The Irish portion of the town has wider streets, and houses less crowded than those of “Little Canada,” but is, altogether, of scarcely better aspect.  Slatternly women gossip in groups about the doorways.  Tawdrily dressed girls saunter along the sidewalks, or loll from the window-sills.  Knots of shirt-sleeved men congregate about the frequent liquor-saloons, talking loudly and volubly.  No signs of poverty are apparent, but everything wears an aspect of prosperous ignorance, satisfied to eat, drink, and idle away the hours not given to work.  Such is the general aspect of operative Lowell to-day; but some of the old well-conducted boarding-houses remain, sheltering worthy sons and daughters of toil.  Similarly, the outskirts of the city are adorned with many pretty white houses, where typical American families are growing up amid wholesome moral and physical surroundings, and enjoying all the advantages of schools, churches, libraries, and free institutions which the Great Republic puts everywhere, with lavish profuseness, at the service even of its least promising populations.

Concerning the Lowell mill-hands of to-day, I prefer, before my own observations, to quote from an article entitled “Early Factory Labor in New England,” written by a lady, herself one of the early mill-girls, and published in the “Massachusetts Labor Bureau Keport for 1883.”  She says: 

“Last winter, I was invited to speak to a company of the Lowell mill-girls, and tell them something of my early life as a member of their guild.  When my address was over, some of them gathered round and asked me questions.  In turn, I questioned them about their work, hours of labor, wages, and means of improvement.  When I urged them to occupy their spare time in reading and study, they seemed to understand the need of it, but answered, sadly, ‘We will try, but we work so hard, and are so tired.’  It was plain that these operatives did not go to their labor with the jubilant feeling of the old mill-girls, that they worked without aim or purpose, and took no interest in anything beyond earning their daily bread.  There was a tired hopelessness about them, such as was never seen among the early mill-girls.  Yet they have more leisure, and earn more money than the operatives of fifty years ago, but they do not know how to improve the one or use the other.  These American-born children of foreign parentage are, indeed, under the control neither of their church nor their parents, and they, consequently, adopt the vices and follies instead of the good habits of our people.  It is vital to the interests of the whole community that they should be brought under good moral influence; that they should live in better homes, and breathe a better social atmosphere than is now to be found in our factory towns.”