Several mills are on record, the day in one of which was fourteen hours, and in the other fifteen hours and ten minutes, this latter being the Eagle Mill at Griswold, Conn.; and previous to 1858 there were many others where hours were equally long.  Work began at five in the morning, or at some points a little later; and there is a known instance of a mill in Paterson, N.J., in which women and children were required to be at work by half-past four in the morning.

In most of the New England factories, the operatives were taxed for the support of religion.  The Lowell Company dismissed them if often absent from church, and their lives without and within the factory were regulated as minutely as if in the cloister.  Women and children were urged on by the cowhide; and the first inspection of the factories, notably in Connecticut, revealed a state of things hardly less harrowing than that which had brought about the passage of the first Factory Acts in England.  At the same time wages were very inadequate.  In twelve hours’ daily labor the weavers of Baltimore were able to earn from sixty to seventy cents a day, the wage of the women being half or a third this amount; and they declared it not enough to pay the expenses of schooling for the children.

With the increase of production and the growing competition of manufacturers, wages were steadily forced downward.  Less and less attention was paid to the comfort or well-being of the operatives, and many factories were unfit working-places for human beings.  Overseers, whose duty it was to keep up the utmost rate of speed, flogged children brutally; and the treatment was so barbarous that a boy of twelve at Mendon, Mass., drowned himself to escape factory labor.  Windows were often nailed down, and their raising forbidden even in the hottest weather.

The most formidable and trustworthy arraignment of these conditions is to be found in a pamphlet printed in 1834, the full title of which is as follows:  “An Address to the Working-men of New England, on the State of Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America.”

The author of this pamphlet, a mechanic of some education, stirred to the heart by the abuses he saw, made an exhaustive examination of the New England mills; and he gives many details of the hours of labor, the wages of employees, and the abuses of power which he found everywhere among unscrupulous manufacturers.  The principal value of his work lies in this, and in his reprint of original documents like the “General Rules of the Lowell Manufacturing Company,” and “The Conditions on which Help is hired by the Cocheco Manufacturing Company, Dover, N.H.”  These conditions were so oppressive that in several cases revolt took place,—­usually unsuccessful, as no organization existed among the women, and they were powerless to effect any marked change for the better.