If he went to school he was nothing but an expense.”[6] [6] “Children in Agriculture,” by Ruth McIntire, a pamphlet published by the National Child Labor Committee. =Mills, Factories, and Workshops.= With the development of the cotton-mill there was opened up a wide field for the exploitation of childhood. The spools full of thread have to be put on the machine and the empty spools removed. Boys and girls of six and eight years can do this work even better than a grown man or woman. One worker in a mill can take care of several machines, and if there is a child to care for the spools the machines can be run very economically, and the profits will be large. Children are used in works and on the breakers in the coal-mines. In one of the silver-mills in the Cœur d’Alene mining district boys stand on the platform alongside the incline down which the ore rushes in a ceaseless stream going into the breakers. As it passes down their quick eyes detect the rocks, and especially the hard round stones that get mixed up with ore. These they pick out and throw to one side. This is a boy’s job. He can do it better than a man. Thus all modern processes of industry seem to be at work to make easy the utilization of the immature and the unskilled. =Why Child Labor.= Because the machine produces so much it is possible to pay the child worker a wage that seems large in comparison to what a man would receive. The father of a boy who worked in one of the cotton-mills said, “I can make a dollar and seventy-five cents a day; but my nine-year-old kid makes anywhere from eighty cents to one dollar a day.” The quick returns from child labor appeal to the selfishness of the manufacturer as well as to the greed of the father and mother. It is not good business to have a man do anything that a machine can do; nor is it good business to put a man to work on a job that a boy can do just as well as a man. This is the dictate of business. Children are an expense, and with the increased cost of living there is always a temptation to utilize the children in the family as economic assets. “I have three children,” said a father in an Indiana town, “and all of them are working. We are about as happy a family as you want to find anywhere. Every month we are able to put a tidy sum in the savings-bank. Every member of the family is doing his or her full share. But now on the other hand, my brother has four children and not one of them is earning a cent. The oldest girl had to have a college education and that is just a drain on the family. Poor George has never known a moment’s ease or peace all of his life, what with an extravagant wife and four children eating their heads off!”