Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/232



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