Lancashire Part 2

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE EXCHANGE, LIVERPOOL]

Liverpool must not be quitted without a parting word upon a feature certainly by no means peculiar to the town, but which to the observant is profoundly interesting and suggestive. This consists in the through movement of the emigrants, and the arrangements made for their departure. Our views and vignettes give some idea of what may be seen upon the river and on board the s.h.i.+ps. But it is impossible to render in full the interesting spectacle presented by the strangers who come in the first instance from northern Europe. These arrive, by way of Hull, chiefly from Sweden and Denmark, and, to a small extent, from Russia and Germany--German emigrants to America usually going from their own ports, and by way of the English Channel. Truly astonis.h.i.+ng are the piles of luggage on view at the railway stations during the few hours or days which elapse before they go on board. While waiting, they saunter about the streets in parties of six or eight, full of wonder and curiosity, but still impressing every one with their honest countenances and inoffensive manners and behaviour. There are very few children among these foreigners, most of whom appear to be in the prime of life, an aged parent now and then accompanying son or daughter. In 1880 there left Liverpool as emigrants the prodigious number of 183,502. a.n.a.lysis gave--English, 74,969; Scotch, 1811; Irish, 27,986; foreigners, 74,115.

III

THE COTTON DISTRICT AND THE MANUFACTURE OF COTTON

First in the long list of Lancas.h.i.+re manufacturing towns, by reason of its magnitude and wealth, comes Manchester. By and by we shall speak of this great city in particular. For the present the name must be taken in the broader sense, equally its own, which carries with it the idea of an immense district. Lancas.h.i.+re, eastwards from Warrington, upwards as far as Preston, is dotted over with little Manchesters, and these in turn often possess satellites. The idea of Manchester as a place of cotton factories covers also a portion of Ches.h.i.+re, and extends even into Derbys.h.i.+re and Yorks.h.i.+re--Stockport, Hyde, Stalybridge, Dukinfield, Saddleworth, Glossop, essentially belong to it. To all these towns and villages Manchester stands in the relation of a Royal Exchange. It is the reservoir, at the same time, into which they pour their various produce. Manchester acquired this distinguished position partly by accident, mainly through its very easy access to Liverpool. At one time it had powerful rivals in Blackburn and Bolton. Blackburn lost its chance through the frantic hostility of the lower orders towards machinery, inconsiderate men of property giving them countenance--excusably only under the law that mental delusions, like bodily ailments, are impartial in choice of victims. Bolton, on the other hand, though sensible, was too near to compete permanently, neither had it similar access to Liverpool. The old salerooms in Bolton, with their galleries and piazzas, now all gone, were ninety years ago a striking and singular feature of that busy hive of spinning and weaving bees.

Most of these little Manchesters are places of comparatively new growth. A century ago nearly all were insignificant villages or hamlets. Even the names of the greater portion were scarcely known beyond the boundaries of their respective parishes. How unimportant they were in earlier times is declared by the vast area of many of the latter, the parishes in Lancas.h.i.+re, as everywhere else, having been marked out according to the ability of the population to maintain a church and pastor. It is not in manufacturing Lancas.h.i.+re as in the old-fas.h.i.+oned rural counties,--Kent, Suss.e.x, Hamps.h.i.+re, and appled Somerset,--where on every side one is allured by some beautiful memorial of the lang syne. "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain" is not here. Everything, where Cotton reigns, presents the newness of aspect of an Australian colony. The archaeological sc.r.a.ps--such few as there may be--are usually submerged, even in the older towns, in the "full sea" of recent building. Even in the graveyards, the places of all others which in their tombstones and inscriptions unite past and present so tenderly, the imagination has usually to turn away unfed. In place of yew-trees old as York Minster, if there be anything in the way of green monument, it is a soiled and disconsolate shrub from the nearest nursery garden.

