the recruiting officers to find suitable material for soldiers in the cotton mill communities of his State. "The employment of children in factories . . . . depreciates the human stock" to revert to our text.

We presume that there is no controversy over the statement that "whatever interferes with the proper education and nurture of the child contradicts the best interests of the nation." Says the Manufacturers' Record, the most conspicuous opponent of child labor legislation in this country, in its issue of January 30, 1908: "The cotton mills of the South have been the most efficient agencies for education in the South in the past twenty-five or thirty years." Let us examine that state

ment.

There is now being conducted a federal investigation of the labor of children and women in industry and the report of the

Bureau of Labor may confirm or may upset the theories that have been based on the census statistics of 1900. The enactment of child labor laws in all the Southern States (for at this writing it seems probable that Mississippi will adopt one at the present legislative session), although these laws have been for the most part rendered ineffective by numerous exemptions, the want of compulsory education, and the absence of factory inspection, has tended to the improvement of conditions. Public sentiment is a powerful influence with the class of men in the South who own and control the textile industry and the putting upon the statute books of the simple principle of State regulation of child labor has had an excellent moral effect Nevertheless, it is a matter of common knowledge that these laws have been almost universally violated, both in letter and in spirit, and the statistics of 1900 are the only authoritative ones to which we can appeal.

The statistics show that in Georgia and the two Carolinas, the centre of the cotton mill industry in the South, one cotton mill operative out of three was from ten to fifteen years of age. For these three States 997 children under ten were reported by the enumerators as at work in the mills, though their instructions. did not call for such reports. In the Northern States, the proportion of children workers to adults was one to ten. The Blue Book, a textile directory corrected annually, showed in 1907, 209,000 operatives. Thirty per cent of this number would be 62,700! When the absence of birth records are considered, the desire of parents to put their children to work that they "may subsist by the oppression of their offspring," the demand for labor in the mills that has often rendered it impossible to secure sufficient adult help, and the complaisance of factory superintendents at admitting children under age when their parents say that they are over the legal age, it is certainly within the bounds of probability that there are sixty thousand children under fourteen years of age. A recent investigation of over half the cotton mills of Mississippi disclosed the fact that on a most conservative estimate twenty-five per cent of the operatives were under fourteen. In one mill the percentage was as high as forty per cent. A recent most friendly investigation of South Carolina

mills showed 1,500 children employed under twelve years of age.

And now for the consideration of the cotton mill as the promoter of education. It is true that many of the larger and more successful mills have done a great deal that they were not obliged to do in the building of school-houses and the payment of the salaries of teachers. Although this is also true, that if they had allowed the extra tax for school purposes which many Southern communities have voted upon themselves, they would have had to pay considerably more for education -- charity thus becoming an economy. But what boots it to build schools and employ teachers if the mill all the time makes its imperative demand for the labor of the children and empties the schools of the children?

The census figures show that in North Carolina the general white illiteracy for children from ten to fourteen years of age is 16.6 per cent. But the illiteracy of the factory children between these ages is 50 per cent. In South Carolina the corresponding figures are 14.8 per cent and 48.5 per cent. In Georgia, 10.4 per cent and 44 per cent. That is, the illiteracy of the children from ten to fourteen years of age in the factory families is from three to four times as great as the illiteracy of the white children in the State at large. Moreover, the general percentage of illiteracy includes that of the mill villages. Considering the numbers of the children now gathered at the factories it is hardly too much to say that the problem of white illiteracy could be solved for our generation if the children of the factories were sent to school. In the investigation just mentioned of the cotton mills of Mississippi, in 1907, fifty per cent of the children were found to be illiterate.

I visited a typical country cotton mill in Georgia before the enactment of the Georgia child labor law. The school had been built by the corporation and a large part of the teachers' salaries was paid from the corporation's funds. The enrollment was found to be ninety. The attendance averaged about thirty. The average age of the children was nine years. Twenty-two children had left the school for the mill during the session and eight of the thirty children then attending school had been at

work in the mill. Of those who had left the school for the mill one was seven, five were eight, two were nine, three were ten, four were eleven and two were twelve years of age.

It is asserted that the children of the mills have come from districts where they had no school advantages and that their illiteracy should not be charged to the mills. But these are children between the ages of ten and fifteen and one year of schooling would enable them to read "See the old hen," and prevent their being classed as illiterates! It is a painful fact to record in this connection, that when the Georgia Legislature was considering, in 1906, the present child labor bill, the Georgia Industrial Association made its main attack upon the provision requiring children under eighteen to attend school three months of one year as a prerequisite to employment the following year, and the same body of manufacturers asked the Attorney-General for an opinion whether instruction in a night school would be a compliance with this provision of the law as passed. The Attorney-General made answer that in his opinion the Legislature was aiming at the protection of the children, not their destruction, and he considered that the requirement that the children attend school at night after working twelve hours a day tended to their destruction.

It should be said in justice that a few conspicuous mills are encouraging the education of children by all the means in their power, and that the manufacturers of North and South Carolina have advocated compulsory education up to twelve years of age. But the very fact that these few mills are always mentioned in the apologies for the child labor evil is proof that they are exceptional. And while North Carolina has passed a compulsory education law by means of which any school district may vote to come under the operation of the law, I have yet to hear of any mill district so voting, and that could be easily accomplished if the mill management desired to exert its influence in that direction.

Referring again to the article of Dr. S. C. Mitchell, in the January SEWANEE REVIEW, it is my opinion that the average cotton mill community is the poorest place in the world for training the citizens of a democracy. Children shut out from school

and shut within the walls of a factory, finally becoming human machines with a weary round of labor, cut off by the long hours from association with any but their fellows, will never be fitted for self-government. The paternalism of the mill, its "benevolent feudalism," as some one has called it, the very providing of schools and churches and in rare instances, of reading rooms and gymnasiums and lyceums, all the gift of the mill, are not conducive to self-help. The spirit of democracy demands justice, not charity. One mill president that I know of, Mr. Banks Holt, of North Carolina, has shown the better way. Feeling that a good graded school was a necessity in his mill village, he proposed to the people that they vote the extra tax that was needed for the erection of the school and its adequate support through a nine months' term. The tax on property had to be practically all paid by himself. The poll-tax could be paid by the employees. So a great educational rally was held, Governor Aycock and State Superintendent Joyner went to the village and spoke on the subject of education, and the people voted the extra tax upon the mill and upon themselves. And they regard it as their school and patronize it as such and respect themselves as citizens and taxpayers. Fraternalism is better than paternalism.

Perhaps the most serious indictment that can be brought against the child labor system is that it "destroys homes." Child labor and the labor of women are always associated. The adult man has in large measure won his fight for shorter hours and higher wages in those industries that demand his brawn and skill. He is therefore able to support his family, keep the wife and mother at her task of home-making, and send the children to school. But when the wages are measured by the ability of the child to perform the work required, the whole family, except the very youngest, must be employed. The worker in a steel mill in Birmingham makes as great a wage as the whole family can make in a cotton mill in the same city. It seems to be an economic law that the system of family labor produces just so much and no more in wages as the system of adult male labor. And where the family is large, the temptation to idleness on the part of the parent becomes irresistible. Vagrancy laws have been passed by several Southern States, but these are and will