Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/323

Rh in the aggregate, are more important to the state and more conducive 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 people 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 surroundings, 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 factory 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