Lowell, between the years 1832 and 1850, was, perhaps, the most remarkable manufacturing town in the world.  Help, in the new cotton mills, was in great demand, and what were then thought very high wages were freely offered, so that, in spite of the national prejudice against factory labor, operatives began to flow from many quarters into the mills.  These people were, for the most part, the daughters of farmers, storekeepers, and mechanics; of Puritan antecedents, and religious training.  In the mill they were treated kindly, and, although their hours were long, they were not overworked.  A feeling of real, but respectful, equality existed between them and their employers, and the best hands were often guests at the houses of the mill owners or ministers of religion.  They lived in great boarding-houses, kept by women selected for their high character, and it is of these industrial families, and of their refined life, that observers like Dickens, Lyell, and Miss Martineau spoke with enthusiasm.  The last writer has made us acquainted, in her “Mind among the Spindles,” with the height to which intellectual life once rose in Lowell mills, before the wave of Irish emigration, following on the potato famine, swept native American labor away from the spindles.  The morality of the early mill-girls, again, was practically stainless, and, strict as the rules of conduct were in the factories, these were really dead letters, so high was the standard of behavior set and sustained by the mill-hands themselves.

Such was the character of native American labor, less than forty years ago, and such, almost, it still remains in those, now few, centers of industry where it has been little diluted with a foreign element.  Nowhere is this so conspicuously the case as in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and especially in the western valleys of the former State, where important mill-streams, such as the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, and the Farmington, are lined with mills still largely manned by native Americans.

Aside from wages, which will be separately considered, the housing, education, sobriety, and pauperism of any given industrial community form together the best possible test of its social condition.  In regard to the housing of labor, there is no more important fact to be discovered than the proportion of an operative population who possess in fee simple the houses in which they dwell.  This proportion among the wage-earners of Massachusetts is remarkably high, one working man in every four being the proprietor of the house in which he lives.  Of the remaining three-fourths, 45 per cent. rent their houses, and 30 per cent. are boarders.  With regard to inhabitancy, the average number of persons living in one house in Massachusetts is rather more than six, while the average number of the Massachusetts family is four and three quarter persons.  Hence, lodgers being excepted, almost every operative family in this State lives under its own roof, while one fourth of all such roofs are owned by the heads of families dwelling therein.