What will they do in England? was now the question. But for any knowledge as to that, I had to wait till I reached Washington.
CHAPTER XVII.
CAMBRIDGE AND LOWELL.
The two places of most general interest in the vicinity of Boston are Cambridge and Lowell. Cambridge is to Ma.s.sachusetts, and, I may almost say, is to all the northern States, what Cambridge and Oxford are to England. It is the seat of the University which gives the highest education to be attained by the highest cla.s.ses in that country. Lowell also is in little to Ma.s.sachusetts and to New England what Manchester is to us in so great a degree. It is the largest and most prosperous cotton-manufacturing town in the States.
Cambridge is not above three or four miles from Boston. Indeed, the town of Cambridge properly so called begins where Boston ceases. The Harvard College--that is its name, taken from one of its original founders--is reached by horse-cars in twenty minutes from the city.
An Englishman feels inclined to regard the place as a suburb of Boston; but if he so expresses himself, he will not find favour in the eyes of the men of Cambridge.
The University is not so large as I had expected to find it. It consists of Harvard College, as the undergraduates" department, and of professional schools of law, medicine, divinity, and science.
In the few words that I will say about it I will confine myself to Harvard College proper, conceiving that the professional schools connected with it have not in themselves any special interest. The average number of undergraduates does not exceed 450, and these are divided into four cla.s.ses. The average number of degrees taken annually by bachelors of art is something under 100. Four years"
residence is required for a degree, and at the end of that period a degree is given as a matter of course if the candidate"s conduct has been satisfactory. When a young man has pursued his studies for that period, going through the required examinations and lectures, he is not subjected to any final examination as is the case with a candidate for a degree at Oxford and Cambridge. It is, perhaps, in this respect that the greatest difference exists between the English Universities and Harvard College. With us a young man may, I take it, still go through his three or four years with a small amount of study. But his doing so does not insure him his degree. If he have utterly wasted his time he is plucked, and late but heavy punishment comes upon him. At Cambridge in Ma.s.sachusetts the daily work of the men is made more obligatory; but if this be gone through with such diligence as to enable the student to hold his own during the four years, he has his degree as a matter of course. There are no degrees conferring special honour. A man cannot go out "in honours"
as he does with us. There are no "firsts" or "double firsts;" no "wranglers;" no "senior opts" or "junior opts." Nor are there prizes of fellowships and livings to be obtained. It is, I think, evident from this that the greatest incentives to high excellence are wanting at Harvard College. There is neither the reward of honour nor of money. There is none of that great compet.i.tion which exists at our Cambridge for the high place of Senior Wrangler; and, consequently, the degree of excellence attained is no doubt lower than with us.
But I conceive that the general level of the University education is higher there than with us; that a young man is more sure of getting his education, and that a smaller percentage of men leaves Harvard College utterly uneducated than goes in that condition out of Oxford or Cambridge. The education at Harvard College is more diversified in its nature, and study is more absolutely the business of the place than it is at our Universities.
The expense of education at Harvard College is not much lower than at our colleges; with us there are, no doubt, more men who are absolutely extravagant than at Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts. The actual authorized expenditure in accordance with the rules is only 50 per annum, _i.e._ 249 dollars; but this does not, by any means, include everything. Some of the richer young men may spend as much as 300 per annum, but the largest number vary their expenditure from 100 to 180 per annum; and I take it the same thing may be said of our Universities. There are many young men at Harvard College of very small means. They will live on 70 per annum, and will earn a great portion of that by teaching in the vacations. There are thirty-six scholarships attached to the University varying in value from 20 to 60 per annum; and there is also a beneficiary fund for supplying poor scholars with a.s.sistance during their collegiate education. Many are thus brought up at Cambridge who have no means of their own, and I think I may say that the consideration in which they are held among their brother students is in no degree affected by their position.
I doubt whether we can say so much of the sizars and bible clerks at our Universities.
At Harvard College there is, of course, none of that old-fashioned, time-honoured, delicious, mediaeval life which lends so much grace and beauty to our colleges. There are no gates, no porter"s lodges, no b.u.t.teries, no halls, no battels, and no common rooms. There are no proctors, no bulldogs, no bursers, no deans, no morning and evening chapel, no quads, no surplices, no caps and gowns. I have already said that there are no examinations for degrees and no honours; and I can easily conceive that in the absence of all these essentials many an Englishman will ask what right Harvard College has to call itself a University.
