"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?" "The parents? That's where the mill-owners have their strongest help. They threaten to discharge the parents if the children don't work an' work hard, and they force the father or mother into whippin' the child to compel it to stay at the loom. The whole country went to war once over the question of a negro havin' to work under compulsion,--or at least, that had quite a bit to do with the war,--but you can enslave white children, you can starve 'em, you can shut 'em up in rooms without air, you can surround 'em with dangerous machinery, you can force 'em to be whipped, you can snatch 'em from their cradles in their homes, you can snap your fingers at the schools, an' you can fill churchyards with a worse Massacre o' the Innocents than history ever tells about, an' the men and women of America don't care." [Illustration: "I 'AIN'T SEEN DAYLIGHT FOR TWO YEARS." Trapper boy working a twelve-hour day below ground, often too tired to go up in the cage at the end of the day and sleeping on the ground beside the track. (_Courtesy of the Ridgway Co._)] "Oh, yes, they do," again protested Hamilton. "It must be that they don't know." "How can they help but know? There are a few that have heard what Spargo calls 'The Bitter Cry of the Children,' but those few are very few, an' the misery an' shame goes on, gettin' worse with ev'ry year." "What's going to be done?" "The children will have to rescue the children," the boy cried. "If men's hearts are cold and women's hearts are asleep, at least the boys can hear. There's no power like a boy's, an' a boy will do anythin' that's big and brave and worth the doin'. In a year from now I'm goin' to start a crusade, like the Children's Crusade in hist'ry, an' march to every mill an' fact'ry in the United States where a child is workin', and make the owner sign a paper pledgin' himself not to employ a child again. Give me an army of American boys an' I'll sweep the country like a flight o' locusts." "But who would join?"