This greed is shared jointly by the capitalist employer
and the parents, but the greater responsibility rests upon the former,
who creates the possibility and fosters the evil.
[Sidenote: Alien Victims]
The immigrants furnish the parents willing to sell their children into
child slavery in the factory, or the worse mill or mine--prisons all,
and for the innocent. Into these prisons gather "tens of thousands of
children, strong and happy, or weak, underfed, and miserable. Stop their
play once for all, and put them out to labor for so many cents a day or
night, and pace them with a tireless, lifeless piece of mechanism, for
ten or twelve hours at a stretch, and you will have a present-day
picture of child labor." But there is yet one thing which must be added
to the picture. Give the child-slave worker a tenement for a home in the
filthy streets of an ordinary factory city, with open spaces covered
with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters
running sewers, and the air foul with odors and black with factory
smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but
hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe "back of the
yards" in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the
picture would be even darker than the one given.
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