Mother Jones decries the barbarity if child labor.

‘Is It Well with The Children?’ by Mother Jones from St. Louis Labor. Vol. 4 No. 106. February 14, 1903.

One of the saddest cases in my experience was that of a little girl in one of the southern mills. I met her in the early morning on her way to work. I asked her how old she was.

“Ten years old,” she answered.

“And how much do you get for working?”

“Oh, I don’t know how much I’ll get this week, but I hope to get a dollar and a half. Mamma is sick and I want to get her some medicine.”

The evening of the next day I saw the child carried from the mill with one hand gone–severed by the mill machinery. The shock killed the mother, and the child was left alone to battle with the world. There was no recompense for injury.

Accidents like these happen every day and never get into the papers.

In the mills the toil of the children is ceaseless. The machinery needs constant watching, and their undivided attention. Oftentimes the children’s hair gets caught in the machinery and they are left completely bald. Their haggard faces and emaciated forms appeal to every human heart for redress.

These children must bear their wrongs in silence. Their masters’ ears are deaf to pity. There is no one for the children to complain to. They rise in the dark, go to work in the dark, and come home to hovels called “home” in the dark, for five months of the year.

In the mills the children in the mule spinning room walk twenty miles a day and those in the spindle room from twelve to fifteen miles.

I remember a band of little tots going out to the woods one Sunday to get some fresh air denied them during the week. In one home they left behind the oldest of four children, a little girl who lay sick upon a pallet of straw. Her mother pleaded with her to go also.

“Maggie, dear, do try and go, it will do you good.”

“Oh, mamma, please let me stay here and rest so that I can go to the mill tomorrow,” the girl pleaded.

On Tuesday her little form was stretched out in a pine board coffin, never again to go down the dirty road to the capitalistic hell.

As I looked at the calm, sweet face with a smile of peace hovering about the lips, I seemed to hear her say, “Thank God, the robbers can not crucify me any more on the altar of their greed for the yellow gold.”

To my last hour on earth I shall see the innocent faces of the dead girl’s companions as they stood outside of the door and talked in whispers of the dead. One of them said at last:

“If that old woman who makes the bosses be good to us knew Maggie was dead she would surely come to the funeral.”

“You mean old Mother Jones, Alice?” said another.

“Yes, I think she doesn’t know how mean the boss is to us. He pulled my hair yesterday because I spoke to Jennie.”

Then they turned to me and asked if I had ever seen Mother Jones, the old woman that makes the bosses give more pay.

“If she was here,” one said, “she would make them let us go home before dark.”

If there were a Socialist president, his first message to the law-makers would be an injunction to wipe out child labor.

Alice Roosevelt never worked in one of the capitalist slave pens. She had a joyous childhood, while thousands of proletarian children had to expend their youthful energy to create profits for capitalists.

I believe if Christ were here again and denounced the child murder our federal judges would send him to jail. When Christ said in the long ago, “Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not,” He showed that society must take loving care of the babies if we can ever hope for a better civilization.

And it is because the children of the workers are neglected and ill-treated that we have cannibals around us today. While poodle dogs are being caressed upon pillows of down, human bodies are being wrecked and distorted and human souls are being destroyed in mills and mines and slums throughout Christendom.

So long as strikes are necessary to liberate these children and guarantee a better manhood and womanhood for the future I propose to be in and encourage strikes even though the capitalists who live in luxury from the lifeblood of babies should take my life, as they have many times tried to.

But, my brothers, workingman with the ballot, you are a party to the murder of your own children so long as you vote blindly for the ticket of your masters. Wake up, boys of the mill and factory and workshops, and vote the Socialist ticket. Then I will live to see the workers’ children in the schools and fields and playgrounds instead of being sacrificed to the god of profit.

A long-running socialist paper begun in 1901 as the Missouri Socialist published by the Labor Publishing Company, this was the paper of the Social Democratic Party of St. Louis and the region’s labor movement. The paper became St. Louis Labor, and the official record of the St. Louis Socialist Party, then simply Labor, running until 1925. The SP in St. Louis was particularly strong, with the socialist and working class radical tradition in the city dating to before the Civil War. The paper holds a wealth of information on the St Louis workers movement, particularly its German working class.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/missouri-socialist/030214-stlouislabor-v04n106.pdf