The Board Included Washing, Lights, Food, Bed, And Attendance - Leaving A Surplus Of Eight Shillings A Week For Clothes And Saving.

Now let me ask any one acquainted with Manchester and its operatives, whether that is not Utopia realized.

Factory girls, for whom every comfort of life is secured, with 21l. a year over for saving and dress! One sees the failing, however, at a moment. It is Utopia. Any Lady Bountiful can tutor three or four peasants and make them luxuriously comfortable. But no Lady Bountiful can give luxurious comfort to half a dozen parishes. Lowell is now nearly forty years old, and contains but 40,000 inhabitants. From the very nature of its corporations it cannot spread itself. Chicago, which has grown out of nothing in a much shorter period, and which has no factories, has now 120,000 inhabitants. Lowell is a very wonderful place and shows what philanthropy can do; but I fear it also shows what philanthropy cannot do.

There are, however, other establishments, conducted on the same principle as those at Lowell, which have had the same amount, or rather the same sort of success. Lawrence is now a town of about 15,000 inhabitants, and Manchester of about 24,000, if I remember rightly; and at those places the mills are also owned by corporations and conducted as are those at Lowell. But it seems to me that as New England takes her place in the world as a great mannfacturing country - which place she undoubtedly will take sooner or later - she must abandon the hot-house method of providing for her operatives with which she has commenced her work. In the first place, Lowell is not open as a manufacturing town to the capitalists even of New England at large. Stock may, I presume, be bought in the corporations, but no interloper can establish a mill there. It is a close manufacturing community, bolstered up on all sides, and has none of that capacity for providing employment for a thickly growing population which belongs to such places as Manchester and Leeds. That it should under its present system have been made in any degree profitable reflects great credit on the managers; but the profit does reach an amount which in America can be considered as remunerative. The total capital invested by the twelve corporations is thirteen million and a half of dollars, or about two million seven hundred thousand pounds. In only one of the corporations, that of the Merrimack Company, does the profit amount to twelve per cent. In one, that of the Booth Company, it falls below seven per cent. The average profit of the various establishments is something below nine per cent. I am of course speaking of Lowell as it was previous to the war. American capitalists are not, as a rule, contented with so low a rate of interest as this.

The States in these matters have had a great advantage over England. They have been able to begin at the beginning. Manufactories have grown up among us as our cities grew - from the necessities and chances of the times.

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