s most of them had personally
seen, the operatives were unintelligent and immoral, made so by fifteen
or sixteen hours' labor a day, and a beer-shop on every corner. They
caused suitable boarding-houses to be built, which were placed under the
charge of women known to be competent and respectable. Land was assigned
and money subscribed for schools, for churches, for a hospital.
Systematic care was taken to keep away immoral persons, and rules were
established, some of which carried the supervision of morals and manners
perhaps too far. The consequence was that the daughters of farmers,
young women well educated and well-bred, came from all quarters, and
found the factory life something more than endurable.

But for one thing they would have found it salutary and agreeable. The
plague of factory life is the extreme monotony of the employment, and
this is aggravated in some mills by high temperature and imperfect
ventilation. At that time the laws of health were so little understood
that few persons saw any hardship in young girls standing on their feet
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen hours a day! It was
considered a triumph when the working-day was reduced to thirteen hours.
Thirty years ago, after prodigious agitation, the day was fixed at
eleven hours. That was too much. It has now been reduced to ten hours;
but it is yet to be shown that a woman of average strength and stamina
can work in a cotton mill ten hours a day for years at a stretch,
without deteriorating in body, in mind, or in character.

During the first years the girls would come from the country, work in
the mill a few months, or two or three years, and then return to their
country homes. Thus the injury was less ruinous than it might have been.
The high character of the Lowell operatives was much spoken of in the
early day. Some of the boarding-houses contained pianos upon which the
boarders played in the evening, and there was a magazine called the
"Lowell Offering," to which they contributed all the articles. These
things seemed so astonishing that Charles Dickens, when he was first in
the United States, in 1842, visited Lowell to behold the marvels for
himself. How changed the world in forty years! Few persons now living
can remember even the cars of forty years ago, when there were but a few
hundred miles of railroad in the United States.

The train which conveyed the great novelist from Boston to Lowell
consisted of three cars, a gen