The situation of these towns is often pleasing enough: sometimes it is picturesque, and even romantic. Having begun in simple homesteads, pitched where comfort and safety seemed best a.s.sured, they are often found upon gentle eminences, the crests of which, as at Oldham, they now overlap; others, like Stalybridge, lie in deep hollows, or, like Blackburn, have gradually spread from the margin of a stream. Not a few of these primitive sites have the ancient character pleasingly commemorated in their names, as Haslingden, the "place of hazel-nuts."

The eastern border of the county being characterised by lofty and rocky hills, the localities of the towns and villages are there often really favoured in regard to scenery. This also gives great interest to the approaches, as when, after leaving Todmorden, we move through the sinuous gorge that, bordered by Cliviger, "mother of rocks," leads on to Burnley. The higher grounds are bleak and sterile, but the warmth and fertility of the valleys make amends. In any case, there is never any lack of the beauty which comes of the impregnation of wild nature with the outcome of human intelligence. Manchester itself occupies part of a broad level, usually clay-floored, and with peat-mosses touching the frontiers. In the bygones nothing was sooner found than standing water: the world probably never contained a town that only thirty to a hundred years ago possessed so many ponds, many of them still in easy recollection, to say nothing of as many more within the compa.s.s of an afternoon's walk.

Rising under the influence of a builder so unambitious as the genius of factories and operatives' cottages, no wonder that a very few years ago the Lancas.h.i.+re cotton towns seemed to vie with one another which should best deserve the character of cold, hard, dreary, and utterly unprepossessing. The streets, excepting the princ.i.p.al artery (originally the road through the primitive village, as in the case of Newton Lane, Manchester), not being susceptible of material change, mostly remain as they were--narrow, irregular, and close-built.

Happily, of late there has been improvement. Praiseworthy aspirations in regard to public buildings are not uncommon, and even in the meanest towns are at times undeniably successful. In the princ.i.p.al centres--Manchester, Bolton, Rochdale, and another or two--the old meagreness and unsightliness are daily becoming less marked, and a good deal that is really magnificent is in progress as well as completed. Unfortunately, the efforts of the architect fall only too soon under the relentless influence of the factory and the foundry.

Manchester is in this respect an ill.u.s.tration of the whole group; the n.o.blest and most elegant buildings sooner or later get smoke-begrimed.

Sombre as the Lancas.h.i.+re towns become under that influence, if there be collieries in the neighbourhood, as in the case of well-named "coaly Wigan," the dismal hue is intensified, and in dull and rainy weather grows still worse. On suns.h.i.+ny days one is reminded of a sullen countenance constrained to smile against the will.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WIGAN]

A "Lancas.h.i.+re scene" has been said to resolve into "bare hills and chimneys"; and as regards the cotton districts the description is, upon the whole, not inaccurate. Chimneys predominate innumerably in the landscape, a dark pennon usually undulating from every summit--perhaps not pretty pictorially, but in any case a gladsome sight, since it means work, wages, food, for those below, and a fire upon the hearth at home. Though the sculptor may look with dismay upon his ornaments in marble once white as a lily, now under its visitation gray as November, never mind--the smoke denotes human happiness and content for thousands: when her chimneys are smokeless, operative Lancas.h.i.+re is hungry and sad.

In the towns most of the chimneys belong to the factories--buildings of remarkable appearance. The very large ones are many storeys high, their broad and lofty fronts presenting tier upon tier of monotonous square windows. Decoration seems to be studiously avoided, though there is often plenty of scope for inexpensive architectural effects that, to say the least, would be welcome. Seen by day, they seem deserted; after dark, when the innumerable windows are lighted up, the spectacle changes and becomes unique. Were it desired to illuminate in honour of a prince, to render a factory more brilliant from the interior would be scarcely possible. Like all other great ma.s.ses of masonry, the very large ones, though somewhat suggestive of prisons, if not grand, are impressive. In semi-rural localities, where less tarnished by smoke, especially when tolerably new, and not obscured by the contact of inferior buildings, they are certainly very fine objects. The material, it is scarcely needful to say, is red brick.

