America and England are in the midst of a new era of production and innovation. The industrial revolution has come to both countries, but there are many costs. The factories that have been set up have extremely poor working conditions. In both American and British factories, there was a very high risk of death. The machines could end up being fatal if you weren't paying attention, and there was one case where somebody was even chopped in half. There also wasn't very clean air to breathe, as dust particles and cloth bits floated throughout the air. In the factories, it was extremely easy for a disease to go around, since many people were working close together. The workers were young women, or children, so death was even more of a possibility.
Neither country had it much worse than the other, even though the English established their factories first, thus getting poor working conditions first. The factory owners wanted to maximize production, so they did not prioritize the healthy conditions. However, if a death occurred in a factory in America, it was much harder to replace that worker, since in England they had orphanages where they could just get new workers from. They did not have those in America, so they had to rely on farm girls to come to Lowell.
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