The News & Observer

OUTSIDERS ONLY HURT.

The Southern people, manufacturers as well as others, recognize the evils of child labor. It has grown up gradually and the responsibility rests upon parents and people as well as upon mill owners. It will be stopped. To doubt that is to doubt the spirit of humanity that animates Southern people. But it will not be ended by the lectures of outsiders. The evil is one that has always been connected everywhere with the beginning of the textile industry. New England has reached the stage when child labor is not permitted. But it employed children in the mills in the early years of mill development and has no right, as Vance would put it, now "to sing the long metre doxology through their noses and thank God that they are better than other people" as they did in the matter of slavery. They never got rid of their slaves by selling them to the South until they were driven to do so by public sentiment and because slavery became unpopular in that climate.

The Brooklyn Eagle, which always has a broad horizon, understands the situation when it says:

"The evils in child labor in the South will be reformed by setting in motion Southern opinion through Southern people against it. Denunciatory Northern opinion will not avail. The South knows the New England disposition of hostility to remote wrongs and of prodigious concern touching the evils of other people. And the South resents it."

The South resents the air assumed by any outsiders who think themselves able to tell everybody else except themselves how to reform. The Manufacturer's Record and some Southern papers, however, mistake the temper of the South if they suppose that a hypocritical spirit in New England can be used to deter the South from doing its plain duty. The Southern people themselves have been the first to see the evils of child labor in their factories. They will stop it, not at the behest of those who are always ready to lecture the South while forgetting the beam in their own eye, but in spite of their exaggerated stories and unsolicited interference. It will be stopped because it is wrong to continue it, and from no other consideration. Those papers that think to defer it by declaring that the agitation is born of New England jealousy do not understand the best Southern sentiment. New England cannot drive them from this duty by a frenzied zeal, and appeals to prejudice against such interference cannot change the determination of the South to put an end to child labor. Justice and humanity demand it and the South will be true to their demands.