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.
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