n labor, and the men and women in the mills belonged to
respectable, often well-to-do American families. Rowdyism was a thing
unknown to them, and as to drunkenness, if that fault was found once in
an operative, he was reprimanded; if it occurred again, he was at once
discharged. And so Amesbury, though a manufacturing town, was in its
neatness and orderliness an exquisite little village with the Powow Hill
at its back and the hem of its robe laved by two beautiful rivers. After
Mr. Aubin's ill health had made him resign his place, the father of
Prof. Langley, well-known to science, was agent for a time, and carried
on matters in the spirit of his predecessors. But there came a change,
the mills were united under one control, and an agent was sent to
Amesbury for the purpose of forcibly illustrating the fact that
corporations have no souls. He did it admirably. Work was started at
high pressure, there came a rush of foreigners into the place, many of
the old towns people moved away in disgust, and the new took the place
of the old as suddenly as if an evil magician had waved his wand
and cried: "Presto!" But this agent soon gave evidence that great
unscrupulousness doesn't pay, even as a financial investment. After
several other short regimes the present agent, Mr. Steere, came to
Amesbury, and the corporation has found it worth while to keep him.
The effect of the sudden influx of foreign population into Amesbury
has never done away with; it has its "Dublin" in a valley where the
corporation built houses for its operatives. And with what indifference
to cleanliness, or health these were built! The poor operatives were
crowded together in a way that would make neatness difficult to the most
fastidious. A physician in Amesbury who considered the poor, presented
this state of things so strongly and so persistently to the agent, spoke
so forcibly of the moral degradation that such herding increased, or
induced, that when it became necessary to build new tenements they were
much better arranged. Every manufacturing town in New England has now
its unwholesome because untaught population, a danger signal on the line
of progress of the republic. It is only popular education that can
remove this obstruction of ignorance. The foreign population of Amesbury
today is large, and although it gives hands to the mills, it adds
neither to the beauty nor the interest of the town. But it gives a
mission to those who believe in the possibil