uish by the epithet "American" because it
is of truly national origin. In the latter case, the so-called "American"
may really be a German, an Irishman, an Englishman, or a Swede, but the
qualities which I would distinguish by the word "American" have not yet
been developed in him, although they will probably be exhibited by his
later descendants.

Setting the census figures aside, therefore, we find, from the
Registration Reports of Massachusetts, that fifty-four out of every
hundred persons who die within the limits of this State are of foreign
parentage. Now bearing in mind that Massachusetts is essentially a Yankee
State, where comparatively few European emigrants settle, it seems
probable that, going back several generations, the numbers, even of
Massachusetts men, who may be truly called "Americans" would dwindle
considerably. These men, however, the children of equality, of the common
school, and of democratic institutions, may be considered as leaven,
leavening the lump of European emigration, and shaping, so far as they
can, the character of the American; people that is yet to be.

Native American labor is best described by reference to a recent past,
when it filled all the factories of the United States, and challenged, by
its high tone, the admiration of Europe. At the beginning of this century,
public opinion in America was most unfriendly to the establishment of
manufactories, so great were the complaints of these made in Europe as
seats of vice and disease. Thus, when Humphreysville, the first industrial
village in America, was built, in 1804, by the Hon. David Humphreys, who
wished to see the colony independent of the mother country for her
supplies of manufactured goods, parents refused to place their children in
his factories until legislation had first made the mill-owner responsible
both for the education and morality of his operatives. Similarly, when the
cotton mills of Lowell, and the silk mills of Hartford, began to rise,
between 1832 and 1840, the American people held the capitalist responsible
for the moral, mental, and physical health of the people whom he employed,
with the result that all England wondered at the stories of factory
operatives, and their so-called "refinements," which were given to this
country by writers like Harriett Martineau and Charles Dickens.

Lowell, between the years 1832 and 1850, was, perhaps, the most remarkable
manufacturing town in the world. Help, in the new cot