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To the long hours of the factory-worker, or the shopwoman, we must often add the irksome duties which to a weary wife must make the return home a pain rather than a pleasure.
On the other hand there was a popular impression that the ranks of prostitution were recruited from the manufactory, and that a certain stigma necessarily rested upon the factory-worker and indeed upon working-girls as a class.
Meanwhile the monopoly arbitrarily depresses rents and land values in the country, while it increases them in the city. "Let me give you an illustration of the methods, by which these results are accomplished. Take if you please, the case of an average city, factory-worker; receiving an average wage of one dollar and fifty cents per day. On this wage, he has a family to support.
Have we not our Burns, who "in glory and in joy Followed his plough along the mountain side;" Clare, the peasant boy; Bloomfield, the farmer's lad; Tannahill, the weaver; Allan Ramsay, the peruke-maker; Cooper, the shoemaker; and Critchley Prince, the factory-worker; but greater than these was Shakespeare, though all were of humble origin. France too has had its uneducated poets.
To masses of men in civilized communities the problem of the food supply is all-absorbing, and may exclude all other and broader interests. The factory-worker, with a mind stupefied by the mechanical repetition of some few simple physical movements of no possible interest to him except as resulting in the wage that keeps him alive, has no share in such light as may be scattered about him.
At present it is not desirable that the link which binds the factory-worker or artisan with the village should be at once severed, for in the neighbourhood of the large factories there is often no proper accommodation for the families of the workers, and agriculture, as at present practised, can be carried on successfully though the Head of the Household happens to be absent.
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