are not now, under the competitive system, able to support those children according to our standards, then the remnant of widows would be a much more manageable portion of the population than the whole body of mothers now dependent upon the state or the community bids fair to be.

It is idle for us to pretend that money taken out of the taxes and given to widows who have been deprived of their breadwinners is not charity. Of course, it is charity; it is public charity. If we take it by begging from the pockets of philanthropists that is private charity. But if we collect it from the industry that has wrought the havoc, that is not charity; that is the merest justice. It is giving the children and families compensation for the loss of their breadwinner, not for the loss of their father as a father.

I am sorry that my own favorite measure which I have been advocating for twenty years has been dislocated from its relation to workmen's compensation and minimum wages boards, so that it gets discussed without regard to these. However, until we get them, I think the more we push the subject of education by means of public funds the better it is for the children.

The Remedy.

Most of these dependent parents, as I have said, are mothers. We think of them, sometimes, perhaps, with pity, but mostly we do not think of them at all. And I believe the reason that they are there is that society has not been compelled to think of them at all. They themselves have had nothing whatever to say about the laws surrounding industry-industrial insurance laws, or the absence of insurance laws, employer's liability laws, workmen's compensation laws, child labor laws, compulsory education laws. In all the states in which the conditions are worst for the children-in Pennsylvania and in all the southern states, the mothers do not have to be consulted about the children or about the laws. They simply provide the children and take the consequences. I believe that this will continue until, throughout our whole Republic, the responsibility for dealing with this complicated problem, this whole child labor problem, including the child breadwinner and the deserting father and the disabled father, is shared by the mothers, and they cease to be as politically dependent as their breadwinning children.

FEUDALISM.

A. J. MCKELWAY, Washington, D. C.,
Southern Secretary, National Child Labor Committee.

"We work in his mill. We live in his houses. Our children go to his school. And on Sunday we go to hear his preacher." This is the pathetic plaint of the cotton mill workers of North Carolina, spoken more than once to our agent in North Carolina. It is refreshing to observe that at least the system of feudalism is recognized by the workers themselves. The expression we have quoted might be amplified with regard to some twenty or twenty-five mills in the South that are invariably advertised for their betterment work, with a significant silence as to the 700 other cotton mills that merely bask in the reflected glory of the "show mills." "We also go to his Y. M. C. A. when he has built one. We spend our leisure time, after the eleven-hour day, those of us who can read, in his reading Our children play in his streets. Our cow sleeps in his stable. We are sent to his store to buy our goods. When we are sick, or hurt in the mill, we go to his hospital. We are arrested by his constable, and tried by his magistrate. And when we die we are buried in his cemetery."

room.

I have been assigned the discussion of two apparently unrelated subjects: Child Wages in the Cotton Mill, and Our Modern Feudalism. As a matter of fact, the two themes are as closely related as cause and effect, as I shall undertake to prove.

The children of the cotton mills whom we undertake to bring within the operation of the law prohibiting their employment are the children under fourteen years of age. They are employed mainly in the spinning rooms, and are principally spinners, doffers, band boys and sweepers. Children under fourteen have been found in other operations of the cotton mills, girl spinners sometimes graduating into weavers and boys occasionally found at the warping machine. The doffer boys work intermittently and much has been made of the fact that when they have replaced the empty spools

with full ones, they can go out into the mill yard and play marbles. Nothing is said of the eleven-hour day, preventing all attendance at school by day, and making the night school oftentimes an added cruelty to tired and sleepy children. And nothing is ever said of the girl spinners who do not work intermittently but must ever be on the alert to watch the spinning frames and tie the broken threads.

Mr. R. M. Miller, Jr., of Charlotte, N. C., who recently appeared before the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives to plead for protection against the competition of the "pauper labor of Europe" in the manufacture of cotton goods, once went into print to say, in opposition to a child labor bill which proposed the raising of the age-limit for girls only, from twelve to fourteen years of age, that 75 per cent. of the spinners of North Carolina were fourteen years old or under. It is one of the traditions of the cotton mill in the South, that spinning is work for girls, not for boys or women. And that tradition of the industry is directly in the face of all the teachings of medical science, as to the necessity for the especial care and protection of young girls at that period of life. Think of your own girls, fathers and mothers, standing at a spinning frame for eleven hours a day, or some. times a night! Of 295 spinners found under 12 in Southern mills, 246 were girls.

Children's Wages High.

