Throughout
The Northern States Of America The Same Feeling Is To Be Seen.
Good And Thoughtful Men Have Been Active
To spread education, to
maintain health, to make work compatible with comfort and personal
dignity, and to divest the ordinary
Lot of man of the sting of that
curse which was supposed to be uttered when our first father was
ordered to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow. One is driven
to contrast this feeling, of which on all sides one sees such ample
testimony, with that sharp desire for profit, that anxiety to do a
stroke of trade at every turn, that acknowledged necessity of being
smart, which we must own is quite as general as the nobler
propensity. I believe that both phases of commercial activity may
be attributed to the same characteristic. Men in trade in America
are not more covetous than tradesmen in England, nor probably are
they more generous or philanthropical. But that which they do,
they are more anxious to do thoroughly and quickly. They desire
that every turn taken shall be a great turn - or at any rate that it
shall be as great as possible. They go ahead either for bad or
good with all the energy they have. In the institutions at Lowell
I think we may allow that the good has very much prevailed.
I went over two of the mills, those of the Merrimack corporation
and of the Massachusetts. At the former the printing establishment
only was at work; the cotton mills were closed.
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