A STUDY OF SOUTHERN COTTON-MILL COMMUNITIES.
CHILD LABOR. THE OPERATIVES IN GENERAL.
The strenuous bitterness with which a majority of the cotton manufacturers in Georgia have for several years fought the passage of a statute prohibiting the employment of children under twelve years of age in factories, mines, and similar places of labor in this state is scarcely to be taken as a trustworthy gauge of the sentiment of southern employers at large.
It is true that up to the present time only four southern states have stood in line with the twenty-two representatives of other sections as having legislated in this direction. But it is only fair to bear in mind that the necessity for such enactment did not arise in this section so early by several generations as in the manufacturing East or the mining West. Twenty years ago there were in all the cotton states only 667,000 spindles, which converted but a meager fraction of this region's great staple into yarn. That number has since been multiplied more than ten times, making approximately 7,000,000 spindles now in operation here. The growth of the industry has been so phenomenal that legislation along related lines has failed to keep pace with it.
Yet one who studies closely certain sociological and industrial phases of the situation must feel convinced that, despite the recent defeat of the child-labor bill before the Georgia legislature, child labor itself is destined to prove but a temporary expedient in the southern factories. Not only is the sentiment of the people at large quite as much against it, after less than a score of years' trial, as was the sentiment of the New England states when more than one generation had fairly grown up in their mills, but there are also practical agencies militating against the system and proving very powerful in co-operation with moral and civic considerations.
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