Now the wages which these children get, the doffers and spinners, are not low, considering the fact that it is child's work. The wages are comparatively high, considering the ages of the children. The Federal Bureau of Labor found in 1908-9, in the Southern mills that were investigated, the agents being required to prove the ages of the children, 17 children 7 years of age, 48 of eight years, 107 of nine, 283 of ten and 494 of eleven years of age. There is not much remunerative work that children from seven to eleven years can do in the South, not very much that children 12 to 14 years can do.

In a representative South Carolina cotton mill,

doffers of 12 years were paid $3.54 per week
doffers of 13 years were paid
doffers of 14 years were paid
doffers of 15 years were paid

3.92 per week
5.04 per week
4.75 per week

and doffers of 20 years and over were paid $2.52 per week, while the earnings of the spinners in 151 Southern mills were $4.54 a week and scrubbers and sweepers $2.96 a week. These are actual wages paid, not the wages computed for full time, which was an average of 62.7 hours per week.

Adult Wages Low.

But here is the impressive thing about the comparative wage of children and adults per week: 251 children under 12 years of age earned less than $2 per week and 731 children of twelve and thirteen earned less than $2 per week. But there were 1,700 workers from 14 to 20 years of age who earned less than $2 per week. And 1,085 operatives twenty-one years of age and over who earned less than $2 a week. There were more girls from 18 to 20 years of age earning less than $2 per week than there were of girls from 14 to 15 earning less than $2. There were 1,733 children under 16 who made from two to three dollars a week and there was almost an equal number, 1,712 workers, sixteen years and over, who earned the same wages. Children under 16 earning from three to four dollars a week numbered 2,426, and those from 16 to 21 and over earning from three to four dollars a week numbered 2,597.

Out of 32,409 workers in the cotton mills, whose actual wages per week were copied from the pay rolls, only 1,444 earned from $8.00 to $9.00 a week, and one of these was a boy and one a girl under 12 years of age. And when we come to the $12 limit, only 54 women out of 17,066 earned from $11 to $12 a week, and one of these was a girl under 16 years of age, while 241 men out of 14,000 reached that wage and one of these was a boy under 16.

I know of no employment in the South for girls under 14 that pays so well as work in the cotton mill, and only one employment for boys, the demoralizing messenger service which is vile for the night shift and bad for the day shift from association with the boys who work at night. And their wages are increased by the tips they get for serving the denizens of the underworld. But the facts driven home by these unquestioned figures is that the wages of children are high as compared with the wages of the adult workers. The same general result is shown, though with higher ages for children and a slightly higher scale of wages, for the New England mills.

Here is the temptation which the cotton mill in its long childenslaving history, in Old England, in New England, in Pennsylvania and the South has set in the way of ignorant, indifferent or povertystricken parents. And who are mainly responsible for this-the employers, enlightened and educated men, able to read and to appreciate the full consequences of the child-labor system to the children, to the country and to democracy itself? Or the parent who supplies the demand which the cotton manufacturer creates? Whom does the enlightened conscience of mankind hold responsible for the introduction of African slavery into America and the British possessions to-day? The African chief who sold his people, already slaves to his lordly will, or the British or New England slavetrader who bought them and transported them?

And now perhaps we begin to see the relation between the comparatively high wages that the children receive and our modern system of feudalism. Why is it that a thousand workers 21 years and over out of 3,700 earn less than $2 a week in the cotton mills? It is because a thousand children under 14 can earn just as much. When the child can do the man's job or the woman's job, the man or woman must lose the job or take the wages that are paid the child. There is no escape from that conclusion. If there is anything the matter with the logic of the argument, I should like to have it pointed out.

When 17,517, more than half the employes whose wages were reported, earn less than $5.00 a week, I know they earn that smali sum because out of the 17,517, there are 7,825 children under 16 who earn the same wages. In any child-employing industry the wages of the adult are measured by the wages of the child.

The children are offered wages that are high for a child and the children are employed, 40,000 of them in the cotton mill industry according to the manufacturers' own figures in 1909, as reported by the Census Bureau. The labor unions have known for a long time that child labor depresses wages. They are charged with selfishness in their advocacy of child labor reform. Even if that be true, I had rather see a man selfishly on the right side of a humane question than selfishly on the wrong side of it. I pay the cotton manufacturer the compliment of supposing that he is as intelligent as the trade unionist. Then he knows that child labor depresses wages and he holds on to the children whom he employs for a double