In a few months the first manufactory was established in Waltham, with the most wonderful success. Henry Clay visited it, and gave a glowing account of it in one of his speeches, using its success as an argument against free trade. It is difficult to see what protection the new manufacture required. The company sold its cotton cloth at thirty cents a yard, and they afterwards found that they could sell it without loss at less than seven cents. The success of the Waltham establishment led to the founding of Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua, and Manchester. There are now at Lowell eighty mills and factories, in which are employed sixteen thousand men and women, who produce more than three million yards of fabric every week. The city has a solid inviting appearance, and there are in the outskirts many beautiful and commanding sites for residences, which are occupied by men of wealth.
But now as to the question above proposed. Why are the operatives at Lowell less discontented than elsewhere? It is in part because the able men who founded the place bestowed some thought upon the welfare of the human beings whom they were about to summon to the spot. They did not, it is true, bestow thought enough; but they thought of it, and they made some provision for proper and pleasant life in their proposed town. Mr. Appleton, who many years ago took the trouble to record these circumstances, mentions that the probable effect of this new kind of industry upon the character of the people was most attentively considered by the founders. In Europe, as most of them had personally seen, the operatives were unintelligent and immoral, made so by fifteen or sixteen hours' labor a day, and a beer-shop on every corner. They caused suitable boarding-houses to be built, which were placed under the charge of women known to be competent and respectable. Land was assigned and money subscribed for schools, for churches, for a hospital. Systematic care was taken to keep away immoral persons, and rules were established, some of which carried the supervision of morals and manners perhaps too far. The consequence was that the daughters of farmers, young women well educated and well-bred, came from all quarters, and found the factory life something more than endurable.
But for one thing they would have found it salutary and agreeable. The plague of factory life is the extreme monotony of the employment, and this is aggravated in some mills by high temperature and imperfect ventilation. At that time the laws of health were so little understood that few persons saw any hardship in young girls standing on their feet thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen hours a day! It was considered a triumph when the working-day was reduced to thirteen hours. Thirty years ago, after prodigious agitation, the day was fixed at eleven hours. That was too much. It has now been reduced to ten hours; but it is yet to be shown that a woman of average strength and stamina can work in a cotton mill ten hours a day for years at a stretch, without deteriorating in body, in mind, or in character.
During the first years the girls would come from the country, work in the mill a few months, or two or three years, and then return to their country homes. Thus the injury was less ruinous than it might have been. The high character of the Lowell operatives was much spoken of in the early day. Some of the boarding-houses contained pianos upon which the boarders played in the evening, and there was a magazine called the "Lowell Offering," to which they contributed all the articles. These things seemed so astonishing that Charles Dickens, when he was first in the United States, in 1842, visited Lowell to behold the marvels for himself. How changed the world in forty years! Few persons now living can remember even the cars of forty years ago, when there were but a few hundred miles of railroad in the United States.
The train which conveyed the great novelist from Boston to Lowell consisted of three cars, a gentlemen's car in which smoking was allowed, a ladies' car in which no one smoked, and "a negro car," which the author describes as a "great, blundering, clumsy chest, such as Gulliver put to sea in from the kingdom of Brobdingnag." Where is now the negro car? It is gone to rejoin its elder brother, the negro pew. The white people's cars he describes as "large, shabby omnibuses," with a red-hot stove in the middle, and the air insufferably close.
He happened to arrive at his first factory in Lowell just as the dinner hour was over, and the girls were trooping up the stairs as he himself ascended. How strange his comments now appear to us! If we read them by the light of to-day, we find them patronizing and snobbish; but at that day they were far in advance of the feelings and opinions of the comfortable class. He observed that the girls were all well-dressed, extremely clean, with serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls, and their feet well protected both against wet and cold. He felt it necessary, as he was writing for English readers, to apologize for their pleasant appearance.
"To my thinking," he remarks, "they were not dressed above their condition; for I like to see the humbler classes of society careful of their dress and appearance, and even, if they please, decorated with such little trinkets as come within the compass of their means."
He alluded to the "Lowell Offering," a monthly magazine, "written, edited, and published," as its cover informed the public, "by female operatives employed in the mills." Mr. Dickens praised this magazine in an extremely ingenious manner. He could not claim that the literature of the work was of a very high order, because that would not have been true. He said:—
"Its merits will compare advantageously with a great many English Annuals."
That is really an exquisite touch of satire. He went on to say:—