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Friday December 29, 1905
From the Montana News: A Story of the Crushing of a Child's Spirit by May Beals

From the December 27th edition of Montana's leading Socialist newspaper comes this story by May Beals:

Story by May Beals
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The Wheels that Cheated the Wheels of the Mill-
Atrocities on Helpless Children.
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All night she had walked back and forth between flying spindles. The roar of the machinery was still numbing her tired brain as she sat down by the road to rest a minute for the long walk homeward. She was a very little girl-one of those who are ceremoniously bundled out of the mill while the inspector is being entertained in the office; one of those whose pitiful and well proven wrongs would take many men from legislative halls and the pews of fashionable churches to spend long terms behind prison bars if our laws were enforced against the rich as they are enforced against the poor.

But the child knew nothing of this. She could not understand, she could only feel, the injustice that was crushing the life from her frail little body. Her blindness and ignorance caused the worst of her suffering.

For she was not yet past suffering the sharp mental anguish that is so much worse than any physical pain. You can work a child until it grows incapable of thought-incapable of any feeling save physical sensations. She had not worked long enough for that.

The sun had risen more than an hour before she had been freed from the machines. She basked in its rays for a moment, stretched out on the hard ground, then taking up her tiny dinner pail she started down the long, red road between the rows of box-like shanties where many of the mill operatives lived. Her home was in the country, three miles out across low, red hills. She had not been used to walking alone. Her older sister had walked with her and worked beside her in the mill, but one day her sister had been too sick to work, and a few days afterwards they had put her down in the ground and had told the child she was in heaven.

The child could not understand, but then all grown up people are hard to understand. They told her in Sunday-school-these strange, grown-up people, that God loves little children and that he had put it into the good capitalist to build the cotton mill so that they have work. The child accepted it all with a child's faith, doubting nothing, but it was like some strange puzzle to her mind. If God loves little girls why does he want them to work in the mill? He knows every thing, so of course he knows how it hurts.

The child was not rebellious, she was only puzzled-and tired, so tired. She heard the far off whistle of the morning train as she neared the crossing and thought of how careful her sister had always been to keep her off the track when the train rushed past them. There was a sharp curve in the track just above the crossing so near that the man could not stop the train, so her sister had said, even if he saw them on the track. The child remembered it now and the memory tore her heart for she had loved her sister better than anything in the world.

She stood on the track and looked at the interminable red hills stretched out between her and her home. She was tired, so tired. Do you know what it is to be so tired that each step you take is torture and each breath a long-drawn out agony? The child stood still for a moment with bent head, then she turned and walked deliberately up the track a little nearer the curve. She knelt on the track and turned her little old face with its hopeless eyes toward the clear morning sky.

"Dear Lord," she said, "I'm plum beat out. I don't want to work in the mill no more and I do want Janey so bad. I've prayed and prayed for other things and none of 'em ever comed, but I won't pester you any more for nothin' if you'll let me be with Janey. For Jesus sake. Amen."

She lay down on the track with her small hands folded beneath her and her eyes shut tight that she might not see it coming. She felt the rough timbers shuddering beneath her and the distant roar of the train grew louder, more deafening, more like the machinery that roared around her all night.

And then the engineer who was wildly cursing his own powerlessness felt the sickening crunch as her little life was ground out beneath the wheels, so much more mercifully than it would otherwise ground out in the wheels of the mill. As soon as the train could be stopped the trainmen ran back to the rear where the scattered fragments lay. The engineer laid his hand on the largest piece of the child and felt that it was warm and quivering. He turned on the others furiously, his hard features drenched with tears.

"There's her dinner pail," he said. "She's laid down there and went to sleep after working all night in that hell of a mill."

And then he cursed the mill and its owner and the civilization that produced them both with such rare and savage profanity, that the ladies in the rear car who had looked out at the window to ascertain the cause of the delay turned away disdainfully and summoned the porter to close the windows. When a little later they learned the cause of his outburst they felt sorry of course for the child, but then-such perfectly shocking language could not help it.

They wondered as the train again moved forward why an inscrutable providence ever permits such people to come within earshot of the respectable and refined.

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[Photograph and paragraph breaks added.]

SOURCE
Montana News
(Helena, Montana)
-Dec 27, 1905
http://www.newspapers.com/image/77952355/

IMAGES
May Beals, Fort Wayne (IN) Jr-Gz, May 27, 1906
http://www.newspapers.com/image/29293183/
Child Labor, Hines, Girl Spinner, 1910
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ncl2004001725/PP/

Note: This is the best photograph that I could find of Mary Beals,
and I fixed it up to the best of my ability. Hopefully a better photo will yet be found.
The photo of the little girl spinner is used here to represent the child in the story.

See also:

The Rebel at Large
-by May Beals
Charles H Kerr & Company, 1906
https://books.google.com/books?id=MX5YAAAAMAAJ
Also here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/fiction/beals/

The Bitter Cry of the Children
-by John Spargo
Macmillan, 1906
https://books.google.com/books?id=5qSXMJQG6E4C

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[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80CBggcgq0w width:560 height:315]