426 PREFERENCE FOR MACHINE AND FEMALE LABOUR. 



being stirred up and fostered at Lowell, take root to any 

 extent among the workmen, and in a country where 

 each grown-up man has a vote, the struggle to maintain 

 prices must be both more violent and more prolonged 

 than among ourselves, and the victory more frequently 

 on the side of the employed. On the part of the masters, 

 the tendency will be, in consequence, as much as possible 

 to employ machinery, female labour, and persons under 

 age, and as little as possible the higher priced, full- 

 grown, more unmanageable, political-power-possessing 

 labour of the males. The influence of this tendency, 

 indeed, is already perceptible, I think, in the Lowell 

 mills. It is machine or power-loom weaving that is 

 almost exclusively practised. The &quot; Lowell Manufactur 

 ing Company&quot; make 12,000 yards of carpet per week 

 upon 124 power carpet-looms, which are attended by 

 women. It was a very pleasing sight to see the large 

 rooms full of these beautiful carpet-looms, all braced 

 together in one long frame-work of iron, the self-acting 

 machinery by which the patterns are formed working as 

 easily as if only plain calicoes were the fabric produced. 

 The Middlesex Company, also, who manufacture 20,000 

 yards a- week of broad-cloths and cassimeres, upon 400 

 looms, and have 4 mills and 3 dyehouses, employ 730 

 women to 575 men. 



Still, like our own manufactures, before they were 

 submitted to so many trials, the Lowell and other mills 

 in Massachusetts as I was informed by an English 

 mill-owner who had visited them much more extensively 

 than myself, and with a view to judge of their economical 

 condition are conducted expensively, independent of 

 the price of labour. He mentioned processes to me, in 

 which he knew that large annual savings might be 

 effected ; and generally, he said, the &quot; expense gone to, 

 to produce such inferior goods, would not pay at all in 

 England.&quot; 



