emissaries into it, with orders to report on every move and disrupt
the union if possible. The factory capitalists in Massachusetts, New
York, Illinois and every other manufacturing State were determined to
keep up their system unchanged, because it was profitable to work
children eleven and a half hours a day in a temperature that in
summer often reached 108 degrees and in an atmosphere certain to
breed immorality; [Footnote: "Certain to breed immorality." See
report of Carrol D. Wright, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor, 1881. A cotton mill operative testified: "Young girls from
fourteen and upward learn more wickedness in one year than they would
in five out of a mill." See also the numerous recent reports of the
National Child Labor Committee.] it was profitable to compel adult
men and women having families to work for an average of ninety cents
a day; it was profitable to avoid spending money in equipping their
factories with life-saving apparatus. Hence these factory owners,
forming the aristocracy of trade, savagely fought every move or law
that might expose or alter those conditions; the annals of
legislative proceedings are full of evidences of bribery.

Having no illusions, and being a severely practical man, Vanderbilt
well knew the pretensions of this trading class; with many a cynical
remark, aptly epitomizing the point, he often made sport of their
assumptions. He knew (and none knew better) that they had dived deep
in bribery and fraud; they were the fine gentlemen, he well recalled,
who had generally obtained patents by fraud; who had so often bribed
members of Congress to vote for a high tariff; the same, too, who had
bribed legislatures for charters, water rights, exemptions from
taxation, the right to work employees as long as, and under whatever
conditions, they wanted to. This manufacturing aristocracy professed
to look down upon Vanderbilt socially as a coarse sharper; and in New