I have said that there are no honours,--and in our sense there are none. But I should give offence to my American friends if I did not explain that there are prizes given--I think all in money, and that they vary from 50 to 10 dollars. These are called _deturs_. The degrees are given on Commencement Day, at which occasion certain of the expectant graduates are selected to take parts in a public literary exhibition. To be so selected seems to be tantamount to taking a degree in honours. There is also a dinner on Commencement Day,--at which, however, "no wine or other intoxicating drink shall be served."
It is required that every student shall attend some place of Christian worship on Sundays; but he, or his parents for him, may elect what denomination of church he shall attend. There is a University chapel on the University grounds which belongs, if I remember right, to the Episcopalian Church. The young men for the most part live in College, having rooms in the College buildings; but they do not board in those rooms. There are establishments in the town under the patronage of the University, at which dinner, breakfast, and supper are provided; and the young men frequent one of these houses or another as they, or their friends for them, may arrange. Every young man not belonging to a family resident within a hundred miles of Cambridge, and whose parents are desirous to obtain the protection thus provided, is placed, as regards his pecuniary management, under the care of a patron, and this patron acts by him as a father does in England by a boy at school. He pays out his money for him and keeps him out of debt. The arrangement will not recommend itself to young men at Oxford quite so powerfully as it may do to the fathers of some young men who have been there. The rules with regard to the lodging and boarding-houses are very stringent. Any festive entertainment is to be reported to the President. No wine or spirituous liquors may be used, &c. It is not a picturesque system, this; but it has its advantages.
There is a handsome library attached to the College, which the young men can use; but it is not as extensive as I had expected. The University is not well off for funds by which to increase it. The new museum in the College is also a handsome building. The edifices used for the undergraduates" chambers and for the lecture-rooms are by no means handsome. They are very ugly red-brick houses standing here and there without order. There are seven such, and they are called Brattle House, College House, Divinity Hall, Hollis Hall, Holsworthy Hall, Ma.s.sachusetts Hall, and Stoughton Hall. It is almost astonishing that buildings so ugly should have been erected for such a purpose. These, together with the library, the museum, and the chapel, stand on a large green, which might be made pretty enough if it were kept well mown like the gardens of our Cambridge colleges; but it is much neglected. Here, again, the want of funds--the res angusta domi--must be pleaded as an excuse. On the same green, but at some little distance from any other building, stands the President"s pleasant house.
The immediate direction of the College is of course mainly in the hands of the President, who is supreme. But for the general management of the Inst.i.tution there is a Corporation, of which he is one. It is stated in the laws of the University that the Corporation of the University and its Overseers const.i.tute the Government of the University. The Corporation consists of the President, five Fellows, so called, and a Treasurer. These Fellows are chosen, as vacancies occur, by themselves, subject to the concurrence of the Overseers.
But these Fellows are in nowise like to the Fellows of our colleges, having no salaries attached to their offices. The Board of Overseers consists of the State Governor, other State officers, the President and Treasurer of Harvard College, and thirty other persons,--men of note, chosen by vote. The Faculty of the College, in which is vested the immediate care and government of the undergraduates, is composed of the President and the Professors. The Professors answer to the tutors of our colleges, and upon them the education of the place depends. I cannot complete this short notice of Harvard College without saying that it is happy in the possession of that distinguished natural philosopher, Professor Aga.s.siz. M. Aga.s.siz has collected at Cambridge a museum of such things as natural philosophers delight to show, which I am told is all but invaluable.
As my ignorance on all such matters is of a depth which the Professor can hardly imagine, and which it would have shocked him to behold, I did not visit the museum. Taking the University of Harvard College as a whole, I should say that it is most remarkable in this,--that it does really give to its pupils that education which it professes to give. Of our own Universities other good things may be said, but that one special good thing cannot always be said.
