A cotton mill was set up in Colorado. That
was a new industry, and the men who established
it were applauded for their “enterprise, which
could not but benefit the whole State.” To
compete with the South, however, this mill had
to employ child labour. The kids’ Judge heard
that they were importing large families and
setting the little children to work. Colorado
had a child-labour law, and the Judge went to
the mill to see if the law was being violated. It
was, and the conditions were pitiful.
“These imported people were practically slaves,” he says. “They had come out under contracts, and the children, unschooled, toiled at the machines first to liberate their parents, then to support them.”
The Judge warned the milling company, but that did no good, so he had criminal proceedings in- stituted, and not only against the superintendent, but against the higher officers also.
This is not the custom in the United States, and the president of the mill, who was also one of the big men in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, called on the Judge to explain that he was a respectable citizen. The Judge suggested that it wasn’t proper to try to influence a judge in a pending case, but the president “didn’t want to do anything improper”; all he wanted
