186 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
were undoubtedly better than they had been in 1861, but prob¬ 
ably not as good as they had been in 1855. The restoration of 
confidence after the war brought a speedy revival of manufac¬ 
tures and a new demand for labor, but there was no great pros¬ 
perity. The number of manufacturing establishments in¬ 
creased, and employment seems to have been steady, but wages 
were low during the five years after the war, and even with the 
encouragement given by the war-tariff, and the increased use of 
labor-saving machinery, profits Were small. Massachusetts 
seems to have been slow in recovering from the financial crisis 
of 1857 and the political crisis of the sixties. Had she been an 
agricultural state it is probable that readjustment would, in both 
cases, have been more rapid. 