Cambridge boasts itself as the residence of four or five men well known to fame on the American and also on the European side of the ocean. President Felton"s* name is very familiar to us, and wherever Greek scholarship is held in repute, that is known. So also is the name of Professor Aga.s.siz, of whom I have spoken. Russell Lowell is one of the Professors of the College,--that Russell Lowell who sang of Birdo"fredum Sawin, and whose Biglow Papers were edited with such an ardour of love by our Tom Brown. Birdo"fredum is worthy of all the ardour. Mr. Dana is also a Cambridge man,--he who was "two years before the mast," and who since that has written to us of Cuba.
But Mr. Dana, though residing at Cambridge, is not of Cambridge, and, though a literary man, he does not belong to literature. He is,--could he help it?--a special attorney. I must not, however, degrade him, for in the States barristers and attorneys are all one.
I cannot but think that he could help it, and that he should not give up to law what was meant for mankind. I fear, however, that successful law has caught him in her intolerant clutches, and that literature, who surely would be the n.o.bler mistress, must wear the willow. Last and greatest is the poet-laureat of the West; for Mr.
Longfellow also lives at Cambridge.
*Since these words were written President Felton has died. I, as I returned on my way homewards, had the melancholy privilege of being present at his funeral. I feel bound to record here the great kindness with which Mr. Felton a.s.sisted me in obtaining such information as I needed respecting the Inst.i.tution over which he presided.
I am not at all aware whether the nature of the manufacturing corporation of Lowell is generally understood by Englishmen. I confess that until I made personal acquaintance with the plan, I was absolutely ignorant on the subject. I knew that Lowell was a manufacturing town at which cotton is made into calico, and at which calico is printed,--as is the case at Manchester; but I conceived this was done at Lowell, as it is done at Manchester, by individual enterprise,--that I or any one else could open a mill at Lowell, and that the manufacturers there were ordinary traders, as they are at other manufacturing towns. But this is by no means the case.
That which most surprises an English visitor on going through the mills at Lowell is the personal appearance of the men and women who work at them. As there are twice as many women as there are men, it is to them that the attention is chiefly called. They are not only better dressed, cleaner, and better mounted in every respect than the girls employed at manufactories in England, but they are so infinitely superior as to make a stranger immediately perceive that some very strong cause must have created the difference. We all know the cla.s.s of young women whom we generally see serving behind counters in the shops of our larger cities. They are neat, well dressed, careful, especially about their hair, composed in their manner, and sometimes a little supercilious in the propriety of their demeanour. It is exactly the same cla.s.s of young women that one sees in the factories at Lowell. They are not sallow, nor dirty, nor ragged, nor rough. They have about them no signs of want, or of low culture. Many of us also know the appearance of those girls who work in the factories in England; and I think it will be allowed that a second glance at them is not wanting to show that they are in every respect inferior to the young women who attend our shops. The matter, indeed, requires no argument. Any young woman at a shop would be insulted by being asked whether she had worked at a factory. The difference with regard to the men at Lowell is quite as strong, though not so striking. Working men do not show their status in the world by their outward appearance as readily as women; and, as I have said before, the number of the women greatly exceeded that of the men.
One would of course be disposed to say that the superior condition of the workers must have been occasioned by superior wages; and this, to a certain extent, has been the cause. But the higher payment is not the chief cause. Women"s wages, including all that they receive at the Lowell factories, average about 14_s._ a week, which is, I take it, fully a third more than women can earn in Manchester, or did earn before the loss of the American cotton began to tell upon them.
But if wages at Manchester were raised to the Lowell standard, the Manchester women would not be clothed, fed, cared for, and educated like the Lowell women. The fact is, that the workmen and the workwomen at Lowell are not exposed to the chances of an open labour market. They are taken in, as it were, to a philanthropical manufacturing college, and then looked after and regulated more as girls and lads at a great seminary, than as hands by whose industry profit is to be made out of capital. This is all very nice and pretty at Lowell, but I am afraid it could not be done at Manchester.
There are at present twelve different manufactories at Lowell, each of which has what is called a separate corporation. The Merrimack manufacturing company was incorporated in 1822, and thus Lowell was commenced. The Lowell machine-shop was incorporated in 1845, and since that no new establishment has been added. In 1821 a certain Boston manufacturing company, which had mills at Waltham, near Boston, was attracted by the water-power of the river Merrimack, on which the present town of Lowell is situated. A ca.n.a.l, called the Pawtucket Ca.n.a.l, had been made for purposes of navigation from one reach of the river to another, with the object of avoiding the Pawtucket Falls; and this ca.n.a.l, with the adjacent water-power of the river, was purchased for the Boston Company. The place was then called Lowell, after one of the partners in that company.
