Sharp contrasts as they are, these sketches fairly picture the heights and depths of industrial conditions in a region which, as I would again remind you, contains nearly one-half of all the factory operatives in America.  More than this, while the States in question would yield to no others their claims to represent advanced civilization, Massachusetts, the creation of the Puritan refugees, and the cradle of American independence, stands confessedly at the head of all her sister States for enlightened philanthropy.  There are no greater lovers of right, honorers of industry, and friends to education in the world than its people, yet the present social condition of Holyoke and of Lowell, as of many other manufacturing cities, would have shocked all America thirty years ago, and been impossible less than half a century back.  It is time we should ask, How is America going to treat a problem, formerly the danger and still the perplexity of Europe, for which democratic institutions have failed to furnish the solution once confidently, but unfairly, expected from them?

The State, the Church, and the School are all doing their best to prevent the lapse to lower conditions which seems to threaten labor in the States, each of them trying their utmost to “make Americans” of alien laborers, by means of the political, religious, and educational institutions of the country.  How inadequate these unaided agencies are for the accomplishment of their gigantic task is nowhere so clearly realized as in the common, or free, schools of the States.  These, in districts such as I have distinguished as “American,” are filled with boys and girls, of all ages from five to eighteen, whose appearance and intelligence bespeak high social conditions.  Whatever the occupation which these young people may ultimately adopt—­and all of them are destined for work-a-day lives—­an observer feels quite sure that they are more likely to raise the character of their several employments, than to be themselves degraded to lower social levels, on quitting school.

But no similar confidence in the future of American labor is engendered by visits to the schools where sits the progeny of alien labor.  In the case of the Canadians, indeed, parents and priests alike bend all their energies to the establishment of “parochial schools,” which, if they forward the cause of the Church, do little for education in the American sense of requiring good citizens, even more than good scholars, at the hands of the national teachers.

The primary schools of great industrial towns, such as Fall River, the Manchester of America, are filled, to quite as great an extent as similar schools in Europe, with ignorant, ragged, and bare-footed urchins.  These children are, indeed, no less well cared for and taught than their Yankee fellows, and one cannot sufficiently admire the energy and enthusiasm with which school-teachers generally endeavor to “make Americans” of their stolid and ragged little