"Do you know," she continued, "that I believe they are really very happy." She had well presented her argument. She had said she would surprise me--and she did. "You will not feel it a breach of affection and hospitality if I print what you say?" I asked her. "It's only fair that the capitalist's view should be given here and there first hand. You own one-half the mill in ----, Carolina?" "Yes." "What do you think of a model mill with only nine hours a day labour, holidays and all nights free, schools, where education is enforced by the State; reading-rooms open as well as churches--amusement halls, music, recreation and pleasure, as well as education and religion?" "I think," she said keenly, "that united, concentrated action on the part of the cotton mill owners might make such a thing feasible; for us to try it alone would mean ruin." "Not ruin," I amended; "a reduction of income." "Ruin," she said, firing. "We couldn't compete. To compete," she said with the conviction of an intelligent, well-informed manufacturer, "I must have my sixty-six hours a week!" The spirit of discontent is always abroad when false conditions exist. Its restless presence is controlled by one spirit alone--humanity--when reasonably are weighed and justly decided the questions of balance between Capital and Labour. We must believe that there is no unsolvable problem before us in considering the presence of the child in the Southern mills. There is nothing in the essence of the subject to discourage the social economist. The question should not be left to the decision of the private citizen. This stuff is worth saving. There is the making in these children of first-class citizens. I quote from the illustrated supplement of the South Carolina _State_ that you may see what the mill manufacturers think of the quality of the "poor white trash": "The operatives in the South Carolina mills are the common people--the bone and sinew who have left the fields to the Negroes. They are industrious, intelligent, frugal, and have the native instincts of honesty and integrity and of fidelity which are essential to good citizenship." If such things are true of the mill-hands of South Carolina, it is worth while to save their children. * * * * * Henceforth, to my vision across the face of the modern history of labour and manufacture will eternally defile the gray, colourless column of the Southern mill-hands: an earth-hued line of humanity--a stream that divides not.