ng entirely out of sight the fact of the articles
having been written by these girls after the arduous labors of the day,
that it will compare advantageously with a great many English Annuals."

The efficiency of the New England mills was extraordinary. James
Montgomery, an English cotton manufacturer, visited the Lowell mills two
years before Dickens and wrote after his inspection of them that they
produced "a greater quantity of yarn and cloth from each spindle and
loom (in a given time) than was produced by any other factories, without
exception in the world." Long before that time, of course, the basic
type of loom had changed from that originally introduced, and many
New England inventors had been busy devising improved machinery of all
kinds.

Such were the beginnings of the great textile mills of New England.
The scene today is vastly changed. Productivity has been multiplied by
invention after invention, by the erection of mill after mill, and by
the employment of thousands of hands in place of hundreds. Lowell as
a textile center has long been surpassed by other cities. The scene in
Lowell itself is vastly changed. If Charles Dickens could visit Lowell
today, he would hardly recognize in that city of modern factories, of
more than a hundred thousand people, nearly half of them foreigners, the
Utopia of 1842 which he saw and described.

The cotton plantations in the South were flourishing, and Whitney's gins
were cleaning more and more cotton; the sheep of a thousand hills were
giving wool; Arkwright's machines in England, introduced by Slater into
New England, were spinning the cotton and wool into yarn; Cartwright's
looms in England and Lowell's improvements in New England were weaving
the yarn into cloth; but as yet no practical machine had been invented
to sew the cloth into clothes.

There were in the United States numerous small workshops where a few
tailors or seamstresses, gathered under one roof, laboriously sewed
garments together, but the great bulk of the work, until the invention
of the sewing machine, was done by the wives and daughters of farmers
and sailors in the villages around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
In these cities the garments were cut and sent out to the dwellings
of the poor to be sewn. The wages of the laborers were notoriously
inadequate, though probably better than in England. Thomas Hood's ballad
The Song of the Shirt, published in 1843, depicts the hardships of the