Your favor of December 26th came duly to hand, and contents noted. I have read the same very carefully, and was very much interested. I was pleased with your work and your report, until I came to the statement which you say has been made to you that there is an extraordinary suspicion greeting you "in several quarters" that you are "suspected of acting in the interests of several northern mill owners and corporations who are jealous of southern development."

        You say further that [yo]u are assured on good authority that money has been collected with a view of stirring up trouble in the trade. You then ask me whether I knew [of]anything of this, and want me to assure you on my sacred word of honor that you are not being used as the tool of any such design. I do not think it necessary to give you any such assurance. I am not accustomed to give any one such assurance, and yours is the first instance of any one, acting in the interests of labor, on behalf of the American Federation of Labor, who has even harbored such a suspicion much less given expression to it. If there be any such suspicion in your mind, it were best that you would drop the work immediately and return.

         Anyway, you say you have been "assured [on] good authority that [. . . . (illegible). I think that you owe it to me, particularly to the A.F. of L., to state who your "good authority" is.

        When the first attempt was made in Great Britain to secure the lawful protection of the women and children from the greed of the employing class, [th]e same charges of improper and ulterior motives were attributed to the [ear]ly advocates of restriction or abolition of child labor. We are accustomed to having these sinister motives attributed to labor men; but i[t] comes strange to us to have one repeat such trash, and one who undertakes to speak and work in behalf of the wronged and oppressed. S[o as far as I] am concerned, I am free to say to you, or to any one else, that I would rather see the industries of the south, the north, or of any other part of the country go to the very dogs, if thereby the children of the workers can be saved from a fate which grinds the heart and life out of them.

        I have very great sympathy for the widows who, you say, are dependent upon the children in the mills; but I do not think you ought to take it amiss when I say that I have a greater sympathy for the children and the care that they may have an opportunity to live, rather than have them mentally and physically dwarfed in the effort even to support their widowed mothers.

        If you want to continue in the work to secure a child labor law, I want you to quit trying to find a way out for the state, for the widows, for the "worthless or helpless fathers," or to have your conscience burdened whether the industries of the south or of any other place are going to be hurt or disarranged by the passage of such a law.

        A few years ago when arguing before the committee on labor of the Massachusetts legislature for the reduction in the hours of labor of children from 60 to 55 per week, we were met with the statement that if such a bill became a law, "it would take the heart out of industry."

        Our reply was that we preferred to take the heart out of industry than to take the hearts out of the children.

        It matters little where we make the effort to secure improved conditions for the toilers, to save the health, the bodies, and the lives of the children, we are met with the same keen, sinister, devilish opposition by those who attribute to us motives other than honest and humane; but they have never deterred us from our purpose, and it shall not in this instance or in the future.

        You will kindly advise me as promptly as possible whether you will undertake to work for the passage of the child labor bill and compulsory education bill, without regard to insinuations, suspicions, or charges of any one made against yourself or the A.F. of L., and upon the lines indicated both in my conversation with you and in this correspondence.

        It may not be uninteresting for you to know that the income of the American Federation of Labor is plainly provided for by the constitution of the organization. That income is published monthly in our official journal, the American Federationist. The expenditures are also published in that journal; and the expense incurred in the work assigned you by me will be published in the American Federationist and properly audited.