All the towns belonging to the Manchester family-circle present more or less decidedly the features mentioned. They differ from one another not in style, or habits, or physiognomy; the difference is simply that one makes calico, another muslins, and that they cover a less or greater extent of ground. The social, moral, and intellectual qualities of the various places form quite another subject of consideration. For the present it must wait; except with the remark that a Lancas.h.i.+re manufacturing town, however humble, is seldom without a lyceum, or some similar inst.i.tution; and if wealthy, is p.r.o.ne to emulate cities. Witness the beautiful Art Exhibition held not long ago at Darwen!

[Ill.u.s.tration: WARRINGTON]

The industrial history of the important Lancas.h.i.+re cotton towns, although their modern development covers less than ninety years, dates from the beginning of the fourteenth century. As early as A.D. 1311, temp. Edward II., friezes were manufactured at Colne, but, as elsewhere in the country, they would seem to have been coa.r.s.e and of little value. "The English at that time," says quaint old Fuller, "knew no more what to do with their wool than the sheep that weare it, as to any artificial curious drapery." The great bulk of the native produce of wool was transmitted to Flanders and the Rhenish provinces, where it was woven, England repurchasing the cloth. Edward III., allowing himself to be guided by the far-reaching sagacity of his wise queen, Philippa, resolved that the manufacture should be kept at home.

Parties of the Flemish weavers were easily induced to come over, the more so because wretchedly treated in their own country. Manchester, Bolton, Rochdale, and Warrington, were tenanted almost immediately, and a new character was at once given to the textile productions both of the district and the island in general. Furness Abbey was then in its glory; its fertile pastures supplied the wants of these industrious people: they seem, however, not to have cared to push their establishments so far, keeping in the south and east of the county, over which they gradually spread, carrying, wherever they went, the "merry music of the loom." The same period witnessed the original use of coal--again, it is believed, through the advice of Philippa; the two great sources of Lancas.h.i.+re prosperity being thus in their rise contemporaneous. The numerous little rivers and waterfalls of East Lancas.h.i.+re contributed to the success of the new adventurers.

Fulling-mills and dye-works were erected upon the margins: the particular spots are now only conjectural; mementoes of these ancient works are nevertheless preserved in the springing up occasionally, to the present day, on the lower Lancas.h.i.+re river-banks, of plants botanically alien to the neighbourhood. These are specially the fullers' teasel, _Dipsacus fullonum_, and the dyers' weed, _Reseda luteola_, both of which were regularly used, the refuse, with seeds, cast into the stream being carried many miles down and deposited where the plants now renew themselves. The retention of their vitality by seeds properly ripened, when buried too deep for the operation of the atmosphere, suns.h.i.+ne, and moisture, all at once, is well known to naturalists, as well as their germination when brought near enough to the surface of the ground. This ancient woollen manufacture endured for quite 300 years. Cotton then became a compet.i.tor, and gradually superseded it; Rochdale and a few other places alone vindicating the old traditions.

The Flemings also introduced the national _sabots_, from which have descended the wooden clogs heard in operative Lancas.h.i.+re wherever pavement allows of the clatter, only that while the _sabots_ were wholly wooden, with a lining of lambskin, the Lancas.h.i.+re clogs have leathern tops.

In the writings of the period before us, and in others long afterwards, the Flemings' woollens are called "cottonnes," a circ.u.mstance which has led to much misapprehension as to the date of the original use in England of cotton _ipsissima_. In 1551-52, temp.

Edward VI., an "Acte" pa.s.sed for the making of "woollen clothe"

prescribes the length and breadth of "all and everie cottonnes called Manchester, Lancas.h.i.+re, and Ches.h.i.+re cottonnes." Leland, in the following reign, mentions in similar phrase, that "divers villagers in the moores about Bolton do make cottons." Genuine cotton fabrics manufactured abroad were known in England, no doubt, though the raw material had not been seen. Chaucer habits his Knight in "fustian," a word which points to Spain as the probable source. The truth as regards the "cottonnes" would seem to be that certain woollens were made so as to resemble cotton, and called by the same name, just as to-day certain calicoes have the look of linen given to them, and are sold as "imitation Irish," and as gloves made of the skins of uncertain animals are pa.s.sed off as "French kid"; unless, indeed, as conjectured by some, the word "cottonnes" was a corruption of "coatings."

