especially about their hair, composed in their manner, and sometimes a little supercilious in the propriety of their demeanor.  It is exactly the same class of young women that one sees in the factories at Lowell.  They are not sallow, nor dirty, nor ragged, nor rough.  They have about them no signs of want, or of low culture.  Many of us also know the appearance of those girls who work in the factories in England; and I think it will be allowed that a second glance at them is not wanting to show that they are in every respect inferior to the young women who attend our shops.  The matter, indeed, requires no argument.  Any young woman at a shop would be insulted by being asked whether she had worked at a factory.  The difference with regard to the men at Lowell is quite as strong, though not so striking.  Working men do not show their status in the world by their outward appearance as readily as women; and, as I have said before, the number of the women greatly exceeded that of the men.

One would of course be disposed to say that the superior condition of the workers must have been occasioned by superior wages; and this, to a certain extent, has been the cause.  But the higher payment is not the chief cause.  Women’s wages, including all that they receive at the Lowell factories, average about 14s. a week, which is, I take it, fully a third more than women can earn in Manchester, or did earn before the loss of the American cotton began to tell upon them.  But if wages at Manchester were raised to the Lowell standard, the Manchester women would not be clothed, fed, cared for, and educated like the Lowell women.  The fact is, that the workmen and the workwomen at Lowell are not exposed to the chances of an open labor market.  They are taken in, as it were, to a philanthropical manufacturing college, and then looked after and regulated more as girls and lads at a great seminary, than as hands by whose industry profit is to be made out of capital.  This is all very nice and pretty at Lowell, but I am afraid it could not be done at Manchester.

There are at present twelve different manufactories at Lowell, each of which has what is called a separate corporation.  The Merrimack Manufacturing Company was incorporated in 1822, and thus Lowell was commenced.  The Lowell Machine-shop was incorporated in 1845, and since that no new establishment has been added.  In 1821, a certain Boston manufacturing company, which had mills at Waltham, near Boston, was attracted by the water-power of the River Merrimack, on which the present town of Lowell is situated.  A canal called the Pawtucket Canal had been made for purposes of navigation from one reach of the river to another, with the object of avoiding the Pawtucket Falls; and this canal, with the adjacent water-power of the river, was purchased for the Boston company.  The place was then called Lowell, after one of the partners in that company.