Musings of the South 173 



the following moderate provisions : Forbidding the 

 employment of children under twelve years of age 

 in the factories; requiring that children up to the 

 age of fourteen years should not be employed unless 

 they could show a certificate of three months* school 

 attendance each year; reducing the day's labor to 

 eleven hours by giving one hour of rest at noon; 

 making a week's work consist of sixty working 

 hours, which if they ran eleven hours per day, 

 would give the children Saturday afternoons. An 

 exception was made of poor widows' children who 

 supported their mothers, and were not thus pro- 

 tected. Lobbyists came from all over the state and 

 succeeded in defeating the bill. Alabama will not 

 place herself at a disadvantage in competing with 

 other states for cotton factories. I have said that 

 the item of labor wage does not count so high, com- 

 paratively, as in other lines of manufacture, and it 

 is becoming less. An invention has just been intro- 

 duced which makes the loom a perfect automaton. 

 When the bobbin in the shuttle is exhausted, the 

 device flings the stick out and replaces it with a 

 new bobbin. One attendant, to whom sixty cents 

 a day is paid, will run twelve of these looms — give 

 one hundred and forty-four hours of machine work 

 for sixty cents — one loom twelve hours for five 

 cents. This is practically eliminating wages from 

 the cost of manufacture. 



There is no economic necessity for child labor. 

 The advantages which the manufacturer in the 



