I have made the destitution of beauty clear. I believe there is an absolute lack of every form or sight that might inspire or cause a soul to awake. There is nothing to lift these people from the earth and from labour. There should be a complete readjustment of this system. I have been interested in reading in the New York _Sun_ of April 20th of the visit of the bishops to the model factories in Ohio. I am constrained to wish that bishops and clergy and philanthropists and millionaires and capitalists might visit in bodies and separately the mills of South Carolina and their tenement population. It is difficult to know just what the ideas are of the people who have constructed these dwellings. They tell us in this same prospectus, which I have read with interest after my personal experience, that these villages are "_picturesque_." This is the only reference I find to the people and their conditions. I have seen nothing but horror, and yet I went into these places without prejudice, prepared to be interested in the industry of the Southern country, and with no idea of the tragedy and nudity of these people's existence. The ultimate balance is sure to come; meanwhile, we cannot but be sensible of the vast individual sacrifices that must fall to destruction before the scales swing even. * * * * * THE CHILD IN SOUTHERN MILLS * * * * * CHAPTER IX THE CHILD IN THE SOUTHERN MILLS In the week before I left for the South I dined in ---- with a very charming woman and her husband. Before a table exquisite in its appointments, laden with the best the market could offer and good taste display, sat the mistress, a graceful, intelligent young woman, full of philanthropic, charitable interests, and one whom I know to be devoted to the care and benefiting of little children in her city. During the meal I said to her casually: "Do you know that in your mills in South Carolina to-night, as we sit here, little children are working at the looms and frames--little children, some of them not more than six years old?" She said, in astonishment, "I don't know it; and I can't believe it." I told her I should soon see just how true the reports were, and when I returned to New York I would tell her the facts. She is not alone in her ignorance. Not one person, man or woman, to whom I told the facts of the cases I observed "_dreamed that children worked in any mills in the United States_!" After my experience amongst the working class, I am safe in saying that I consider their grievances to be the outcome of the ignorance and greed of the manufacturer abetted, aided and made possible by the ignorance and poverty of the labourer.