A Tiny Human Machine

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Aug 21, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 34.

A Tiny Human Machine.

“We met little Joe one day in a Pittsburg toby (cheap cigar) factory,” writes Owen R. Lovejoy in the Woman’s Home Companion. “A tenement room twelve feet square, with a low ceiling, not an open door or window, was occupied by twelve or thirteen people, who were rolling this cheap cigar. We had gone with a friend of the children to see little Joe, a boy of eleven, who worked twelve hours a day except on one day of the week when his hours continued on to midnight.

“As we watched him bending over his table, his fingers flying deftly at their work, we seemed to see two pictures of little Joe sitting before us. First was the perfect machine, a human organism, trained to lightning motions that produced five or six hundred of these cigars each day, for which he received eight cents a hundred. Second, the sallow face, the lusterless eyes, the narrow chest, the ominous cough, which combined to write with his life-blood Nature’s curse upon our social neglect. Without speaking a word, Joe told us more convincingly about child labor than all the census reports that were ever compiled.”