[Illustration:  “WAVING ARMS OF SMOKE AND STEAM, A SYMBOL OF SPENT ENERGY, OF THE LIVES CONSUMED, AND VANISHING AGAIN”

Factories on the Alleghany River at the 16th Street bridge, just below the pickle works]

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PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN

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CHAPTER III

PERRY, A NEW YORK MILL TOWN

No place in America could have afforded better than Pittsburg a chance to study the factory life of American girls, the stimulus of a new country upon the labourers of old races, the fervour and energy of a people animated by hope and stirred to activity by the boundless opportunities for making money.  It is the labourers’ city par excellence; and in my preceding chapters I have tried to give a clear picture of factory life between the hours of seven and six, of the economic conditions, of the natural social and legal equipment of woman as a working entity, of her physical, moral and esthetic development.

Now, since the time ticked out between the morning summoning whistle to that which gives release at night is not half the day, and only two-thirds of the working hours, my second purpose has been to find a place where the factory girl’s own life could best be studied:  her domestic, religious and sentimental life.

Somewhere in the western part of New York State, one of my comrades at the pickle works had told me, there was a town whose population was chiefly composed of mill-hands.  The name of the place was Perry, and I decided upon it as offering the typical American civilization among the working classes.  New England is too free of grafts to give more than a single aspect; Pittsburg is an international bazaar; but the foundations of Perry are laid with bricks from all parts of the world, held together by a strong American cement.

Ignorant of Perry further than as it exists, a black spot on a branch of a small road near Buffalo, I set out from New York toward my destination on the Empire State Express.  There was barely time to descend with my baggage at Rochester before the engine had started onward again, trailing behind it with world-renowned rapidity its freight of travelers who, for a few hours under the car’s roof, are united by no other common interest than that of journeying quickly from one spot to another, where they disperse never to meet again.  My Perry train had an altogether different character.  I was late for it, but the brakeman saw me coming and waved to the engineer not to start until my trunk was checked and safely boarded like myself.  Then we bumped our way through meadows quickened to life by the soft spring air; we halted at crossroads to pick up stray travelers and shoppers; we unloaded plowing machines and shipped crates of live fowl; we waited at wayside stations with high-sounding names for family parties whose unpunctuality was indulgently considered by the occupants of the train.