It must be understood that water-power alone is used for preparing the cotton and working the spindles and looms of the cotton mills.
Steam is applied in the two establishments in which the cottons are printed, for the purposes of printing, but I think nowhere else.
When the mills are at full work, about two-and-a-half million yards of cotton goods are made every week, and nearly a million pounds of cotton are consumed per week (_i.e._ 842,000 lbs.), but the consumption of coal is only 30,000 tons in the year. This will give some idea of the value of the water-power. The Pawtucket Ca.n.a.l was, as I say, bought, and Lowell was commenced. The town was incorporated in 1826, and the railway between it and Boston was opened in 1835, under the superintendence of Mr. Jackson, the gentleman by whom the purchase of the ca.n.a.l had in the first instance been made. Lowell now contains about 40,000 inhabitants.
The following extract is taken from the hand-book to Lowell:--"Mr.
F. C. Lowell had in his travels abroad observed the effect of large manufacturing establishments on the character of the people, and in the establishment at Waltham the founders looked for a remedy for these defects. They thought that education and good morals would even enhance the profit, and that they could compete with Great Britain by introducing a more cultivated cla.s.s of operatives. For this purpose they built boarding-houses, which, under the direct supervision of the agent, were kept by discreet matrons"--I can answer for the discreet matrons at Lowell--"mostly widows, no boarders being allowed except operatives. Agents and overseers of high moral character were selected; regulations were adopted at the mills and boarding-houses, by which only respectable girls were employed. The mills were nicely painted and swept,"--I can also answer for the painting and sweeping at Lowell,--"trees set out in the yards and along the streets, habits of neatness and cleanliness encouraged; and the result justified the expenditure. At Lowell the same policy has been adopted and extended; more s.p.a.cious mills and elegant boarding-houses have been erected;"--as to the elegance, it may be a matter of taste, but as to the comfort there is no question,--"the same care as to the cla.s.ses employed; more capital has been expended for cleanliness and decoration; a hospital has been established for the sick, where, for a small price, they have an experienced physician and skilful nurses. An inst.i.tute, with an extensive library, for the use of the mechanics, has been endowed. The agents have stood forward in the support of schools, churches, lectures, and lyceums, and their influence contributed highly to the elevation of the moral and intellectual character of the operatives. Talent has been encouraged, brought forward, and recommended."--For some considerable time the young women wrote, edited, and published a newspaper among themselves, called the Lowell Offering.--"And Lowell has supplied agents and mechanics for the later manufacturing places who have given tone to society, and extended the beneficial influence of Lowell through the United States. Girls from the country, with a true Yankee spirit of independence, and confident in their own powers, pa.s.s a few years here, and then return to get married with a dower secured by their exertions, with more enlarged ideas and extended means of information, and their places are supplied by younger relatives. A larger proportion of the female population of New England has been employed at some time in manufacturing establishments, and they are not on this account less good wives, mothers, or educators of families." Then the account goes on to tell how the health of the girls has been improved by their attendance at the mills, how they put money into the savings-banks, and buy railway shares and farms; how there are thirty churches in Lowell, a library, banks, and insurance offices; how there is a cemetery, and a park, and how everything is beautiful, philanthropic, profitable, and magnificent.
Thus Lowell is the realization of a commercial Utopia. Of all the statements made in the little book which I have quoted I cannot point out one which is exaggerated, much less false. I should not call the place elegant; in other respects I am disposed to stand by the book.
