domestic service, and this prestige will not wear itself altogether out.  Those now employed have a strong conception of the dignity of their own social position, and their successors will inherit much of this, even though they may find themselves excluded from the advantages of the present Utopia.  The thing has begun well, but it can only be regarded as a beginning.  Steam, it may be presumed, will become the motive power of cotton mills in New England as it is with us; and when it is so, the amount of work to be done at any one place will not be checked by any such limit as that which now prevails at Lowell.  Water-power is very cheap, but it cannot be extended; and it would seem that no place can become large as a manufacturing town which has to depend chiefly upon water.  It is not improbable that steam may be brought into general use at Lowell, and that Lowell may spread itself.  If it should spread itself widely, it will lose its Utopian characteristics.

One cannot but be greatly struck by the spirit of philanthropy in which the system of Lowell was at first instituted.  It may be presumed that men who put their money into such an undertaking did so with the object of commercial profit to themselves; but in this case that was not their first object.  I think it may be taken for granted that when Messrs. Jackson and Lowell went about their task, their grand idea was to place factory work upon a respectable footing—­to give employment in mills which should not be unhealthy, degrading, demoralizing, or hard in its circumstances.  Throughout the Northern States of America the same feeling is to be seen.  Good and thoughtful men have been active to spread education, to maintain health, to make work compatible with comfort and personal dignity, and to divest the ordinary lot of man of the sting of that curse which was supposed to be uttered when our first father was ordered to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.  One is driven to contrast this feeling, of which on all sides one sees such ample testimony, with that sharp desire for profit, that anxiety to do a stroke of trade at every turn, that acknowledged necessity of being smart, which we must own is quite as general as the nobler propensity.  I believe that both phases of commercial activity may be attributed to the same characteristic.  Men in trade in America are not more covetous than tradesmen in England, nor probably are they more generous or philanthropical.  But that which they do, they are more anxious to do thoroughly and quickly.  They desire that every turn taken shall be a great turn—­or at any rate that it shall be as great as possible.  They go ahead either for bad or good with all the energy they have.  In the institutions at Lowell I think we may allow that the good has very much prevailed.