compared with the rest of the country-even the disorderly new civilization of the West. Our newspapers now publish the facts without that sort of comment that kills public conscience. They show the record of the South a sorrowful one, though for 1907 we are now rejoicing that our people were guilty of only fifty out of fifty-six lynchings in the United States, as against sixty-seven out of seventy-three in 1906.

The New Issues.

Now prohibition presents this grave question with a new issue. Heretofore discussions of lawlessness have been chiefly in relation to the absorbing problem of the negro. Sacredness of law was put almost always in conflict with shocking crimes. The best citizenship of the South, therefore, had not been able to make more than a stifled protest for law.

But prohibition offers an issue of favorable conditions for lining up the moral and patriotic elements of Southern society on the side of law. The task is laid on us to prove that we are strong enough in civilization to constrain men or compel them to honor laws whether they are pleased with them or not. That is one test to which the prohibition policy will submit the South.

The other issue is the integrity of Democracy. The question arises in connection with the Prohibition policy in the Southern states, whether our Democracy is secure, if a weak minority can prevent the will of the people and defeat the execution of their will expressed in legislation. Look at the situation as it is in Georgia. The majority demanding the prohibition of the liquor traffic is immense. This is not disputed. Can the people of Georgia sustain their will? Is there not here an issue going to the foundations of Democracy? It is not a ques

tion of the small and occasional violations of the prohibition law, as in the case of all other laws against crime, occurring in the ordinary experience of its execution. It is a question of considerable bodies of citizens in determined desire to see the will of the people overthrown lawlessly. If the people of a state, representing an overwhelming majority of citizenship, cannot have what they legally have chosen to have, the failure is more than a failure of prohibition. It is the breaking down of Democracy. It would not be a failure of Democracy, of course, but its illustration, if those opposed to prohibition as a policy of the state should seek by appointed means to change its majority to a minority and get rid of it by repeal; but we are not about to meet an honest, open effort of this kind, but a lawless, unscrupulous resistance to the prohibition law by two classes-the criminal and the antiprohibitionist element which encourages the criminal by moral support.

The point, then, is this: The battle for Democracy and law is coming on in the South over the prohibition issue. It ought to be made an aggressive and uncompromising battle. Therefore, the real issues of it should not lack for strong emphasis. The South has much to gain from such a conflict. It would mean a great progress. It is to be prayed that we are going into it really, that a great spirit may be roused, a great agitation drawn on. The next quarter century ought to see in every state, possibly in every local and county campaign, a political excitement over the question of the prohibition policy. Through such training we would come to an alliance of conscience on all the South's problems.

The prohibition issue, as the issue of law and Democracy, is the task and the opportunity-the

wider opportunity of the South. It is the opportunity to get together and into organized relations the intelligence and moral conscience of the Southern people-for this and other causes. It is the opportunity to lessen greatly the unhealthy attention to the negro question which had absorbed Southern thought to our hurt for so long. It is the opportunity to emphasize our recognition of the South's responsibility for the negro's moral welfare. AngloSaxon supremacy should thus be exercised in consideration of our kindly concern about his development in our midst. It is the opportunity to achieve a real leadership in the nation by example, by assistance to the prohibition movements in other sections, and by influence in national legislation on the subject. It is the opportunity-the first since the late war-to play a part distinctly, of noble proportions, in the moral progress of humanity at large, by the demonstration that a grand division of Anglo-Saxon states can meet and master a problem that has always overmastered Anglo-Saxon people, even in their oldest civilization; for the drink traffic curse is a world problem.

JOHN E. WHITE,

Pastor Second Baptist Church, Atlanta, Ga.

CHAPTER II.

CHILD LABOR IN THE SOUTH.

What Child Labor Means.

XHILD Labor is a comparatively new expression in the South. It came with the wonderful development which set in as soon as this section had begun to recover from the cataclysm of the great war between the states and the almost equally disastrous period of "reconstruction." The superficial student can scarcely realize that "in 1860 the assessed value of property in the South was $5,200,000,000, out of a total of $12,000,000,000 in the entire country, or 44 per cent. In 1870 the South had only $3,000,000,000 of assessed value, while the total for the whole country was $14,170,000,000." The state of South Carolina, "which in 1860 had been third in rank in wealth in proportion to the number of her inhabitants, had dropped to be thirtieth." Prior to the war the people of the South engaged almost entirely in agricultural pursuits and under the slavery régime manufactures did not thrive; indeed, in some sections industrialism was discouraged, and yet it is fair to say that even under the slavery system during the decade 1850-1860 "the number of Southern factories of all kinds swelled to very respectable proportions and the total number in 1860 was 24,590, with an aggregate capital invested of $175,000,000."

Child Labor is generally accepted to mean the employment of children under fourteen years of age, as breadwinners. The poverty of the South in more recent years has made it necessary for all

to work; there has been no "rich idle" class here for forty or more years.

The South has been, and still is, an agricultural section. Some very excellent writers fail to differentiate between those who work on the farms and those employed indoors. The census for 1900— the last published official record-shows that there were 3,784,265 children, between the ages of ten and fifteen in the fifteen Southern states. Of this number 1,077,950, or 28 per cent., are breadwinners who work for a living. This may be regarded as disappointing, but when it is remembered that of the 1,077,950 breadwinners in the South, between the ages of ten and fifteen, who work, there are 843,494 who labor on the farm, the showing is not so disappointing. This, therefore, means that the census figures indicate that in all there are 234,555 children in the fifteen Southern states employed in other than agricultural pursuits, or only 6.2 per cent. of the total number of children, between ten and fifteen years. These are classed as breadwinners, "engaged in other than farm work." The 234,555 children between the ages of ten and fifteen "engaged in other than agricultural pursuits," represent 21 per cent. of the total number of breadwinning children in the South. With a showing of 843,494 children engaged in agriculture, out of a total of 1,077,950 breadwinners, there are 78 per cent. between the ages given employed on farms of the South.

There is not now, nor has there ever been, any complaint of the work on the farms, though it be by those under fifteen years of age. The work is out of doors and necessarily light. There has never been, and there is no likelihood of there being, any legislation restricting labor of an agricultural