always happy to find an independent livelihood which emancipates them from the control of the family. Consequently, the wages of the factory girls are extremely low. At the same time the distance from the village to the factory being mostly great, the girls cannot return home every day, the less so as the hours of labour are usually long. So they stay all the week at the factory, in barracks, and they only return home on Saturday evening; while at sunrise on Monday a waggon makes the tour of the villages, and brings them back to the factory. Barrack life — not to mention its moral consequences — soon renders the girls quite unable to work in the fields. And, when they are grown up, they discover that they cannot maintain themselves at the low wages offered by the factory; but they can no more return to peasant life. It is easy to see what havoc the factory is thus doing in the villages, and how unsettled is its very existence, based upon the very low wages offered to country girls. It destroys the peasant home, it renders the life of the town worker still more precarious on account of the competition it makes to him; and the trade itself is in a perpetual state of unsettledness.
Some information about the present state of the small industries in this region will be found in the text; but, unfortunately, we have no modern description of the industrial life of the Lyon’s region, which we might compare with the above.