Let us first take a large manufacturing firm, or rather series of firms, well known in South Lancashire.  We mean the cotton-spinning mills of the Messrs. Ashworth at Egerton and New Eagley.  They have been in existence for more than seventy years.  They have been repeatedly enlarged, and increasing numbers of workpeople have been employed at the uniform wages paid throughout the district.  Workmen earn from seventeen shillings to two pounds a week.  Women-weavers can earn as much as twenty-one shillings a week.  Where the parents have children, the united earnings of families amount to as much as from L150 to L200 a year.

Then, as to what the Ashworths have done for the benefit of their workpeople.  Schooling, by means of mutual instruction classes, was in operation from the first; but about the year 1825, when the works were greatly enlarged, and the population was considerably increased, a day school was opened for children, which was used as an evening school for young men, as well as for a Sunday-school.  The continued extension of the works led to an enlargement of the school accommodation; and while this was being provided, arrangements were made for a news-room, library, and for the performance of divine worship on Sundays.  A cricket-ground was also provided for the use of young people.

Misgivings were not unfrequently expressed that the zeal and expenditure incurred by the Messrs. Ashworth might one day be turned against them, to their annoyance and pecuniary loss.  The prediction was realized in only a single instance.  A young man of considerable talent, who when a child had been removed to the factory from a neighbouring workhouse, made very rapid progress at school, especially in arithmetic; and when a strike of the workpeople occurred in 1830, one of the great strike years, he became very officious as a leader.  The strike was defeated by the employment of new hands, and it was attributed to the influence of this young man that the employed were brutally assailed by an infuriated mob, and that the windows of the schoolroom were smashed, and other works of destruction committed.

The employers, nevertheless, pursued their original design.  They repaired the school-house, and endeavoured to increase the efficacy of the teaching.  They believed that nothing was better calculated to remove ignorant infatuation than increased schooling.  In a great many instances, the heads of the families had previously been engaged as hand-loom weavers, or in some pastoral pursuit; and it became evident that in course of time the exercise of their minds in the details of a new pursuit awakened their intelligence, and their general demeanour indicated marks of a higher cultivation.