It is also to the credit of the founders of Lowell and those who have succeeded them even to this day, that provision was made that on a given Saturday in each month, every man, woman, and child should be paid the wages earned the preceding month, in cash, with-out any deduction or diminution. The only exception was that in the earliest years one corporation required thirty cents a month to be deducted for the support of religious worship. So well has this full and regular payment of wages been maintained that a really serious “strike” for higher wages has never occurred in Lowell, and, further, no worker in the corporate mills in Lowell has ever lost by non-payment a dollar of wages earned.
When President Jackson visited Lowell in 1833, all the laboring men and women of the mills turned out to welcome and escort him. Every woman carried a parasol and was dressed in white muslin, with a blue sash, save the women of the Hamilton corporation, who wore black sashes in respect for the memory of their agent [manager], who had just died.
Afterwards, so strong was the feeling of American citizenship, that the several hundred operatives in the weaving rooms of the Hamilton mill struck and left the mill because the company had put into their room an Irish washerwoman to scrub the floor. They were native Americans and would not stand that.
With such people I spent my boyhood and knew them well. I played with and went to school with their children; I became acquainted with the use of tools in the shops, by the permission of the fathers; I learned to reverence and admire women and men without regard to what the one wore and the other possessed. I knew all their wants; knew their sicknesses and the causes thereof; saw the deterioration in their bodily health from year to year as they grew pallid and nervous. I found that the mill life averaged about five years,--not that people lived no longer than five years who worked in the mills, but that as a rule that employment was compelled by necessity rather than by choice, and was quit as soon as the operatives could afford it. The girls came from the country to work in the mills to get a few hundred dollars to remove the mortgage on the home place; the young men came for the same purpose, or to get the means of starting
