o be the duty of Property to itself to provide Education for
All._"

John Clark, Esq., of Lowell, who has had under his superintendence for
eight years about fifteen hundred persons of both sexes, gives
concurrent testimony. He has found, with very few exceptions, the best
educated among his hands to be the most capable, intelligent, energetic,
industrious, economical, and moral, and that they produce the best work,
and the most of it, with the least injury to the machinery. They are, in
short, in all respects the most useful, profitable, and the safest
operatives; and as a class, they are more thrifty, and more apt to
accumulate property for themselves. "I am very sure," he remarks, "that
neither men of property nor society at large have any thing to fear from
a more general diffusion of knowledge, nor from the extension and
improvement of our system of common schools. On our pay-roll for the
last month are borne the names of twelve hundred and twenty-nine female
operatives, forty of whom receipted for their pay by 'making their
mark.' Twenty-six of these have been employed in job work; that is, they
are paid according to the quantity of work turned off from their
machines. The average pay of these twenty-six falls eighteen and one
half per cent. below the general average of those engaged in the same
departments.

"Again: we have in our mills about one hundred and fifty females who
have at some time been engaged in _teaching schools_. Many of them teach
during the summer months, and work in the mills in winter. The average
wages of these ex-teachers I find to be seventeen and three fourths per
cent. _above the general average of our mills, and about forty per cent.
above the twenty-six who can not write their names_. It may be said they
are generally employed in the higher departments, where the pay is
better. This is true; but this again may be, in most cases, fairly
attributed to their better education, which brings us to the same
result. If I had included in my calculations the remaining fourteen of
the forty, who were mostly sweepers and scrubbers, and who are paid by
the day, the contrast would have been still more striking; but, having
no well-educated females in this department with whom to compare them, I
have omitted them altogether. In arriving at the above results, I have
considered the _net wages_ merely, the price of board being in all cases
the same. I do not consider these results as either extraord