Some years ago, in one of the mean streets of Paris, I saw, in a dingy window, a picture that stamped itself indelibly upon my memory. It was not, judged by artistic canons, a great picture; on the contrary, it was crude and ill drawn and might almost have been the work of a child. Torn, I think, from the pages of the Anarchist paper _La Revolté_, it was, perchance, a protest drawn from the very soul of some indignant worker. A woman, haggard and fierce of visage, representing France, was seated upon a heap of child skulls and bones. In her gnarled and knotted hands she held the writhing form of a helpless babe whose flesh she was gnawing with her teeth. Underneath, in red ink, was written in rude characters, “The wretch! She devours her own children!” My mind goes back to that picture: it is literally true to-day, that this great nation in its commercial madness devours its babes. IV The textile industries rank first in the enslavement of children. In the cotton trade, for example, 13.3 per cent of all persons employed throughout the United States are under sixteen years of age.[109] In the Southern states, where the evil appears at its worst, so far as the textile trades are concerned, the proportion of employees under sixteen years of age in 1900 was 25.1 per cent, in Alabama the proportion was nearly 30 per cent. A careful estimate made in 1902 placed the number of cotton-mill operatives under sixteen years of age in the Southern states at 50,000. At the beginning of 1903 a very conservative estimate placed the number of children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the South at 30,000, no less than 20,000 of them being under twelve.[110] If this latter estimate of 20,000 children under twelve is to be relied upon, it is evident that the total number under fourteen must have been much larger than 30,000. According to Mr. McKelway, one of the most competent authorities in the country, there are at the present time not less than 60,000 children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the Southern states.[111] Miss Jane Addams tells of finding a child of five years working by night in a South Carolina mill;[112] Mr. Edward Gardner Murphy has photographed little children of six and seven years who were at work for twelve and thirteen hours a day in Alabama mills.[113] In Columbia, S.C., and Montgomery, Ala., I have seen hundreds of children, who did not appear to be more than nine or ten years of age, at work in the mills, by night as well as by day.