Before I had made any inquiry into the cause of the apparent comfort, it struck me at once that some great effort at excellence was being made. I went into one of the discreet matrons" residences; and perhaps may give but an indifferent idea of her discretion when I say that she allowed me to go into the bedrooms. If you want to ascertain the inner ways or habits of life of any man, woman, or child, see, if it be practicable to do so, his or her bedroom. You will learn more by a minute"s glance round that holy of holies, than by any conversation. Looking-gla.s.ses and such like, suspended dresses, and toilet-belongings, if taken without notice, cannot lie or even exaggerate. The discreet matron at first showed me rooms only prepared for use, for at the period of my visit Lowell was by no means full; but she soon became more intimate with me, and I went through the upper part of the house. My report must be altogether in her favour and in that of Lowell. Everything was cleanly, well-ordered, and feminine. There was not a bed on which any woman need have hesitated to lay herself if occasion required it. I fear that this cannot be said of the lodgings of the manufacturing cla.s.ses at Manchester. The boarders all take their meals together. As a rule, they have meat twice a-day. Hot meat for dinner is with them as much a matter of course, or probably more so, than with any English man or woman who may read this book. For in the States of America regulations on this matter are much more rigid than with us. Cold meat is rarely seen, and to live a day without meat would be as great a privation as to pa.s.s a night without bed.
The rules for the guidance of these boarding-houses are very rigid.
The houses themselves belong to the corporations or different manufacturing establishments, and the tenants are altogether in the power of the managers. None but operatives are to be taken in. The tenants are answerable for improper conduct. The doors are to be closed at ten o"clock. Any boarders who do not attend divine worship are to be reported to the managers. The yards and walks are to be kept clean, and snow removed at once; and the inmates must be vaccinated, &c., &c., &c. It is expressly stated by the Hamilton Company,--and I believe by all the companies,--that no one shall be employed who is habitually absent from public worship on Sunday, or who is known to be guilty of immorality. It is stated that the average wages of the women are two dollars, or eight shillings, a week, besides their board. I found when I was there that from three dollars to three-and-a-half a week were paid to the women, of which they paid one dollar and twenty-five cents for their board. As this would not fully cover the expense of their keep, twenty-five cents a week for each was also paid to the boarding-house keepers by the mill agents. This substantially came to the same thing, as it left the two dollars a week, or eight shillings, with the girls over and above their cost of living. The board included washing, lights, food, bed, and attendance,--leaving a surplus of eight shillings a week for clothes and saving. Now let me ask any one acquainted with Manchester and its operatives, whether that is not Utopia realized. Factory girls, for whom every comfort of life is secured, with 21 a year over for saving and dress! One sees the failing, however, at a moment. It is Utopia. Any Lady Bountiful can tutor three or four peasants and make them luxuriously comfortable. But no Lady Bountiful can give luxurious comfort to half-a-dozen parishes. Lowell is now nearly forty years old, and contains but 40,000 inhabitants. From the very nature of its corporations it cannot spread itself. Chicago, which has grown out of nothing in a much shorter period, and which has no factories, has now 120,000 inhabitants. Lowell is a very wonderful place and shows what philanthropy can do; but I fear it also shows what philanthropy cannot do.
There are, however, other establishments, conducted on the same principle as those at Lowell, which have had the same amount, or rather the same sort, of success. Lawrence is now a town of about 15,000 inhabitants, and Manchester of about 24,000,--if I remember rightly;--and at those places the mills are also owned by corporations and conducted as are those at Lowell. But it seems to me that as New England takes her place in the world as a great manufacturing country--which place she undoubtedly will take sooner or later--she must abandon the hot-house method of providing for her operatives with which she has commenced her work. In the first place, Lowell is not open as a manufacturing town to the capitalists even of New England at large. Stock may, I presume, be bought in the corporations, but no interloper can establish a mill there. It is a close manufacturing community, bolstered up on all sides, and has none of that capacity for providing employment for a thickly-growing population which belongs to such places as Manchester and Leeds.
That it should under its present system have been made in any degree profitable reflects great credit on the managers; but the profit does not reach an amount which in America can be considered as remunerative. The total capital invested by the twelve corporations is thirteen million and a half of dollars, or about two million seven hundred thousand pounds. In only one of the corporations, that of the Merrimack Company, does the profit amount to 12 per cent. In one, that of the Boott Company, it falls below 7 per cent. The average profit of the various establishments is something below 9 per cent.
I am of course speaking of Lowell as it was previous to the war.
American capitalists are not, as a rule, contented with so low a rate of interest as this.
The States in these matters have had a great advantage over England.
