of Italian immigrants, boarded them, and paid the parents a regular weekly sum. In the mills of the South it is frequently made a condition of the employment of married men or women that all their children shall be bound to work in the same mills. The following is one of the rules posted in a South Carolina cotton mill:— “All children, members of a family, above twelve years of age, shall work regularly in the mill, and shall not be excused from service therein without the consent of the superintendent for good cause.”[143] Many times I have heard fathers and mothers—in the North as well as in the South—say that they did not want their children to work, that they could have done without the children’s wages and kept them at school a little longer, or apprenticed them to better employment, but that they were compelled to send them into the mills to work, or lose their own places. Even more eloquent as evidencing the keen demand of the manufacturers for child labor is the fact to which Mr. McKelway calls attention, that, in response to their demand, cotton-mill machinery is being made with adjustable legs to suit small child workers. Mr. McKelway rightly contrasts this with the experience in India when the first cotton mills were erected there. Then, for the first time, it was found necessary to manufacture spinning frames high enough from the floor to accommodate adult workers.[144] With such facts as these before us, it is easy to see that the urgency of the employers’ demands for child labor is an important factor in the problem. Underlying all other causes is the fundamental fact that the exploitation of the children is in the interests of the employing class. It may be urged that it is necessary for children to begin work at an early age because the work they do cannot be done by men or women, but the contention is wholly unsupported by facts. There is no work done by boys in the glass factories which men could not do; no skill or training is required to enable one to do the work done by breaker boys in the coal-mines; the work done by children in the textile mills could be done equally well by adults. The fact that in some cases adults are employed to do the work which in other cases is done by children, is sufficient proof that child labor is not resorted to because it is inevitable and necessary, but on account of its cheapness.