alien charges.  In these cases, however, where often the children have had no schooling at all before they are old enough to work, it is quite clear that the school cannot do all that is required to raise the labor of to-day up to the levels it occupied in the past.  And, if the school itself is ineffective in this regard, how much more so must be the Church, to which immigrant youth is a comparative stranger; or those democratic institutions which are based, to quote the words of Washington himself, upon “the virtue and intelligence of the people.”

Whether the present condition of labor in America will ever again be lifted to the levels of the past depends, in truth, less upon the State, the Church, and the School, than upon the part which the American employer is taking or about to take in this question.  It is impossible for any unprejudiced observer to be long in the States, and especially in the New England States, without coming to the conclusion that a large number of employers are very anxious about the character of the labor they employ, and willing to assist to the utmost of their power in improving it.  In spite of the love of money and luxury which is so conspicuous a feature of certain sections of American society, a high ideal of the proper function of wealth has arisen in the States, where large fortunes are chiefly things of recent date, among large and influential classes having an enlightened regard for the best welfare of the country.  This regard finds expression now in the establishment of a factory, managed with one eye on profits and another on the elevation of the artisan, and now in the endowment of free libraries or similar institutions, offering opportunities of improvement to all.

To give only a few instances of the former movement:  Mr. Pullman, the great car-builder, has recently established, on Lake Calumet, a vast system of workshops and workmen’s homes, a description of which reads like a chapter from More’s “Utopia.”  The Waterbury Watch Company has lately built a factory, employing 600 hands, on similar lines to those of Mr. Pullman.  Cheney Brothers’ silk mills at South Manchester remain now, after Irish labor has entirely taken the place of native hands, at almost the same high level as that which, in common with Lowell, they held forty years ago.  Messrs. Fairbanks, of St. Johnsbury, in Vermont, conduct a large establishment, where every married employe owns a house in the village, almost an Eden for beauty and order, which has grown up around these remote but remarkable scale works.  Similarly, the Cranes at Dalton, in Massachusetts; Messrs. Brown, Sharpe and Co., at Providence, Rhode Island; Mr. Hazard at Peacedale, Narragansett; and last, not least, Col.  Barrows, at Willimantic, in Connecticut, have all succeeded in restoring the past conditions of native American labor among operatives, now, for the most part, of alien origin.