They have been able to begin at the beginning. Manufactories have grown up among us as our cities grew;--from the necessities and chances of the times. When labour was wanted it was obtained in the ordinary way; and so when houses were built they were built in the ordinary way. We had not the experience, and the results either for good or bad, of other nations to guide us. The Americans, in seeing and resolving to adopt our commercial successes, have resolved also, if possible, to avoid the evils which have attended those successes.
It would be very desirable that all our factory girls should read and write, wear clean clothes, have decent beds, and eat hot meat every day. But that is now impossible. Gradually, with very up-hill work, but still I trust with sure work, much will be done to improve their position and render their life respectable; but in England we can have no Lowells. In our thickly populated island any commercial Utopia is out of the question. Nor can, as I think, Lowell be taken as a type of the future manufacturing towns of New England. When New England employs millions in her factories, instead of thousands,--the hands employed at Lowell, when the mills are at full work, are about 11,000,--she must cease to provide for them their beds and meals, their church-going proprieties and orderly modes of life. In such an attempt she has all the experience of the world against her. But nevertheless I think she will have done much good. The tone which she will have given will not altogether lose its influence. Employment in a factory is now considered reputable by a farmer and his children, and this idea will remain. Factory work is regarded as more respectable than domestic service, and this prestige will not wear itself altogether out. Those now employed have a strong conception of the dignity of their own social position, and their successors will inherit much of this, even though they may find themselves excluded from the advantages of the present Utopia. The thing has begun well, but it can only be regarded as a beginning. Steam, it may be presumed, will become the motive power of cotton mills in New England as it is with us; and when it is so, the amount of work to be done at any one place will not be checked by any such limit as that which now prevails at Lowell. Water-power is very cheap, but it cannot be extended; and it would seem that no place can become large as a manufacturing town which has to depend chiefly upon water. It is not improbable that steam may be brought into general use at Lowell, and that Lowell may spread itself. If it should spread itself widely, it will lose its Utopian characteristics.
One cannot but be greatly struck by the spirit of philanthropy in which the system of Lowell was at first inst.i.tuted. It may be presumed that men who put their money into such an undertaking did so with the object of commercial profit to themselves; but in this case that was not their first object. I think it may be taken for granted that when Messrs. Jackson and Lowell went about their task, their grand idea was to place factory work upon a respectable footing,--to give employment in mills which should not be unhealthy, degrading, demoralizing, or hard in its circ.u.mstances. Throughout the northern States of America the same feeling is to be seen. Good and thoughtful men have been active to spread education, to maintain health, to make work compatible with comfort and personal dignity, and to divest the ordinary lot of man of the sting of that curse which was supposed to be uttered when our first father was ordered to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow. One is driven to contrast this feeling, of which on all sides one sees such ample testimony, with that sharp desire for profit, that anxiety to do a stroke of trade at every turn, that acknowledged necessity of being smart, which we must own is quite as general as the n.o.bler propensity. I believe that both phases of commercial activity may be attributed to the same characteristic. Men in trade in America are not more covetous than tradesmen in England, nor probably are they more generous or philanthropical. But that which they do, they are more anxious to do thoroughly and quickly.
They desire that every turn taken shall be a great turn,--or at any rate that it shall be as great as possible. They go ahead either for bad or good with all the energy they have. In the inst.i.tutions at Lowell I think we may allow that the good has very much prevailed.
I went over two of the mills, those of the Merrimack corporation, and of the Ma.s.sachusetts. At the former the printing establishment only was at work; the cotton mills were closed. I hardly know whether it will interest any one to learn that something under half-a-million yards of calico are here printed annually. At the Lowell bleachery fifteen million yards are dyed annually. The Merrimack cotton-mills were stopped, and so had the other mills at Lowell been stopped, till some short time before my visit. Trade had been bad, and there had of course been a lack of cotton. I was a.s.sured that no severe suffering had been created by this stoppage. The greater number of hands had returned into the country,--to the farms from whence they had come; and though a discontinuance of work and wages had of course produced hardship, there had been no actual privation,--no hunger and want.
Those of the workpeople who had no homes out of Lowell to which to betake themselves, and no means at Lowell of living, had received relief before real suffering had begun. I was a.s.sured, with something of a smile of contempt at the question, that there had been nothing like hunger. But, as I said before, visitors always see a great deal of rose colour, and should endeavour to allay the brilliancy of the tint with the proper amount of human shading. But do not let any visitor mix in the browns with too heavy a hand!
