We shall in due course examine the enormous organization, including all the big manufacturers of the country, which for thirty years has carried on a nation-wide campaign to paralyze the schools in the interest of child labor. While we are in Michigan, let us see what they have been doing here. All over the state are vast fields of beets and celery, and for the cultivation of these cheap labor is a necessity. A man applies for a job, and only one question is asked him: “What is your gang?”—the meaning of the question being: “How many child slaves have you got?” Children as young as five years of age stagger about the fields, carrying in each hand a beet which weighs as much as six pounds, and with the clay on it as much as ten pounds. The National Child Labor Committee, covering one-seventh of the beet-territory, counted sixty-nine children under six years of age, working as high as fifteen hours a day! Of course, such babies, working such hours become ill, and are malformed for life; yet before committees of the legislatures of forty-eight states you will hear suave manufacturers explaining that child labor is good for children—all the great presidents of America were raised on farms! These suave gentlemen got through a law exempting the canning industry from the child labor laws during the canning season; and then the suave gentlemen devised a method, by the use of vats, to make the canning season last the year round! This being a depressing subject, you will be glad to end with a laugh; so I mention that one of these big business gentlemen, a bitter and persistent enemy of the child labor laws, is an active officer in the national organization of the Animal Welfare League! CHAPTER XL BOSTON IN BONDAGE Let us now move to the Atlantic seaboard, beginning with Boston, hub of the universe and fountain-head of our culture. Boston once prided itself upon the civic virtues and stern New England moralities; today it is a graft-ridden city of slums, the cultured population having withdrawn to the suburban towns, and the plutocracy to haughty isolation in the Back Bay District, where “the Lowells speak only to Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God.” The great bankers and corporation magnates employ the corrupt city government in their factional fights—Lee, Higginson & Company against Kidder, Peabody & Company; it is reported by those on the inside that one mayor of the city made more than a million dollars out of the “tips” he got from the latter firm. For a decade or two the great part of Boston’s government has been for sale; the district attorney was selling justice, or injustice, wholesale, and recently an effort was made to convict him, but the gang proved too strong.