Native American labor is best described by reference to a recent past, when it filled all the factories of the United States, and challenged, by its high tone, the admiration of Europe. At the beginning of this century, public opinion in America was most unfriendly to the establishment of manufactories, so great were the complaints of these made in Europe as seats of vice and disease. Thus, when Humphreysville, the first industrial village in America, was built, in 1804, by the Hon. David Humphreys, who wished to see the colony independent of the mother country for her supplies of manufactured goods, parents refused to place their children in his factories until legislation had first made the mill-owner responsible both for the education and morality of his operatives. Similarly, when the cotton mills of Lowell, and the silk mills of Hartford, began to rise, between 1832 and 1840, the American people held the capitalist responsible for the moral, mental, and physical health of the people whom he employed, with the result that all England wondered at the stories of factory operatives, and their so-called "refinements," which were given to this country by writers like Harriett Martineau and Charles Dickens. Lowell, between the years 1832 and 1850, was, perhaps, the most remarkable manufacturing town in the world. Help, in the new cotton mills, was in great demand, and what were then thought very high wages were freely offered, so that, in spite of the national prejudice against factory labor, operatives began to flow from many quarters into the mills. These people were, for the most part, the daughters of farmers, storekeepers, and mechanics; of Puritan antecedents, and religious training. In the mill they were treated kindly, and, although their hours were long, they were not overworked. A feeling of real, but respectful, equality existed between them and their employers, and the best hands were often guests at the houses of the mill owners or ministers of religion. They lived in great boarding-houses, kept by women selected for their high character, and it is of these industrial families, and of their refined life, that observers like Dickens, Lyell, and Miss Martineau spoke with enthusiasm. The last writer has made us acquainted, in her "Mind among the Spindles," with the height to which intellectual life once rose in Lowell mills, before the wave of Irish emigration, following on the potato famine, swept native American labor away from the spindles. The morality of the early mill-girls, again, was practically stainless, and, strict as the rules of conduct were in the factories, these were really dead letters, so high was the standard of behavior set and sustained by the mill-hands themselves.