At the Ma.s.sachusetts cotton-mills they were working with about two-thirds of their full number of hands, and this, I was told, was about the average of the number now employed throughout Lowell.
Working at this rate they had now on hand a supply of cotton to last them for six months. Their stocks had been increased lately, and on asking from whence, I was informed that that last received had come to them from Liverpool. There is, I believe, no doubt but that a considerable quant.i.ty of cotton has been shipped back from England to the States since the civil war began. I asked the gentleman, to whose care at Lowell I was consigned, whether he expected to get cotton from the South,--for at that time Beaufort in South Carolina had just been taken by the naval expedition. He had, he said, a political expectation of a supply of cotton, but not a commercial expectation.
That at least was the gist of his reply, and I found it to be both intelligent and intelligible. The Ma.s.sachusetts mills, when at full work, employ 1300 females and 400 males, and turn out 540,000 yards of calico per week.
On my return from Lowell in the smoking car, an old man came and squeezed in next to me. The place was terribly crowded, and as the old man was thin and clean and quiet I willingly made room for him, so as to avoid the contiguity of a neighbour who might be neither thin, nor clean, nor quiet. He began talking to me in whispers about the war, and I was suspicious that he was a Southerner and a Secessionist. Under such circ.u.mstances his company might not be agreeable, unless he could be induced to hold his tongue. At last he said, "I come from Canada, you know, and you,--you"re an Englishman, and therefore I can speak to you openly;" and he gave me an affectionate grip on the knee with his old skinny hand. I suppose I do look more like an Englishman than an American, but I was surprised at his knowing me with such certainty. "There is no mistaking you,"
he said, "with your round face and your red cheeks. They don"t look like that here," and he gave me another grip. I felt quite fond of the old man, and offered him a cigar.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.
We all know that the subject which appears above as the t.i.tle of this chapter is a very favourite subject in America. It is, I hope, a very favourite subject in England also, and I am inclined to think has been so for many years past. The rights of women, as contradistinguished from the wrongs of women, has perhaps been the most precious of the legacies left to us by the feudal ages. How amidst the rough darkness of old Teuton rule women began to receive that respect which is now their dearest right, is one of the most interesting studies of history. It came, I take it, chiefly from their own conduct. The women of the old cla.s.sic races seem to have enjoyed but a small amount of respect or of rights, and to have deserved as little. It may have been very well for one Caesar to have said that his wife should be above suspicion; but his wife was put away, and therefore either did not have her rights, or else had justly forfeited them. The daughter of the next Caesar lived in Rome the life of a Messalina, and did not on that account seem to have lost her "position in society," till she absolutely declined to throw any veil whatever over her propensities. But as the Roman empire fell, chivalry began. For a time even chivalry afforded but a dull time to the women. During the musical period of the troubadours, ladies, I fancy, had but little to amuse them save the music. But that was the beginning, and from that time downwards the rights of women have progressed very favourably. It may be that they have not yet all that should belong to them. If that be the case, let the men lose no time in making up the difference. But it seems to me that the women who are now making their claims may perhaps hardly know when they are well off. It will be an ill movement if they insist on throwing away any of the advantages they have won. As for the women in America especially, I must confess that I think they have a "good time." I make them my compliments on their sagacity, intelligence, and attractions, but I utterly refuse to them any sympathy for supposed wrongs. _O fortunatas sua si bona norint!_ Whether or no, were I an American married man and father of a family, I should not go in for the rights of man--that is altogether another question.
This question of the rights of women divides itself into two heads,--one of which is very important, worthy of much consideration, capable perhaps of much philanthropic action, and at any rate affording matter for grave discussion. This is the question of women"s work; how far the work of the world, which is now borne chiefly by men, should be thrown open to women further than is now done. The other seems to me to be worthy of no consideration, to be capable of no action, to admit of no grave discussion. This refers to the political rights of women; how far the political working of the world, which is now entirely in the hands of men, should be divided between them and women. The first question is being debated on our side of the Atlantic as keenly perhaps as on the American side. As to that other question, I do not know that much has ever been said about it in Europe.
"You are doing nothing in England towards the employment of females,"