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Updated: June 16, 2025
The second brought it back as his fortune, then immediately sent it back for another brother to bring over, and so on until they all arrived, each proving that he was not a pauper. Yet these same brothers, each with several children, became an expense to the Government before they were earners. The children were sent to industrial homes, and later entered the sweat-shops.
Now perhaps he's caught, and his name is to be dragged in the mire, and it's my flightiness, my lack of commonsense that has done it!" "I shouldn't let that trouble me," I said. "You could not know " "Oh, it's not that! It's that I hadn't a single courageous word to say to him not a hint that he ought to refuse to wring blood-money from sweat-shops!
I will stop long enough to present an account of one industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if space permitted I could present the same sort of proof for a dozen other industries which I have studied the steel-mills of Western Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the glass-works of Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of Paterson, the cotton-mills of North Carolina, the woolen-mills of Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of Louisiana, the copper-mines of Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.
In 1895 there is still less legislation; only a statute for State arbitration, against payment of wages in store orders, against discrimination against unions, and for factory legislation may be noted. In 1896 there are a few statutes for State arbitration and weekly payment, for regulating the doctrine of fellow servants, and some legislation concerning factories and sweat-shops.
According to the census of 1900, there were over 700,000 children under sixteen years of age at work in the mills, mines, factories, and sweat-shops of the United States. Nearly all of the States had child-labor laws, but they were ordinarily poorly enforced and no State was wholly free from the blight of this child slavery.
To contrast a factory like this with some of the sweat-shops I have visited, is like contrasting heaven with hell. There may be, and I doubt not are, many other factories where the same Christian thoughtfulness is exercised in the treatment of employees, as here. Upon all such may the benediction of Heaven rest! May their numbers be multiplied!
A California law once made it a criminal offence for any person to sleep with less than one thousand feet of air in his room for his own exclusive use! It is indeed a crime to be poor. This legislation to reform sweat-shops is a field which has been almost entirely cultivated by what I have termed the moral reformers, with little or no help from organized labor.
So I went from house to house; stumbling over dirty children; climbing grimy stairs, catching glimpses of crowded sweat-shops; peering into all sorts of holes called rooms by courtesy; inhaling a hundred stenches in as many minutes; gaining an insight that sickened me into the squalid life of the quarter.
At all events, legislation may be aimed against sweat-shops which in any sense resemble factories that is, where numbers of persons not the family of the occupier are engaged in industrial labor; so in Pennsylvania it has been extended to jurisdiction over shops maintained in the back yards of tenements; while in most States the statute applies to any dwelling where any person not a member of the family is employed, and general legislation against sweat-shops already exists in the twelve north-eastern industrial States from Massachusetts to Missouri and Wisconsin, leaving out only Rhode Island.
Think of the women and little children toiling in sweat-shops; of the families without money, without hope, without food and without coal, facing the winter in such cities as Chicago and New York, while a barren empire, which you and I can transform to an Eden, waits for them there in the north," and he waved his arm toward Donnaville. "There's glory enough for us all, Mr. Carey.
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