THE FUTURE OF OUR COTTON MANUFACTURE. 309 



in tlie aggregate, are more important to the state and more con- 

 ducive to diversity of occupation. 



There has been up to this time a large reserve of unemployed 

 people who could be drawn from the mountain sections of the 

 South, where the factory-made fabrics have displaced the product 

 of the spinning-wheel and of the hand loom, by which these peo- 

 ple had been habituated to the textile industry. They are an 

 excellent class of operatives, and, in passing from their isolated, 

 narrow, and penurious lives on the hills to the factory and its sur- 

 roundings, they have made a step in progress corresponding to 

 that which occurred in New England when the farmers' daughters 

 left the household and filled up the factories away back in 1840 

 and 1850. But it will be remembered that, with the progress of 

 wealth and common welfare, all the farmers' daughters of New 

 England have gone up and out of the textile factory into better 

 paid branches of work, which are less monotonous, and which 

 are more conducive to a satisfactory life. 



The farmers' daughters earned from one hundred and fifty 

 to one hundred and seventy-five dollars a year for thirteen hours 

 of arduous work each day, in a low-studded, stove-heated, badly 

 lighted, and non-ventilated factory. The French Canadians, 

 who now in greatest number occupy their places, earn about 

 twice as much per day and more than twice as much per hour, 

 working ten hours per day, in the modern factory which I may 

 presently show can yet be made a chosen sanitarium. As the 

 earnings have advanced with the improvements in the processes 

 and conditions of the work, the cost of the product has diminished, 

 while the workman has received an increasing proportion and the 

 capitalist a diminishing proportion of the joint product ; but there 

 was far greater opportunity for women to change from the fac- 

 tory to other branches of work in New England in former times 

 than there will soon be at the South. We at the North were 

 always a versatile people. We always had variety of occupation, 

 whereas in the South nearly all the minor arts of life are in a 

 very imperfect stage and in the very beginning of development ; 

 hence the change may be more rapid from the factory to other 

 occupations. 



Now, where it requires a thousand dollars or more of capital 

 to set one woman at work in a cotton-mill, it only calls for two 

 hundred or so to set one woman or man at work in a shoe-factory, 

 in a clothing-factory, in a saddler's shop, or in any of the minor 

 arts which may be counted by hundreds each inconspicuous in 

 itself, but the aggregate giving employment, even here in New 

 England, to a force to which our factory population bears but the 

 ratio of a small fraction. 



I have stated the natural law which I think will be one of the 



