dings. They are, indeed,
the fastnesses, so to speak, to which the Yankee artisan has retired,
after having been almost literally swept out of the great manufacturing
cities by successive waves of emigrant labor, chiefly of Irish and
French-Canadian nationality. To these great cities we must now turn for
examples of a condition of operative society which contrasts most
unfavorably with that which has already been sketched; it being,
meanwhile, understood that a penumbral region, of more or less mixed
conditions, graduates the brightness of the one into the darkness of the
other picture.

The city of Lowell, whose brilliant past is so well known, exemplifies, on
that very account, better than any other manufacturing town in the States,
the character of recent alterations in American labor conditions. The
mill-hands, formerly such as I have described them, have been almost
entirely replaced by Canadians and Irish, who have given a new character
and aspect to the Lowell of forty years ago. "Little Canada," as the
quarter inhabited by the former people is called, exhibits a congeries of
narrow, unpaved lanes, lined with rickety wooden houses, which elbow one
another closely, and possess neither gardens nor yards. They are let out
in flats, and are crowded to overflowing with a dense population of
lodgers. Peeps into their interiors reveal dirty, poorly furnished rooms,
and large families, pigging squalidly together at meal times, while
unkempt men and slatternly women lean from open windows, and scold in
French, or chatter with crowds of ragged and bare-legged children, playing
in the gutters.

The Irish portion of the town has wider streets, and houses less crowded
than those of "Little Canada," but is, altogether, of scarcely better
aspect. Slatternly women gossip in groups about the doorways. Tawdrily
dressed girls saunter along the sidewalks, or loll from the window-sills.
Knots of shirt-sleeved men congregate about the frequent liquor-saloons,
talking loudly and volubly. No signs of poverty are apparent, but
everything wears an aspect of prosperous ignorance, satisfied to eat,
drink, and idle away the hours not given to work. Such is the general
aspect of operative Lowell to-day; but some of the old well-conducted
boarding-houses remain, sheltering worthy sons and daughters of toil.
Similarly, the outskirts of the city are adorned with many pretty white
houses, where typical American families are growing up amid whole