422 WASTE OF FEMALE LABOUR. 



other cloths produced.* The increase of manufactories 

 has had the natural effect of raising the price of labour, 

 and of thus increasing the most important obstruction to 

 a successful competition with ourselves. 



In my travels in the agricultural districts of North 

 America, I was everywhere, except among the French 

 habitants, struck with the reckless waste of female labour 

 which universally prevails. Household drudgery of any 

 kind the females will perform in their own houses or 

 homes, but out-of-door work is too degrading ! To the 

 daughters of the poor farmers of Vermont, New Hamp 

 shire, Massachusetts, Maine, and even of New Brunswick, 

 the chance of employing themselves in a new form of 

 labour, to which no fancied stigma attaches, comes as a 

 welcome outlet for their wasting energies ; and, conse 

 quently, from these sources the supply of factory females 

 is chiefly drawn. It is certainly a pleasure to see the 

 clean, healthy, and respectable appearance of these females 

 at their work in the mills, and to hear of their steady and 

 virtuous behaviour in private. One cannot but wish that 

 such a state of things may long continue. But the 

 struggle has already begun between the master and the 

 operative the employer and the employed. The price 

 of labour is considered by the manufacturer as the great 

 obstacle to a successful competition with England, and 

 his anxiety is to reduce it. That of the labourer, who 

 knows the bias of his employer, is to keep wages up. 

 In this struggle, in spite of democratic institutions, the 

 labourer must gradually give way. It has been so with 

 ourselves. When the cotton manufacture was first intro 

 duced (so late as 1772) prices were high, wages were 

 good, the sons of comparatively rich men went upon the 

 loom, respectable females filled the first factories ; and 

 domestic comfort, healthy families, and general morality 



* At Lowell about 7500 females, and 2000 males, are employed iii 

 tlie production of the 352,000 yards of cloth per day. 



