What were my first impressions of the hands who returned at noon under the roof which had extended unquestioning its hospitality?  Were they a band of slaves, victims to toil and deprivation?  Were they making the pitiful exchange of their total vitality for insufficient nourishment?  Did life mean to them merely the diminishing of their forces?

On the contrary, they entered gay, laughing young, a youth guarded intact by freedom and hope.  What were the subjects of conversation pursued at dinner?  Love, labour, the price paid for it, the advantages of town over country life, the neighbour and her conduct.  What was the appearance of my companions?  There was nothing in it to shock good taste.  Their hands and feet were somewhat broadened by work, their skins were imperfect for the lack of proper food, their dresses were of coarse material; but in small things the differences were superficial only.  Was it, then, in big things that the divergence began which places them as a lower class?  Was it money alone that kept them from the places of authority?  What were their ambitions, their perplexities?  What part does self-respect play?  How well satisfied are they, or how restless?  What can we learn from them?  What can we teach them?

We ate our dinner of boiled meat and custard pie and all started back in good time for a one o’clock beginning at the mill.  For the space of several hundred feet its expressionless red brick walls lined the street, implacable, silent.  Within all hummed to the collective activity of a throng, each working with all his force for a common end.  Machines roared and pounded; a fine dust filled the air—­a cloud of lint sent forth from the friction of thousands of busy hands in perpetual contact with the shapeless anonymous garments they were fashioning.  There were, on their way between the cutting-and the finishing-rooms, 7,000 dozen shirts.  They were to pass by innumerable hands; they were to be held and touched by innumerable individuals; they were to be begun and finished by innumerable human beings with distinct tastes and likings, abilities and failings; and when the 7,000 dozen shirts were complete they were to look alike, and they were to look as though made by a machine; they were to show no trace whatever of the men and the women who had made them.  Here we were, 1,000 souls hurrying from morning until night, working from seven until six, with as little personality as we could, with the effort to produce, through an action purely mechanical, results as nearly as possible identical one to the other, and all to the machine itself.

[Illustration:  “THEY TRIFLE WITH LOVE”]

What could be the result upon the mind and health of this frantic mechanical activity devoid of thought?  It was this for which I sought an answer; it is for this I propose a remedy.