THE RED-HEADED YANKEE GIRL WHO HELPED REDEEM THE VILLAGE

they could catch, a little bacon, and occasionally some sorghum-the cheapest grade of molasses-bought at the country store.

One of the children died after a while. The country coroner couldn't tell from what cause. To-day he would have pronounced. it that strange new disease called pellagra. A second child was ill. A doctor on a walking trip through the mountains recommended a meat diet. But meat cost money. And there was no money; so that child, too, died.

Some one up North will probably say that had the children availed themselves of the opportunities afforded by the State for education they would have been better off. Quite true. But the nearest school was over twenty miles away, and the school-books necessary would have cost over a dollarone-tenth of the family's annual income.

Then, somehow or other, word came to Henry Decker that he and his family could find work in the cotton mill. And after a while they came for him with an open wagon drawn by two mules. He and his wife and the three children who had lived, and the furniture, bedding, and wardrobe of the family were loaded in.

So, after fifty miles of the roughest sort of country roads, they came to the mill.

A house with four rooms was now their home. They were to pay two dollars a month for this. They had no idea how the money was to be raised; and at first didn't like the house, for they couldn't keep pigs in the yard.

The wife and the two oldest children went to work in the mill. Henry Decker was given an easy job sorting yarns, where he could sit still. The first week they made no money, but the wife came home with some peculiar slips of paper. The foreman had told her that she could get food at the store for these slips.

The next week the family, all four of them, had made $14-not very much for sixty hours a week work for each of four people, but more than they had ever had in a year before.

At the end of the year Henry Decker was making $3.60 a week; his wife was a spinner at $6.40; Zeb was making $4.80; and Hattie, now sixteen, had reached $10 a week. That gave the family a weekly income of $21.80.

Their weekly expense was about as follows: Rent, 50 cents; food, $6.50; clothes, $3; incidentals, tobacco for Henry,

etc., $1; electric light, 12 cents-the latter admitted to be a gross luxury, but Joe, the youngest boy, was going to the district school and had to study, and Henry's wife had been to a session of moonlight school and had learned to read well enough to pick out the large type of the Charlotte "Observer" that the foreman lent her once in a while. Their total income was now, as has been said, $21.80. Their expenses, $11.12. That is, they were spending more in a week than they had previously spent in a year; yet there was seldom a week when $10 did not go into the bank, where the mill-owner paid them six per cent.

That was fourteen years ago. To-day Henry Decker and his wife live on their own farm and have $4,000 in the bank; Hattie married an overseer who makes $5 a day, and lives in a pretty cottage in the village; Zeb is himself an overseer; and Joe graduated from Wake Forest University last spring and is going to the Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville in the fall.

That is the true story of one mill family. The rise of this family is spectacular, of course, for they started at the very bottom. It is doubtful if anywhere in the civilized world one may find more abject poverty than in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. But for ninety per cent of the families going into a good mill it would appear that there is a vast improvement in living conditions.

THE FUTILE TEN DOLLARS

Note the stress on the word "good." For, as in all other industries, the mills vary greatly with the temper and character of their owners, superintendents, and overseers. In not all mills even to-day are conditions as pleasant as Henry, Decker found them fourteen years ago. And it is of the worst mills that the reader hears.

He knows, perhaps, that last year in South Carolina there were twenty-five prosecutions for the employment of children under twelve years of age. He knows that in twenty-three cases conviction resulted. He knows that two overseers and one mill superintendent were convicted of willfully breaking the law by knowingly employing children under twelve years of age.

And in none of the three cases did the fine exceed ten dollars.

Further, listen to one of the cases:

April 2, 1915. While making inspection of

the Mills, South Carolina, the inspector found that one Tom Lovell had been working in that mill under sworn statement of age No. 22,008, showing him to be over twelve years of age. Upon investigation it was brought out that the overseer of spinning, Luther P— had persuaded the ignorant mother to sign an affidavit showing this child's wrong age in order that he could put the child to work. A warrant was sworn out for the overseer, who entered a plea of guilty, and was fined ten dollars.

It is not remarkable that such a case as this makes the reader lose sight of the fact that twenty of the twenty-three convictions were against parents who had perjured themselves with false affidavits as to their own children's age.

THE OWNER'S PART

The development of a sense of responsibility for the welfare of his mill operatives on the part of the owner is one of the most interesting features of the whole cotton mill problem. Time was when many a mill-owner charged as much as he could get for the rent of his houses, went the limit in prices for foodstuffs at the company store, and worked children of any age if he could get away with it." It is rare now to find a mill village where the operative is charged more than fifty cents a room per month for his cottage, or to find a company store where the prices are higher than, or as high as, those prevailing in the neighborhood; and it is no longer possible to employ children under the legal age. The percentage of convictions to prosecutions in South Carolina shows that.

