The German Migration.—­To political discontent and economic distress, such as was responsible for the coming of the Irish, may likewise be traced the source of the Germanic migration.  The potato blight that fell upon Ireland visited the Rhine Valley and Southern Germany at the same time with results as pitiful, if less extensive.  The calamity inflicted by nature was followed shortly by another inflicted by the despotic conduct of German kings and princes.  In 1848 there had occurred throughout Europe a popular uprising in behalf of republics and democratic government.  For a time it rode on a full tide of success.  Kings were overthrown, or compelled to promise constitutional government, and tyrannical ministers fled from their palaces.  Then came reaction.  Those who had championed the popular cause were imprisoned, shot, or driven out of the land.  Men of attainments and distinction, whose sole offense was opposition to the government of kings and princes, sought an asylum in America, carrying with them to the land of their adoption the spirit of liberty and democracy.  In 1847 over fifty thousand Germans came to America, the forerunners of a migration that increased, almost steadily, for many years.  The record of 1860 showed that in the previous twenty years nearly a million and a half had found homes in the United States.  Far and wide they scattered, from the mills and shops of the seacoast towns to the uttermost frontiers of Wisconsin and Minnesota.

The Labor of Women and Children.—­If the industries, canals, and railways of the country were largely manned by foreign labor, still important native sources must not be overlooked; above all, the women and children of the New England textile districts.  Spinning and weaving, by a tradition that runs far beyond the written records of mankind, belonged to women.  Indeed it was the dexterous housewives, spinsters, and boys and girls that laid the foundations of the textile industry in America, foundations upon which the mechanical revolution was built.  As the wheel and loom were taken out of the homes to the factories operated by water power or the steam engine, the women and, to use Hamilton’s phrase, “the children of tender years,” followed as a matter of course.  “The cotton manufacture alone employs six thousand persons in Lowell,” wrote a French observer in 1836; “of this number nearly five thousand are young women from seventeen to twenty-four years of age, the daughters of farmers from the different New England states.”  It was not until after the middle of the century that foreign lands proved to be the chief source from which workers were recruited for the factories of New England.  It was then that the daughters of the Puritans, outdone by the competition of foreign labor, both of men and women, left the spinning jenny and the loom to other hands.