Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

Fortunately, I became socially intimate with a very able and very accomplished physician of most conservative views in a neighboring town, who had no concern with the mills in Lowell or with their operatives, save when called as a doctor. He explained to me that the hours of labor, thirteen and a half hours a day for six days in the week, were too great a strain on the life-powers of the operatives. There was only thirty minutes intermission in the fourteen hours to get a hurried meal, which could not be readily digested when the laborer was at work. Though for the most part the labor was not heavy, yet, being in connection with the running of machines, it required constant attention, so that whatever time there was the work could not be remitted. While this long day was not immediately destructive, explained the doctor, it certainly permitted the “survival of the fittest” only, and in the end deteriorated the physical strength of the whole population.

Thus instructed and convinced, my first political action was an endeavor to procure from the legislature an enactment making ten hours a day's work in manufacturing employments. I gathered around me a few of like thought, and the struggle began. A more unpopular movement in the opinions of the mill managers and their principal workmen could not have been made. How and why one of the agents, who was my friend, visited me to remonstrate may be adverted to hereafter. The lips of the operatives were closed; for if they said “ten hours” loudly, or if some enemy reported that they attended secretly a ten-hour meeting, their days of working in the mills of Lowell were numbered.

I am not denouncing this action on the part of the managers; it was natural. They thought they were doing right; the stockholders wanted large dividends, and they were having them. The mills were exceedingly profitable. They were the highest class of investment in the State, and their surplus funds devoted to the enlargement of their properties were simply enormous.

The argument of the agents when some few of the more intelligent deigned to argue with me, was this: “How can the mills of Lowell running only ten hours compete with the mills of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and other States, where they run fourteen or fifteen hours?”