William Clifford and Marie Walcamp in The Blood of the Children (1915)

William Clifford

Marie Walcamp

Sherman Bainbridge

Bess Meredyth

The story opens with Senator Woodward speaking on the night before the Child Labor Bill is passed. He pleads earnestly to abolish child labor. His opponents, mill owners Hewitt, Davis and others, sitting in the audience, are alarm...

Henry MacRae

The Blood of the Children

The story opens with Senator Woodward speaking on the night before the Child Labor Bill is passed. He pleads earnestly to abolish child labor. His opponents, mill owners Hewitt, Davis and others, sitting in the audience, are alarmed at the enthusiasm of the crowd. Woodward returns home and bids his wife Alice to retire, as he must work late. Meanwhile, Hewitt, Davis and the others, knowing that the bill comes up in the morning, determine to bribe Woodward. They leave for his home. Woodward is alone in the library when the men are announced. Hewitt offers him $100,000 to be absent from the house the following morning. Woodward, in a fury, starts to turn them out, then thinks better and asks them to listen to him while he tells them what the bill means to him. Grumbingly they consent. Woodward starts to talk. The story goes back twenty years. He tells how he, Woodward, was a worker in the mills and his sweetheart, Alice, and his little sister were employed there also. His sister had consumption, a disease prevalent among the workers, caused by the lint entering their lungs. The foreman, who also loves Alice, begs her to marry him, promising to take her out of the mills. Alice's sister dies, and the doctor advises Alice, too, to leave the mills at once. Woodward hears the doctor's verdict and realizes he cannot help her. With a cry of horror Alice rushes away and promises the foreman she will marry him. Woodward takes to drinking after Alice marries. Ten years later he owns one of the biggest mills in the South and employs, for the most part, child labor. One day as he sits in his office, they bring in a little boy, who has been caught in the machinery and Woodward orders them to take the child away, merely commenting on the carelessness of children. Later he overturns a red ink bottle and imagines the ink is blood. A factory child is brought home dying to her mother, who was Alice. Alice's husband has died, leaving her destitute. When she sees her child is dying she is crazed by grief and rushes to the mills. There, for the first time, she meets Woodward. She turns on him and calls him a murderer, saying he has killed her child and a hundred more. Woodward follows her home in time to see her child die with her eyes fixed accusingly on him. Stupefied, he walks away, always trying to remove the imaginary blood stains from his fingers. He wanders into a swamp and sinks down exhausted. Suddenly the faces of hundreds of sickly, mutilated children appeared to him and pointed accusingly at him. The swamp turns to blood and he sinks lower and lower into it, until Alice's child, glorified and radiant, rushes up and leads him away. Again he stumbles, and as he reaches for her she vanishes, but in her place appears the accusing children. Again Alice's child leads him forth, and this time he stands on the edge of a wood, where the children all glorified and happy, run about and play. The child leaves him and joins the others, but as he starts to follow an angel with a flaming sword appears and holds him back, saying he has murdered the children's bodies on earth, and therefore, he should not be permitted to touch their souls. With a groan he sinks to the ground where they find him, hours later, a babbling idiot. They take him to Alice's home. She nurses him back to health. Then he sells his mills and gives himself up to the task of abolishing child labor. Woodward finishes his recital. Davis asks to he allowed to give the $100,000 "bribe fund" to "help the kids."

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The Blood of the Children

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