"Why do they have so many boys around these places?" queried Hamilton of the workman he had been watching.
"Have to, they say," the glass-blower replied, "cheap bottles mean cheap labor. No one ever expects to pay anything for a bottle--that is thrown in with everything liquid you buy. The manufacturer's got to make his little profit somewhere an' in a cheap bottle he makes it by employin' young boys cheap an' workin' 'em till they drop."
"No need to do it even here," he said. "It takes money, though, to put in an endless belt to carry the bottles to the annealin' oven. The big fact'ries mostly have 'em, but there are plenty o' places like this in small towns where everythin' is done on a cheap scale, an' a boy's labor is about the cheapes' thing in the United States--unless it's a girl's."
Seeing that the glass-blower was being delayed in his task, Hamilton sauntered away, and went back to the place where the "crusader" worked. The latter broke out again as soon as he saw the boy coming.
"I've been talkin' to you about children workin'," he said, "but you haven't thought of babies bein' made to work?"
"But they couldn't do any real work!" exclaimed Hamilton.
"Do you know what one factory owner in the South said, not knowin' he was talkin' to a member o' the child-labor commission? He said 'A kid three year old can soon learn to straighten out tobacco leaves for wrappers, and a little worker of four is good help in stripping.'"
"Of course,--an' the children find it so hard to keep up that they are taught to chew snuff--as a stimulant--before they are six year old. Jane Addams, writin' o' the torture chambers they call cotton mills in parts o' the South, said she saw on the night shift, with her teeth all blackened and decayed from excessive snuff chewin', a little girl o' five year old, busily and clumsily tyin' threads in coarse muslin, an' answerin' a question she said she had been there every night throughout the hot summer excep' two, when 'her legs and back wouldn't let her get up.' An' what do you suppose the fact'ry owner did--send a physician? No, he docked her the two days' wages for the time she'd been away ill, an' another day's fine as a punishment."
"That's brutal!" cried Hamilton. "Didn't the parents protest?"