=Robbers of Childhood.= “Ketch,” cried a small lad as he turned with the ball in his hand just as he was entering the mill door at the end of the thirty minute noon period of freedom. The boy to whom he had called, and who had been playing ball with him during this period raised his hands preparatory to catching the ball. Then he dropped them to his side and said, “Naw, don’t throw it, else we’ll get fined for not comin’ in on time after the whistle blew.” No time for play! Thirty minutes for lunch and out of that thirty minutes these boys had taken as much as possible for a game of ball. By night they would be so tired that there would be no inclination to play. They would stand around and talk a little, or sit on the front porch for an hour after supper, and then crawl into bed and sleep until aroused by the whistle of the factory early in the morning. This was the life of these children. The only period in their lives when they might have been free was taken away from them and they were made to work in the mills of industry, grinding out the raw materials of civilization which go into the very foundation of our society, and grinding out at the same time the joy of life and the possibilities of ever being able to gain the best that life holds in store for them.
=A National Evil.= East, west, north, and south we have been robbing children on every hand. California canners deplore the conditions among the child workers in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts those who employ children find excuses for themselves in the laws of the state, and in the traditions of New England, but they have no good thing to say about conditions in the mills of the South. In the South it is easy to find men who are responsible for the children working who see nothing but good evolution of the family from bad rural conditions to a condition of comparative opulence in their mill cities, but who can see nothing good in the child labor as it is found in the coal-mines in Pennsylvania and the beet-fields of the Northwest. In Montana and Nebraska the farmer everywhere will tell you that “Nothing is so good for a child as to work in the beet-fields. It makes a man of him quicker than anything else.”