kingdom progress will not be accompanied by undeserved poverty, "Each for all," instead of "each for each," will yet be the watchword of industry, and the device, let us hope, for that flag of discontented labour which still wants a motto. The long conflict between capital and labour draws to a close, and the treaty of peace between these old foes will be a deed of industrial partnership. Beyond all dreams of the Golden Age will be the splendour, majesty and happiness of the free peoples when, fulfilling the promise of the ages and the hopes of humanity, they shall have learned how to make equitable distribution among themselves of the fruits of their common labour."*

* Hon. Abram Hewitt, Speech on opening of Brooklyn Bridge.

CHAPTER IX.

NORTH ADAMS-AN INDUSTRIAL BATTLE

WILLIAMSTOWN.

"We are ruined by Chinese cheap labour."

LEAVING Pittsfield for North Adams, the most northerly manufacturing town in Massachusetts, the railway soon crosses the watershed of the Housatonic and strikes the sources of the Hoosac River. These have been artificially collected into an immense, lake-like reservoir, the reliance in dry seasons of every mill on this busy stream, which flows northward until it is well behind the Greylock range, around whose feet it wheels towards the west to pour through a gap in the Taconics on its way to the mighty Hudson. The Hoosac is still a baby river when it begins work, and its course is so steep that it runs, so to speak, out of one factory into another, dancing over its boulder-strewn bed whenever the millowner lets it out to play.

North Adams, a town of fifteen thousand souls, lies

upon the westward sweep of the stream, and seems almost buried among the hills, so closely and steeply is it environed by the spurs of the Greylock range. The mountains assume a very different appearance here to that which they wear at Pittsfield. There, the observer stands on the summit of a great swell of land, itself nearly twelve hundred feet high, and whose base extends from the Sound to the St. Lawrence, rising from which, the highest peaks, whether of the Greylock, Taconic, or Hoosac ranges, form mere gracefully flowing lines in the landscape. But, at Adams, the Hoosac valley is four hundred feet lower than that of the Housatonic at Pittsfield, while the hills themselves, instead of standing remote from the stream, press closely upon it, to the great gain of the scenery in grandeur.

There are many industries in Adams-cotton-mills, print-works, paper factories and boot- and shoe-shops; but it is only the latter which we have come to see. Not that the town is noted for this particular manufacture, but because of the interest attaching to an attempt made here some years ago to introduce Chinese labour into a Massachusetts manufactory. Before telling the story, however, something must be said about American bootand shoe-shops, the parents of our own great establishments at Leicester and Northampton.

The making of boots and shoes was one of the earliest, and is one of the most important of American industries. Setting milling and meat-packing aside,

as being agricultural rather than mechanical in their character, boot- and shoe-making is only surpassed in importance by the cotton, clothing, lumber, and iron and steel industries of the country. Cotton is king in America, as in England, so far as the employment of labour is concerned; but Saint Crispin counts seventy followers for every hundred of King Cotton's subjects. In value of products, iron and steel are supreme among American manufactures, but the shoemakers only lack eighteen per cent. of the ironmasters and eight per cent. of the cotton-lords in the money's worth of their goods. Considerably more than half of this immense business, worth in the aggregate nearly forty millions of pounds sterling, is monopolized by the State of Massachusetts, where more than seventy thousand people earn their living by the last, a sixth of this number being centred in one place, the old fishing village of Lynn, near Boston.

Lynn has been distinguished for this branch of industry almost from the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620. The first English shoemakers to settle there were Philip Kirtland and Edmund Bridges, who arrived in 1635. But they were preceded in Massachusetts by Thomas Beard and Isaac Rickman, passengers in the Mayflower, as we learn from a letter to the DeputyGovernor of the New England Company, dated London, 1629:

"Thomas Beard, a shoemaker, and Isack Rickman,

being both recomended to vs by M1 Symon Whetcombe to receive their dyett and house roome at the charge of the Companie, we have agreed they shall be with you the Governor, or placed elsewhere, as you shall think good, and receive from you their dyett and lodging for wh they are to pay, each of them, at the rate of £10 p" annm. The said Thos: Beard hath in the ship, the May Flower, divers hydes both for soles and vpp leathers wh hee intends to make into botes and shoes there in the country."

To return to Lynn. Shoemaking, begun by Kirtland and Bridges, in the seventeenth, made great strides in the eighteenth century, under the influence of a Welshman named Adam Dagyr, who, by the excellence of his shoes, soon made this business the most important industry of the town. Lynn was, and still is, essentially a fishing station, and this circumstance assisted, strangely enough, to determine its industrial destiny. The colonial fisherman, like the colonial housewife, was great at selfhelp. As she produced all the family homespun, so he made his own watertight boots, and, when his fishing gear was laid aside for the winter, he took naturally to the last as a source of additional income.

Until within the last thirty years, shoes were made entirely by hand, and a shoemaker's shop in Massachusetts consisted of a framed and shingled shanty, about ten or twelve feet square, containing from four to eight "berths," as the spaces occupied by the workmen