The employment of cotton for manufacturing in England is mentioned first in 1641, when it was brought to London from Cyprus and Smyrna.

The word "cotton" itself, we need hardly say, is of oriental origin, taking one back to India, the old-world birthplace of the plant. Used there as the clothing material from time immemorial, it is singular that the movement westward should have been so slow. The people who introduced it, practically, to Europe, were the Moors, who in the tenth century cultivated cotton in old Granada, simultaneously with rice, the sugar-cane, and the orange-tree, all brought by themselves from Asia. In those days Moslems and Christians declined to be friendly, and thus, although the looms were never still, the superabundance of the manufacture went exclusively to Africa and the Levant. The cotton-plant being indigenous also to Mexico and the West Indies, when commerce arose with the latter, Cyprus and Smyrna no longer had the monopoly. Precise dates, however, are wanting till the first years of the eighteenth century, when the United States and the Mersey of to-day had their prototype in Barbadoes and the Lune, already mentioned as having been a cotton port long anterior to Liverpool. Lancaster city itself is not accessible by s.h.i.+ps. The cotton was usually landed on the curious _lingula_ which juts into the Irish Sea where the estuary disappears, and hither the country people used to come to wonder at it.[15] The first advertis.e.m.e.nt of a sale of cotton in Liverpool appeared in November 1758, but thirty years after that Lancaster was still the princ.i.p.al Lancas.h.i.+re seat of import. One of the most distinguished of the "Lancas.h.i.+re worthies," old Mr. John Blackburne, of Orford Mount, near Warrington, an enthusiastic gardener, cultivated the cotton-plant so successfully that he was able to provide his wife with a muslin dress, worn by her on some state occasion in or about 1790, the material derived wholly from the greenhouse he loved so fondly. Strange that, except occasionally in an engine-room, we scarcely ever see the cotton-plant in the county it has filled with riches--the very place where one would expect to find it cherished. How well would it occupy a few inches of the s.p.a.ce so generally devoted to the pomps and vanities of mere colour-wors.h.i.+p!

Apart from the a.s.sociations, it is beautiful; the leaves resemble those of the grape-vine; the flowers are like single yellow roses.

There never was a flood without its ark. One man a few years ago did his part with becoming zeal--the late Mr. R. H. Alc.o.c.k, of Bury.

Lancas.h.i.+re, it may be allowed here to remind the reader, is the only manufacturing district in England which depends entirely upon foreign countries for the supply of its raw material. One great distinction between England and other countries is that the latter send away the whole, or very much, of their natural produce, usually as gathered together, England importing it and working it up. How terribly the dependence in question was proved at the time of the Federal and Confederate war, all who were cognisant of the great Cotton-famine will remember. Next in order would come sugar and timber, a dearth of either of which would unquestionably be disastrous; but not like want of cotton in Lancas.h.i.+re--the stranding of a whole community.

[15] _Vide_ the _Autobiography of Wm. Stout_, the old Quaker grocer, ironmonger, and general merchant of Lancaster. He mentions receiving cotton from Barbadoes in 1701, and onwards to 1725, when the price advanced "from 10d. to near 2s. 1d. the lb."

The Lancas.h.i.+re cotton towns owe their existence essentially to the magic touch of modern mechanical art. During all the long procession of centuries that had elapsed since the time of the "white-armed"

daughter of Alcinous, her maidens, and their spinning-wheels, and of the swarthy weavers of ancient Egypt, the primeval modes of manufacture had been followed almost implicitly. The work of the Flemings themselves was little in advance of that of the Hebrews under Solomon. In comparison with that long period, the time covered by the change induced by machinery was but a moment, and the growth of the weaving communities, compared with that of previous times, like a lightning-flash. The movement commenced about 1760. Up till long after the time of Elizabeth, the staple manufacture of Lancas.h.i.+re, as we have seen, was woollen. Flax, in the sixteenth century, began to be imported largely, both from Ireland and the Continent, and when cotton at last arrived the two materials were combined. Flax was used for the "warp" or longitudinal threads, which in weaving require to be stronger than the "woof," while cotton was employed only for the latter--technically the "weft."

