Then there is the cotton lint, or “fly,” as it is called, which literally fills the air. It is no unusual thing to find the air around the factory for a hundred or more feet literally alive with cotton shreds. There are contrivances for carrying off a certain amount of this dust, but there are few Rhode Island factories which have installed them, and there is no one in which, so far as I know, any energetic and scientific efforts are making to solve the terrible problem. For terrible it is. Breathe a cotton-saturated air, a damp, hot air at that, for ten hours a day and consider the condition in which lungs and throat will be. Now these are conditions natural to the making of cotton and woollen cloths, conditions which can never be entirely corrected. They are hard and wearing, but they become dangerous in the extreme when combined with certain other conditions not incident to the industry, due entirely to the ignorance or the greed or the indifference of factory owners. It is hard to believe that men who ask other men and women and children to labor ten hours a day in a dripping heat and an atmosphere alive with cotton and wool particles will be slow to furnish them abundant supplies of pure flowing drinking water; but a bucket or barrel filled from some outside source is frequently all that is furnished a floor of workers. It is difficult to believe that factory owners would not be eager to see that these workers of theirs were furnished with comfortably heated toilet rooms, with every sanitary appliance; but all up and down the Pawtucket River one finds factories with toilets that cannot by any stretch of words be called respectable. When the day’s work is done the textile operative rarely has a comfortable cloak or dressing room in which to prepare for the street. If it were merely the matter of putting on a hat and coat, this would not be serious. But part at least of the clothes ought to be changed before going out. The heat, moisture, and dust under which he has worked for ten hours make it unsafe to go suddenly into the open air without dry garments. In cold weather a chill or shock is almost inevitable. But it is rare that the factory provides a dressing room. The result is that bronchitis and pneumonia are always attacking textile operatives, weakening lungs and throat and fitting the system for the white plague, which hangs like a perpetual shadow over a textile community.