tinued depression in the industry had worn him and his
family out, and he had emigrated to South Carolina. In
Massachusetts the percentage of white illiteracy is eight-
tenths of one per cent, while in South Carolina it is
thirteen and six-tenths per cent; also in South Carolina
there is a property qualification for voters -- and for these
and other reasons child-labor is the rule, and so the cotton
mills were driving those of Massachusetts out of the busi~
ness. Adams did not know this, he only knew that the
Southern mills were running; but when he got there he
found that if he was to live, all his family would have to
work, and from six o'clock at night to six o'clock in the
morning. So he had set to work to organize the mill-
hands, after the fashion in Massachusetts, and had been
discharged; but he had gotten other work, and stuck at it,
and at last there had been a strike for shorter hours, and
Harry Adams had attempted to address a street meeting,
which was the end of him. In the states of the far South
the labor of convicts is leased to contractors, and when
there are not convicts enough they have to be supplied.
Harry Adams was sent up by a judge who was a cousin of
the mill-owner with whose business he had interfered; and
though the life had nearly killed him, he had been wise
enough not to murmur, and at the end of his term he and
his family had left the state of South Carolina -- hell's
back yard, as he called it. He had no money for car-fare,
but it was harvest-time, and they walked one day and
worked the next; and so Adams got at last to Chicago,
and joined the Socialist party. He was a studious man,
reserved, and nothing of an orator; but he always had a
pile of books under his desk in the hotel, and articles from
his pen were beginning to attract attention in the party
press.

Contrary to what one would have expected, all this
radicalism did not hurt the hotel business; the radicals
flocked to it, and the commercial travellers all found it
diverting. Of late, also, the hotel had become a favorite
stopping-place for Western cattlemen. Now that the Beef
Trust had adopted the trick of raising prices to induce

[[383]]

p382 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p383w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p384

v?