Page:Revolution and Other Essays.djvu/38

 distorted, stunted, mind and body. Elbert Hubbard says of the child-laborers of the Southern cotton mills :

"I thought to lift one of the little toilers to ascertain his weight. Straightaway through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bones there ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken thread. I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a silver dime. He looked at me dumbly from a face that might have belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of pain it was. He did - he did not know what it not reach for the money was. There were dozens of such children in this particular mill. A physician who was with me said that they would all be dead probably in two years, and their places filled by others - there were plenty more. Pneumonia carries off most of them. Their systems are ripe for disease, and when it comes there is no rebound - no response. Medicine simply does not act - nature is whipped, beaten, discouraged, and the child sinks into a stupor and dies."

So fares modern man and the child of modern man in the United States, most prosperous and enlightened of all countries on earth. It must be