ton mills, was in
great demand, and what were then thought very high wages were freely
offered, so that, in spite of the national prejudice against factory
labor, operatives began to flow from many quarters into the mills. These
people were, for the most part, the daughters of farmers, storekeepers,
and mechanics; of Puritan antecedents, and religious training. In the mill
they were treated kindly, and, although their hours were long, they were
not overworked. A feeling of real, but respectful, equality existed
between them and their employers, and the best hands were often guests at
the houses of the mill owners or ministers of religion. They lived in
great boarding-houses, kept by women selected for their high character,
and it is of these industrial families, and of their refined life, that
observers like Dickens, Lyell, and Miss Martineau spoke with enthusiasm.
The last writer has made us acquainted, in her "Mind among the Spindles,"
with the height to which intellectual life once rose in Lowell mills,
before the wave of Irish emigration, following on the potato famine, swept
native American labor away from the spindles. The morality of the early
mill-girls, again, was practically stainless, and, strict as the rules of
conduct were in the factories, these were really dead letters, so high was
the standard of behavior set and sustained by the mill-hands themselves.

Such was the character of native American labor, less than forty years
ago, and such, almost, it still remains in those, now few, centers of
industry where it has been little diluted with a foreign element. Nowhere
is this so conspicuously the case as in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and
especially in the western valleys of the former State, where important
mill-streams, such as the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, and the Farmington,
are lined with mills still largely manned by native Americans.

Aside from wages, which will be separately considered, the housing,
education, sobriety, and pauperism of any given industrial community form
together the best possible test of its social condition. In regard to the
housing of labor, there is no more important fact to be discovered than
the proportion of an operative population who possess in fee simple the
houses in which they dwell. This proportion among the wage-earners of
Massachusetts is remarkably high, one working man in every four being the
proprietor of the house in which he lives. Of the remaining three-four