Trinity Ward swarms with factory operatives; and, after our chat with blind John, the chairmaker, and his ancient crony the grinder from Nile Street, we set off again to see something more of them.

We had a few minutes' talk about the increasing distress of the town; and he gave me a short account of the workroom which has been opened in Knowsley Street, for the employment of female factory operatives out of work.

Upon this moor there are now fifteen hundred men, chiefly factory operatives, at work, levelling the land for building purposes, and making a great main sewer for the drainage of future streets.

His position as overlooker, too, made him dislike the thoughts of receiving relief amongst the operatives whom he might some day be called upon to superintend again.

Most of these men are what you in England would call operatives, and the women are their wives, daughters, and sisters.

The merchants, the artists, the operatives, and agriculturists unfortunately have left behind them few inheriting their habits of perseverance.

And when these pallid, half-starved miners and operatives, begrimed with smoke and dirt, issued from their infernal hovels and gathered in crowds, threatening all sorts of violence, and dispersed only at the point of the bayonet, there was something to call out fear as well as compassion from those who lived upon their toils.

Of the twenty-five thousand souls who inhabit that city, ten thousand are operatives in the factories.

I knew that many of the factory operatives, who were industrious and economical, supported large families of children on their wages.

That background in The Dwelling-Place of Light (MACMILLAN) is an American cottonmill district with a mixed alien population of operatives, and trouble brewing as the result of a headstrong wage-cutting manager, Claude Ditmar, in conflict with the I.W.W. The phases of this grim struggle are most forcibly described, the author holding no brief for either protagonist.

In looking over the books of the mills we visited, where the operatives entered their names, I observed very few that were not written by themselves; certainly not five per cent.

The female operatives are generally boarded in houses built and owned by the "corporation" for whom they work, and which are placed under the superintendence of matrons of exemplary character, and skilled in housewifery, who pay a low rent for the houses, and provide all necessaries for their inmates, over whom they exercise a general oversight, receiving about one dollar and one-third from each per week.

The factory operatives at Lowell form a community that commands the respect of the neighborhood, and of all under whose observation they come.

" Besides the general prosperity of the operatives, the shareholders in the different corporations divide from eight to fifteen per cent, per annum on their capital.

More substantial was an essay of 1827 by a Marylander, James Raymond, who cited the experiences of his own commonwealth to support his contentions that slavery hampered economy by preventing seasonal shiftings of labor, by requiring employers to support their operatives in lean years as well as fat, and by hindering the accumulation of wealth by the laborers.

Except for their foremen, each of these was run by slave operatives exclusively; and in the latter case, at least, all the slaves were owned by the company.

When J. Graves came from New England in 1848 to assume the management of this mill he found several negroes among the operatives, all of whom were on hire.

His first impulse was to replace all the negroes with whites; but before this was accomplished the newcomer was quite converted by their "activity and promptness," and he recommended that the number of black operatives be increased instead of diminished.

At the height of this régime, in 1851, the slave operatives numbered 158.

Likewise when the rope walk of Smith, Dorsey and Co. at New Orleans was offered for sale in 1820, fourteen slave operatives were included without mention of their families.

The operatives, especially,what are here called the braccianti,this salt of all cities, this nursery of the army and navy, this inexhaustible source of production and riches, impress me by their appearance of comfort and good-humor.

This commonalty of women must also be, at one and the same time, the operatives, the soldiers, the virgins, and the legislators of the country!

He attributed it in the first place to the stagnation, the almost extinction, of the iron trade, the blowing out of furnaces, and the consequent cessation of the demand for the best class of food on the part of thousands of operatives and mechanics, who had hitherto been the farmers' best customers.

Thus as a curiosity first, and as a small mountain of fat beef afterward, he proved a generous gift to the suffering operatives in the manufacturing districts.

There was no money to put into such undertakings and no operatives to work the mills if they had been built.