her wicked eye.”These trains whirl through the crooked streets with a mysterious, awe-compelling power, that would suggest witchery were it not for the clang of their alarm bells, and the knowledge that fares must be paid. They disturb the quiet and solemnity of many an ancient village, and have brought knowledge of evil as well as of good to many a youth. What railways and steamship lines have done in bringing peoples of all climes and continents nearer together, and thus at once widened men’s area of knowledge and sympathy, and contracted the physical area of the earth, this the electrically propelled motor is doing on a smaller scale for the people of the towns of the ancient commonwealths of New England.
In ante-bellum days, New England and the South were, perhaps, most unlike in their attitude toward manufacturing, and the difference was one that meant far more than a mere incident of difference of climate or a difference of opinion as to sectional or federal fiscal policy. The art of manufacturing, as New Englanders had practised it for generations before what is now known as the “factory system” developed, had been based on a universal recognition of the nobility of labor, the necessity for personal initiative, and the duty of thrift. Toil was considered honorable for men and women alike. Every hillside stream was set at work turning the wheels of countless mills. Yankee ingenuity was given free play in the invention of appliances, and Yankee initiative saw to it that after the raw material was converted into the finished product, markets were found in the newer settlements of the Interior and West, or in Europe and Asia. Many a farmer was a manufacturer as well. Home industries flourished, and no month in the year was too inclement for toil and its reward.
With the application of steam power to the transportation of freight and passengers, with the invention of the spinning-jenny and the perfecting of the cotton loom and the development of the “factory system” of specialized and divided labor, New England, quick to perceive wherein her future prosperity lay, at once leaped forward to seize the opportunity, and the relative superiority thus early gained she has not lost, even though other sections more favorably situated as to accessible supplies of fuel and raw materials have, in the meantime, awakened and developed.
Whether judged by the legislation governing their operation, their structural adaptability to the work to be done, their equipment of machinery, the variety and quality of their product, or the intelligence and earning capacity of their operatives, the New England factories can safely challenge comparison with those of any in the world, and the typical factory towns of New England, whether along her largest rivers, such as Lowell and Hartford, or at tide-water, as Fall River and Bridgeport, or nestled among the hills, as North Adams or St. Johnsbury, are the frequent subject of study by the deputed agents of European governments or manufacturers, anxious to ascertain what it is that makes the American manufacturer so dangerous a competitor in the markets of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Few more interesting movements in the history of man’s upward struggle have been chronicled than the successive waves of immigration which have swept into the factories of towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. First came from the hill towns and farms the daughters of the original English, Irish, and Scotch settlers – women like Lucy Larcom, – then the Irish, specially imported from Ireland, and then the French from Canada. The Irish came when the original stock became, in its own estimation, too select for daily toil in the factory. The French came at an opportune time for the employers, when the Irish were also stirred by loftier ambitions. And it is already apparent that, whereas the French came, at first, only to win money to take back to Canada, now they are settling down to become citizens as well as residents, aspiring to higher and other realms of activity – in short, getting ready to give way in turn to some other nationality. Of course, nothing just stated should be interpreted to imply that the ideals of New England respecting the honorable nature of toil have changed, or that her factory operatives have ceased to be men of all races including the English. She has, however, witnessed or rather been the scene of a remarkable process of assimilation and transformation of races such as none of the manufacturing towns of England have seen.
Thus far, consideration has been given to those factors in the life of the community which it may truthfully be said are to be found in a large majority of the towns and villages of New England. It would be necessary, for a complete study of the New England town at its best, to include other factors, such as the savings-bank, the local lodges of the fraternal, secret orders, the co-operative bank – known in the Middle States as the building loan association, – the daily or weekly local newspaper, and the gossip and wisdom retailed by the habitués of the “village store,” which, in many of the smaller towns, serves as the clearing-house of ideas, local and national. Nor could any thorough study of the New England town as an institution fail to note at least the beneficent effect which the exclusion of shops where intoxicating liquors are retailed has had upon all of the States, thanks to that measure of prohibition which has been made possible through statutory or legislative enactment. So that, in the towns of the agricultural districts of New England, the legalized dram-shop is unknown, as are all the attendant moral and economic evils that follow in its train when the traffic is tolerated. Nor is the possibility of excluding the saloon from larger towns – manufacturing and residential – to be gainsaid in view of the record established by such cities as Cambridge, Somerville, Chelsea, Brookline, and Newton, Massachusetts. In fact, Cambridge, with its more than eighty thousand inhabitants, for nearly twelve years now has enforced local prohibition in a way to make its method of doing so a model for the country; the secret of the method by which it secures an annual “No-license vote” and a non-partisan administration of all city affairs being, in short, the union of temperance men of all degrees of abstinence, Jews and Christians of all sects, and citizens of all national parties on the simple platform – “No saloons, and no tests for local officials other than fitness, and soundness on questions of local policy.”
But there is one factor in the life of very many of the New England towns to-day that cannot be passed by without some allusion. It is the town or city library. In many instances the gift of some private donor, who was either born in the town, and making a home and fortune elsewhere desired to testify that he was not unmindful of ancestral environment and of youthful privileges, or else accumulated a fortune in the town and desired both to perpetuate his memory and to render a public service, the library building usually stands as a token of that marked interest in public education and public welfare which Americans of wealth reveal by gifts, generous to a degree unknown elsewhere in Christendom, competent European judges being witnesses. Appleton’s Annual Encyclopedia records a total of $27,000,000 given to religious, educational, and philanthropic institutions in the United States, in sums of $5000 or more, by individuals, as donations or bequests during the year 1896. In this list are recorded gifts, amounting to $195,000, to establish or to endow town libraries in New England.
Sometimes the major portion of the contents of the library building is also the gift of the generous donor of the edifice, but, usually, the town assumes responsibility for the equipment and maintenance of the library, deriving the necessary income from appropriations voted by the citizens in town-meetings or by aldermen and councilmen, members of the local legislature, and assessed and collected pro rata according to the valuation of property, just as all other town or city taxes are collected. But, whether the gift of some private individual or the creation and property of the town, the fact remains that the handsomest public buildings in New England to-day are the public-library buildings, and in no department of civic life are the New England States and towns so far in advance of those of other sections of the country as in their generous annual appropriations for the maintenance of this form of individual and civic betterment. New Hampshire is to be credited with the first law permitting towns to establish and to maintain libraries by general taxation. This she did in 1849. Massachusetts followed in 1854, Vermont in 1865, Connecticut in 1881. Boston, however, deserves credit for being the pioneer in public taxation for a municipal library, and to the Hon. Josiah Quincy, grandfather of its present mayor, who, in 1847, proposed to the City Council that they request the Legislature for authority to lay a tax to establish a free library, belongs the honor of having founded in America a form of municipal and town activity, than which, as Stanley Jevons says, in his book Methods of Social Reform, “there