It should be remembered, too, that the action for the benefit of the mill workers may be termed purely extra-legislative-that is, beyond the power of any law to provide-for it is inconceivable that any statute could be so framed as to compel the owners to see to it that the employees live in a certain set fashion. And, so far as the law goes, the mill-owner is compelled only to pay his wages and to refuse to employ workers under the prevailing age limit. There his obligation, in a strictly legal sense, ceases. And though it is true that there are still some owners who hold themselves responsible no further than this, there are others who do not.

THE NEW MILL VILLAGE

Witness the rapid improvement in the physical character of the mill villages.

It was only a very few years ago that the typical mill village consisted of rank upon

rank of cheap wooden cabins, all built on the same pattern, square, ugly, unpainted, perched two or three feet above the hard, bare clay on four piles, one at each corner of the structure. There were no fences, no trees, no grass. A hundred or more of these ugly boxes lined themselves in rows of ten or fifteen in the middle of a sun-beaten desert of yellow-red clay. Every cabin had a crude privy at its rear; there was no sewerage system, and the few scattered wells used by the whole community were easily susceptible of pollution. Epidemics of typhoid fever were distressingly common.

To objections and criticism the mill-owner could reply: "I can't help it; if they don't want to live there, they don't have to.”

He was strictly within his legal rights; but where else were these people to live?

Gradually, however, there came a change in the aspect of the mill villages. The houses were painted; a few better houses, a trifle more pleasing to the eye, were erected; sewerage systems were installed wherever practicable. One owner secured several wagonloads of young saplings and planted one tree in front of each cottage. Other owners followed his lead. Two or three superintendents offered prizes for the most neatly kept premises, and rubbish disappeared from the front yards and from beneath the houses. The idea of beautification became popular. Grass seed was planted in the front yards and an occasional scraggy flower-bed appeared. Cheap but neat and serviceable fences were constructed. Here and there a little vegetable garden filled in the space back of the cottage, where before had been only the hardbeaten clay.

THE OWNER WITH A CONSCIENCE

A mill-owner in North Carolina was among the pioneers. This man had controlled a large mill that had been running for well on to forty years. The houses of his village were dilapidated and ancient; land was dear in the heart of the town where the mill was, and the expense of expansion prohibitive. The mill-owner was not satisfied with the living conditions of his people; perhaps, too, he was shrewd enough to realize that people living in such an environment could not give him their best work.

A few miles out in the country land cost almost nothing an acre. The owner saw his opportunity and began the construction of one of the handsomest mill buildings in the

Soutn. All along the south side of the building he saved a broad space for terraces and flower gardens. In front of the mill he placed an ornamental fountain, stocked with fish; even a small alligator was introduced-to-day the delight of the youngsters.

Then he began to plan his village. First he laid out one broad main street, then the other streets; but he discarded the usual geometrical plan of parallel roads and rectangular plots. Instead of felling all the trees and making a waste of the property, he curved his roads hither and thither so that the best trees might be spared. The cottages he erected were of a dozen different types, and beside each cottage was a neat little tract laid out for use as a vegetable garden, the space between the front of the cottage and the road being reserved for grass and flowers. Pigs and dogs were barred, although a milch cow might be tethered in the rear of the yard if the tenant so desired.

This work was begun thirteen years ago. To-day that mill village is as pleasant and homelike a little spot as one may well imagine. The front gardens blossom with flowers; onions, cabbages, yams, and strawberries grow at the side of the houses; two or three trees shelter the front windows, and almost every cottage has its trellis of vines and rambler roses on the front porch. The people are clean, neat, and, from every appearance, contented. The streets are clean and well kept-far cleaner than the streets of many of the Carolina cities.

That is the physical side of the new spirit of the mill villages. But there is yet another side.

TWENTY-ONE PER CENT ILLITERATE The financial condition of the South since the war has never permitted of the establishment of any thoroughly comprehensive system of education for the poorer classes. Four months' schooling out of twelve is as much as six of the Southern States have been able to supply. Many mill-owners considered this not enough and went into their own pockets to maintain the schools for from two to five additional months, giving the children of the mill villages from six to nine months' schooling annually. Even then it was difficult to persuade the children to attend, since until recently there has been little progress toward compulsory education.

If a child did not like the school, he left. One little girl of seven "quit," as she termed it, because her teacher would not allow her to