mother at home with the little ones while he earned food and clothing, it would go hard with that family. With all these small children being fed into competition with him, he will be lucky not to be forced to the wall.

A cotton mill, as it is generally run in my state, is an institution designed for a man of a family of three to six boys and girls, twelve to eighteen years of age. He can put them to work and rest the balance of his life. Often, too often, this is what he does.

I have hastily run over the defense. This has been a hard fight. It will be harder. Slowly our people are being aroused. There is just one more job awaiting somebody-that of shaking up the mill operatives. This is a man's job. The sooner these people are made to realize that all is not well with them, the better. They must learn this lesson. It should have been taught them long ago.

Somehow, I feel that the mountain man can help in this. Back there he is learning to do it. Amidst stern problems, and often in dire poverty, he has learned, and knows well that a child was never born to support the family during infancy. It is only when he is lured away by deceptive stories of much money to be had by family work that he loses his mountain independence. It is a shame for him to be thus tempted.

In a valley between the Blue Ridge and the mountains further to the west, there lie one hundred acres of mountain land. A man, now old, walks daily over this mountain farm. He is the father of ten children. As earners of money in a mill, this family, working as mill families work, at any time during the past twenty years would have given him an average income of fifty to a hundred dollars a month, even if he himself became a mill vagrant. Instead, he with his good wife have fought it out on his own little farm, counting no sacrifice for their children great. Their children are all strong, every one of them has a fair education. One son owns his mountain farm. Two others are living out strong lives in Western Canada. One sister is married and has her own home in Tennessee. Another sister is a skilled nurse in a leading hospital. Stil! another will be graduated from one of our educational institutions this year. The younger boys are on the farm, while I, the oldest son of this plain mountaineer, am pleading with the people of my state to see to it that every boy and girl has his or her chance in life and gets at least an opportunity to grow as boys

and girls should grow. Think you, thinks any man, that my father had better have gone to the mill? He and his people are the plain mountain folk.

I know the man with a house of one room. I have grown up with his boys. I know the hardships of that life. Many of us are poor. There are worse things than poverty. It would give me great sorrow to see my people begin to move from their mountain homes to our mills. Before any man starts, he must have already made up his mind to throw the burden of family support upon the shoulders of his wife or his children. When a mountain man decides to do this, he has lost the best part of him. Men don't hire out their children in my mountain county, and the average of intelligence is better than that of any mill village known to me.

I can recall now men and women, children of a widow left with nothing. They fought it out. They are excellent citizens. They are proud of their own progress.

I tell you that in my native county no farmer would be suffered to put his children and his wife out to work all night long. His neighbors would not allow such a thing to be. Nor would any man stand well if he made his crop by working women and children.

The average mountain renter raises his family, gives them plenty of food and clothing, and rarely ever hires one out under fourteen. The mother stays at home with the little ones. grow to be strong men and women.

They

If in any state there is a necessity for violating these principles which the average mountaineer knows to be wrong, it is evidence of the need of reformation. If men are thus undermining the ideals. of family responsibility-and these mill men are-it is time now to investigate, and investigate fully. There is something wrong.

Perhaps I can make it clear by making it personal. I have three boys. Under our present laws six years from now I could have two of these working in a mill. Now suppose, in the turn of the wheel of fortune, I should find myself forced to live by the daily work of my hands. I would have no land and would be forced to rent. Understand that I know the mountains and the life, and I know the best side of the mill life. I live next to the best cotton mill in North Carolina.

There would be no question with me. I'd go directly to the

hills where my boys would have some chance to grow. Before I'd put my boys of 12 to 14 at work in a mill either day or night, before we would put our boys there to work, depriving them of all opportunity and destroying our own ambitions for them, my wife and I will build us a cabin by the side of a mountain spring and I'll plow a brindle-bull on the Ivy-Bluffs of the barrens of the Pick-Breeches. I am sure that it would be much better for my boys. Before God, we should seek no better things for our own boy than we try to get for the other man's boy; no better things for our girl. than for the other woman's girl. There should be no line drawn. here.

Fallacy of Mill Benefits.

And yet we are told that we must not legislate for the protection of children, because the mills have done so much for the mountain people. The school and the church is sneered at and a cotton mill is offered as the cure for all social disease. We mountain people do have our problems. We have had them since first our sturdy ancestors felled the trees of the forest. We do have our poor, and even our almost worthless families; but I cannot believe that it is a good thing to teach any body of people that they should hail an opportunity to make their women and children the supporters of the family a blessing.

Granting all the good that the mills have done us, does that furnish any reason for violating an instinct that even the birds have? Your farm girl who goes wrong and drifts to the city generally wears much finer clothes, has costly fittings in her room, rides in a carriage and, for a time, has money to burn. Does any sensible person offer these as a plea for the conditions in which she lives? There is just about as much reason for the latter as for the former. Neither ought to be.

And yet, these arguments have had a great influence with our people, especially with our legislators. Of all states in the American Union, North Carolina changes perhaps most slowly. That certain conditions have been is proof to many of our people that they ought to be. Many of our leaders stand firm upon this proposition. This makes all reform up-hill pulling.

But I want to promise you one thing, and this whether the National Child Labor Committee feels it wise to help longer in North

Many of us Our men and

Carolina or not: these reforms are going to come. recognize that there has to be some fighting done. our women, many of them, are ready for the fray. We are anxious to get into it. And we are going to win. God has given us everything that makes for a good life. It is possible for all of us to live without making beasts of burden of our women and children. The only reason why we do make these work is because one part of our people are getting too much, and others too little. It is up to us to change this, and we will change it. It may take years to force the change, but the change will be made.

CANNERIES.

LEWIS W. HINE, New York,

Staff Photographer, National Child Labor Committee.

I wish to present to you a phase of child labor, serious in the extreme, and I hope a little careful consideration will give you an accurate, sympathetic view of the situation.

The two chief sections engaged in the work of canning oysters and shrimp are first the Gulf Coast from New Orleans eastward to Florida, and second the Atlantic Coast of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Maryland was the pioneer state, but it has already been outstripped by Mississippi, and several other states are following close in the annual output.

When we speak of child labor in oyster canning, we refer to the cooked or "cove" oysters, not to the raw ones. Children are not used in opening raw oysters for the sole reason that their fingers are not strong enough. Occasionally one finds young boys at work on the boats dredging for oysters, but not many children work on the boats; for that is a man's job.

Every year, about October, hundreds (some authorities say thousands) of Polish and Bohemian people are herded together by various bosses or "padrones" and shipped over to the southern coasts by train and by boat. You may imagine that the long ride in the crowded day coach or on the boats is not without its hardships, and every day of the long six months of their stay is crowded with discomfort, hardship and peril.

First they move into the shacks provided by the company. We are told by one of the canners, "We give these people all the modern conveniences. They have an artesian well. What more can we do?" But one becomes skeptical when inconveniences and insanitary conditions are so much in the majority. If there were no cold or wet weather in these parts, if waste and sewage were