with green jalousies, and surrounded by a well-tilled quarter acre lot.  Its windows are aglow with geraniums, and from its veranda we glance upward to the wooded slopes of the Green Mountain range, and downward to the River Naugatuck, whose blue mill-ponds look like tiny Highland lakes surrounded by great factories.  Within, a pleasant sitting-room is furnished with all the comforts and some of the luxuries of life, the tables are strewn with books, and the walls decorated with pretty photographs.  Mr. S.’s wife and daughter are educated and agreeable women, who entertain us, during an hour’s call, with intelligent conversation, which, turning for the most part on the events of the War of Independence, is characterized by ample historical knowledge, a logical habit of mind, and a remarkable readiness to welcome new ideas.  No refreshments are offered us, for no one eats between meals, and, in private houses, as in the public refreshment rooms, where native labor usually takes its meals, nothing stronger than water is ever drunk.  Such are the homes of men whom I would distinguish as “American” artisans, and such, also, are those of many foreign workmen who have been long under native influence.

It is not in the valleys of Massachusetts, however, that the greatest manufacturing cities of the Union are to be found, the towns already referred to containing usually only a few thousand inhabitants, and being still, for the most part, rural in their surroundings.  They are, indeed, the fastnesses, so to speak, to which the Yankee artisan has retired, after having been almost literally swept out of the great manufacturing cities by successive waves of emigrant labor, chiefly of Irish and French-Canadian nationality.  To these great cities we must now turn for examples of a condition of operative society which contrasts most unfavorably with that which has already been sketched; it being, meanwhile, understood that a penumbral region, of more or less mixed conditions, graduates the brightness of the one into the darkness of the other picture.

The city of Lowell, whose brilliant past is so well known, exemplifies, on that very account, better than any other manufacturing town in the States, the character of recent alterations in American labor conditions.  The mill-hands, formerly such as I have described them, have been almost entirely replaced by Canadians and Irish, who have given a new character and aspect to the Lowell of forty years ago.  “Little Canada,” as the quarter inhabited by the former people is called, exhibits a congeries of narrow, unpaved lanes, lined with rickety wooden houses, which elbow one another closely, and possess neither gardens nor yards.  They are let out in flats, and are crowded to overflowing with a dense population of lodgers.  Peeps into their interiors reveal dirty, poorly furnished rooms, and large families, pigging squalidly together at meal times, while unkempt men and slatternly women lean from open windows, and scold in French, or chatter with crowds of ragged and bare-legged children, playing in the gutters.