And this meeting recommends
to the friends of the cause, in different countries, to petition
their respective Governments in favor of the measure."
On the 30th, in company with John G. Whittier and C. Stewart Renshaw, I
went over to Lowell, the chief seat of the woollen and cotton
manufacture in America. Less than twenty years ago, there were not more
than forty or fifty houses on the site of this flourishing city, which
now contains upwards of twenty thousand inhabitants. Its numerous mills
are all worked by water power, and belong to incorporated joint-stock
companies. We were obligingly shown over two of the largest woollen and
cotton factories, where every stage of the manufacture was in process,
from the cotton, or sheep's wool, to the finished fabric. We also
visited works, where the printing of cottons is executed in a superior
style, besides a new process for dyeing cotton in the thread, invented
by an Englishman, now in the establishment. The following abstract of
the manufacturing statistics of Lowell, on the first of January, 1841,
will show the great importance to which this new branch of industry has
attained with such unprecedented rapidity.
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