Page:Carl Sandburg - You and Your Job (1910).pdf/10

10 cried and broke out saying, "We haven't got any chance like boys used to have—there ain't no wars nor nothin' so we kin show the stuff we're made of." For all our little blames and quarrels and mistakes, those were great days, Bill, great days!

Now, Bill, old pardner, do you see that we had advantages? We didn't go at hard work till after boyhood, when we were almost grown men. What do I mean? What's my point? Why, just this, Bill: The quitter has no childhood; he is put to work in his young days when he ought to be in school, and battered and beaten and torn and worn in the gray air and grime of mine or mill or shop, so when the time comes that he ought to be a man of ability and power, he is just a wreck. a miserable, fumbling, stumbling, played-out and done-for wreck of a man. When the last United States census was taken, an army of 1,700,000 child laborers, all under fifteen years of age, was at work in this country. If, from the time you were twelve years of age, until you were eighteen, Bill, you had been forced to stand at a loom in a cotton mill, or had picked slate as a breaker-boy in a mine, or had been a "carryin' in boy" in a glass factory, you would have been ready to quit! You would have been shot to pieces, just a runt of a man, and if you had heard some Shakespearean reader recite, "What a piece of work is man! In apprehension how noble," you would have gasped out, "The hell you say!"

The "quitter" comes from many different places. I was in Oshkosh a few days ago, and