FOOTNOTES:
[DY] M. Ballanche.
[DZ] As in some of the States there is no law of divorce, the legislatures grant it in virtue of their legislative omnipotence. Out of less than 150 acts passed by the New Jersey legislature in 1836, thirteen were acts authorising divorces.
[EA] In the mail-coaches, the best seats are always yielded to women, without regard to the order in which the names are booked. The husband also does the marketing and often brings home the provisions himself. Nothing is more common than to see men carrying home a goose or a turkey by the legs, or a basket of fruit. I have before observed that the conjugal and social submission of the woman is more complete in the United States than in France. In France, a woman engages in business, and with the consent of her husband is acknowledged as a responsible agent; but there is nothing of this sort in England and the United States. Our children in Canada have even gone beyond us in this respect, and have admitted females to the electoral franchise.
[EB] The English workman is very skilful. Although in certain branches we excel the English, it appears to me incontestable, that at present the English workman is the first in Europe. In some respects, he is also superiour to the American; he will, for example, finish a particular piece of work in a better style, but when out of his special sphere, and separated from the tools of the English workshops, which are of a superiour kind, he will be at loss. The American workman has a more general aptitude; his sphere is larger, and he can extend it indefinitely at will. He accomplishes at least, as much as the English workman, and when he devotes himself for a long time to the same task, which is not usual with him, he does it better.
[EC] Thus a shoemaker or tailor will not go to a customer's house to take a measure, but requires all, women and men, to come in person to his shop.
[ED] In the relations between the master and the operative, the most deplorable usages prevail in our large manufacturing towns. Many of the masters are reduced to practise the most disgraceful artifices on their workmen, in order to sustain themselves against the violence of competition; thus, in some workshops and factories, the hands of the clock are put forward in the morning and backward in the evening. The operatives commit reprisals in every possible manner.
[EE] The piquage d'onces, or secretion of silk by the workmen, is one of the cankers of Lyons. The value of the silk thus stolen is estimated at nearly one million of dollars a year; the thefts committed in the Rheims factories are stated to exceed 600,000 dollars. The operatives exchange the gold-lace at the dram-shops for about one fourth of its actual value.
[EF] The domestics in the United States are almost everywhere much inferior to the operatives, personal service being here looked upon as degrading. In many of the States the domestics will not bear to be called servants, and take that of help; this is the case in New England. The domestic is there a hired agent whose task is light, and who in many houses takes his meals with the family. On these conditions, native servants may be had in New England who are attentive and intelligent; they stand upon their rights, and expect to be treated with respect by their employers, but they perform their duties with an honourable fidelity. In most of the non-slave-holding States, the servants are chiefly free blacks, who are generally lazy and depraved, or newly arrived emigrants from Ireland, who are ignorant and without skill, prone to be most provokingly familiar, and in the intoxication of their new condition, so different from the squalid misery they have left behind them, more disposed to take airs upon themselves, than the natives of the country.