"Thousands of our laboring people travel hundreds of miles in quest of employment on canals at 62-1/2 cents to 87-1/2 cents per day, paying $1.50 to $2.00 a week for board, leaving families behind depending upon them for support. They labor frequently in marshy grounds, where they inhale pestiferous miasmata, which destroy their health, often irrevocably. They return to their poor families broken hearted, and with ruined constitutions, with a sorry pittance, most laboriously earned, and take to their beds, sick and unable to work. Hundreds are swept off annually, many of them leaving numerous and helpless families. Notwithstanding their wretched fate, their places are quickly supplied by others, although death stares them in the face. Hundreds are most laboriously employed on turnpikes, working from morning to night at from half a dollar to three-quarters a day, exposed to the broiling sun in summer and all the inclemency of our severe winters. There is always a redundancy of wood-pilers in our cities, whose wages are so low that their utmost efforts do not enable them to earn more than from thirty-five to fifty cents per day.... Finally there is no employment whatever, how disagreeable or loathsome, or deleterious soever it may be, or however reduced the wages, that does not find persons willing to follow it rather than beg or steal." FOOTNOTES: [61] "Kings of Fortune":16--The pretentious title and sub-title of this work, written thirty odd years ago by Walter R. Houghton, A.M., gives an idea of the fantastic exaltation indulged in of the careers of men of great wealth. Hearken to the full title: "Kings of Fortune--or the Triumphs and Achievements of Noble, Self-made men.--Whose brilliant careers have honored their calling, blessed humanity, and whose lives furnish instruction for the young, entertainment for the old and valuable lessons for the aspirants of fortune." Could any fulsome effusion possibly surpass this? [62] "Mr. Girard's bank was a financial success from the beginning. A few months after it opened for business its capital was increased to one million three hundred thousand dollars. One of the incidents which helped, at the outstart, to inspire the public with confidence in the stability of the new institution was the fact that the trustees who liquidated the affairs of the old Bank of the United States opened an account in Girard's Bank, and deposited in its vaults some millions of dollars in specie belonging to the old bank."--"The History of the Girard National Bank of Philadelphia," by Josiah Granville Leach, LL.B., 1902. This eulogistic work contains only the scantiest details of Girard's career. [63] The First Session of the Twenty-second Congress, 1831, iv, containing reports from Nos. 460 to 463. [64] Ibid.