potato blight that fell
upon Ireland visited the Rhine Valley and Southern Germany at the same
time with results as pitiful, if less extensive. The calamity inflicted
by nature was followed shortly by another inflicted by the despotic
conduct of German kings and princes. In 1848 there had occurred
throughout Europe a popular uprising in behalf of republics and
democratic government. For a time it rode on a full tide of success.
Kings were overthrown, or compelled to promise constitutional
government, and tyrannical ministers fled from their palaces. Then came
reaction. Those who had championed the popular cause were imprisoned,
shot, or driven out of the land. Men of attainments and distinction,
whose sole offense was opposition to the government of kings and
princes, sought an asylum in America, carrying with them to the land of
their adoption the spirit of liberty and democracy. In 1847 over fifty
thousand Germans came to America, the forerunners of a migration that
increased, almost steadily, for many years. The record of 1860 showed
that in the previous twenty years nearly a million and a half had found
homes in the United States. Far and wide they scattered, from the mills
and shops of the seacoast towns to the uttermost frontiers of Wisconsin
and Minnesota.

_The Labor of Women and Children._--If the industries, canals, and
railways of the country were largely manned by foreign labor, still
important native sources must not be overlooked; above all, the women
and children of the New England textile districts. Spinning and weaving,
by a tradition that runs far beyond the written records of mankind,
belonged to women. Indeed it was the dexterous housewives, spinsters,
and boys and girls that laid the foundations of the textile industry in
America, foundations upon which the mechanical revolution was built. As
the wheel and loom were taken out of the homes to the factories operated
by water power or the steam engine, the women and, to use Hamilton's
phrase, "the children of tender years," followed as a matter of course.
"The cotton manufacture alone employs six thousand persons in Lowell,"
wrote a French observer in 1836; "of this number nearly five thousand
are young women from seventeen to twenty-four years of age, the
daughters of farmers from the different New England states." It was not
until after the middle of the century that foreign lands proved to be
the chief source from which workers were recruited for t