raised,
made the undertaking heroic. Thus, when the mill life was once begun it
was seldom deserted.

Without educational advantages, save in the most rudimentary way,
without any fair prospect of ever becoming independent or of materially
improving their status, these mill workers kept up the daily round of
labor, earning the millions which were laying the foundations of a new
and greater East, eventually a new United States, and voting, in so far
as they exercised the right of suffrage at all, for the cause of their
masters, against the "slave-drivers" of the South and for protection to
manufactures as a means of defending themselves against their poorer
brethren of Europe. As to their total number, we have no more reliable
estimate than that of McMaster, who says there were not less than two
million operatives in all lines of industry in 1825. Nobody thought of
these people as slaves; and most people thought they must be happy to
escape the dull life of the country, and that fourteen hours' work was a
normal human exercise. A worthless father who lived on the labor of
little children of his own begetting was counted lucky to have children
to work for him; and the girl who entered the primrose path as a
possible way of escape from her hard surroundings was then as now
promptly ruled out of the pale of human sympathy and consigned to the
lake of everlasting fire and brimstone.

Another great interest had grown to immense proportions in the East of
1830--the financial. Beginning with the flush times of Hamilton's
leadership, the financier had grown in power and influence, sometimes
purposely organizing a monopolistic control over the money of the
public, as in the case of the Suffolk Bank of Boston, sometimes
mercilessly robbing depositors, as in the notorious defalcation of the
Derby Bank of Connecticut in 1825, until it had become a serious
national problem not merely to regulate the currency of the country, but
to curb the rapacity of those who, under one pretense or another,
violated the laws of all the States in order to heap up hasty fortunes.
In 1815 there had been 208 banks in the country, mainly in the Middle
States and New England, with a capital of $82,000,000; at the end of the
year 1833 there were 502 banks with a capital of $168,829,000. At the
end of the second war with England, there were $17,000,000 of specie in
the banks; eighteen years later, when the capital had doubled, loans had
greatly increase