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It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring
to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human
beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a
throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken,
black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it
loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its
bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim
horizon of its life,--all this, even as you and I. These black
thousands are not in reality lazy; they are improvident and
careless; they insist on breaking the monotony of toil with a
glimpse at the great town-world on Saturday; they have their
loafers and their rascals; but the great mass of them work
continuously and faithfully for a return, and under circumstances
that would call forth equal voluntary effort from few
if any other modern laboring class. Over eighty-eight per cent
of them--men, women, and children--are farmers. Indeed,
this is almost the only industry. Most of the children get their
schooling after the "crops are laid by," and very few there
are that stay in school after the spring work has begun.
Child-labor is to be found here in some of its worst phases, as
fostering ignorance and stunting physical development. With
the grown men of the county there is little variety in work:
thirteen hundred are farmers, and two hundred are laborers,
teamsters, etc., including twenty-four artisans, ten merchants,
twenty-one preachers, and four teachers. This narrowness of
life reaches its maximum among the women: thirteen hundred
and fifty of these are farm laborers, one hundred are servants
and washerwomen, leaving sixty-five housewives, eight teachers,
and six seamstresses.
Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget
that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not
in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning
of the world, or resting after the heat of the strife. But
here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn
the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit
beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of
careless happy childhood and dreaming youth. The dull monotony
of daily toil is broken only by the gayety of the
thoughtless and the Saturday trip to town. The toil, like all
farm toil, is monotonous, and here there are little machinery
and few tools to relieve its burdensome drudgery. But with all
this, it is work in the pure open air, and this is something in a
day when fresh air is scarce.
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