1862 Report of Farmers' Institutes 



Two or three years ago I visited a large spice factory in New 

 England, widely known not only for the excellence of its product, 

 but for the care given to its employees. We watched, with deep 

 interest, the ease with which the machines did the work, and the 

 apparent leisure of the young women whose only business seemed 

 to be to keep the machines up to their work by a deft touch here 

 and there. When we thought we had seen the entire plant, our 

 guide opened a door at one side and took us into a room with a 

 long table running down the center. Around it were seated a 

 dozen or two of women fifty and sixty years old, each of them 

 with a pasteboard box in one hand and a metal scoop in the other, 

 slowly and laboriously filling by hand counterparts of the boxes 

 which the machines in the other room were filling so rapidly and 

 accurately. I turned to our giiide and asked him : '' Who are 

 those women and what place has this room in your up-to-date 

 factory ? " He said : " Those are women who have worked for us 

 for twenty years, some of them longer. There is something lack- 

 ing in their mental make-up which renders it impossible for them 

 ever to learn the use of machinery, but we are not turning them 

 away on that account. We are letting them go on in their same 

 infinitely slow, dull way until the time comes when they them- 

 selves are ready to quit work.'' It was a pleasant thought that a 

 great big money-making concern should take such individual 

 thought for its workers, but a very startling one that every one of 

 us, by failing to develop the faculty of utilizing the helps at our 

 command might drudge our way through life in a way similar 

 to those poor women. 



We have centuries of tradition to overcome before we can 

 achieve a man's scorn of poor tools. We must learn to look at 

 our workshops with men's eyes. I venture to say that if we all 

 had the courage to go away for a three months' vacation, leaving 

 the men in charge of our kitchens, that while at the end of the 

 first month thing\s might look '' like sixty," at the end of the sec- 

 ond month they would begin to improve, and if our courage still 

 held out and we stayed the third month, we should come home to 

 find many things changed for the better. They might look strange 

 and queer, but there is no doubt that in every instance we should 

 find labor-saving devices installed which men never dreamed we 