Fabrics composed wholly of cotton do not appear to have been made in Lancas.h.i.+re before the time of George II., Bolton leading the way with cotton velvets about 1756. The cotton weft was spun by the people in their own cottages, chiefly by the women, literally the "spinsters" of the family, representative eighteen centuries afterwards, of the good housewife of the _aeneid_ and of the still older one in the Book of Proverbs, though as the years rolled on so greatly did the demand increase that every child had work of one kind or another. Thus began "infant labour," afterwards so much abused. The employment of children over thirteen in the modern factory is quite a different thing. Placed under legal restrictions, it is a blessing alike to themselves and to their parents, since if not there, the children now earning their bread would be idling, and probably in mischief. Those, it has been well said, who have to live by labour should early be trained to labour. Diligent as they were, the spinsters could not produce weft fast enough for the weavers. Sitting at their looms, which were also in the cottages, thoughtful men pondered the possibilities of quicker methods. Presently the dream took shape, and from the successive inventions of Whyatt, Kay, Highs, and Hargreaves, emerged the famous "spinning-jenny,"[16] a machine which did as much work in the same time as a dozen pair of hands. Abreast of it came the warping-mill, the carding-engine, and the roving-frame: the latter particularly opportune, since the difficulty had always been to disentangle the fibres of the cotton prior to twisting, and to lay them exactly parallel. Arkwright now came on the scene. He himself never invented anything; but he had marvellous powers of combination, such as enabled him to a.s.similate all that was good in the ideas of other men, and to give them unity and new vitality. The result was machinery that gave exquisite evenness and attenuation to the "rovings," and a patent having been granted 15th July 1769, Arkwright is properly regarded as the founder of the modern modes of manufacture. Arkwright possessed, in addition, a thoroughly feminine capacity for good management and perseverance, with that most excellent adjunct, the art of obtaining ascendancy over capitalists.

Among the immediate results were the disuse of linen warp, the new frames enabling cotton warp to be made strong enough; and the concentration of all the early processes, spinning included, in special buildings, with employment of horse or water-power. The weaving, however, long remained with the cottagers, and survives to a slight extent even to the present day. The Lancas.h.i.+re cotton manufacture, strictly so called, is thus very little more than a century old. No further back than in 1774, fabrics made wholly of cotton were declared by statute to have been "lately introduced," and a "lawful and laudable manufacture."

[16] That the spinning-jenny was so named after a wife or daughter of one of the inventors is fable. The original wheel was the "jenny," a term corresponding with others well known in Lancas.h.i.+re,--the "peggy" and the "dolly,"--and the new contrivance became the "_spinning_-jenny."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DINNER HOUR]

The following year, 1775, saw the perfecting of Crompton's celebrated "mule," which produced, at less expense, a much finer and softer yarn than Arkwright's machine. It was specially suitable for muslins; and from this date most a.s.suredly should be reckoned the elevation of the manufacture to its highest platform. Like the jenny, it was used at first in private houses, but a n.o.bler application was close at hand--a new revolution--the superseding of hand, and horse, and water power, all at one moment, by steam. Had the former remained the only artificial sources of help--even supposing rivers and brooks not subject to negation by drought, the cotton manufacture must needs have been confined within narrow limits, and the greatest conceivable supply of the raw material would not have altered the case. Steam, which, like Lord Chatham, "tramples upon impossibilities," at once gave absolute freedom; and manufacturing, in the s.p.a.ce of thirty years, eclipsed its history during 3000. The "mule" was now transferred to the mill, and the factory system became complete.

Power-looms were first employed in Manchester in 1806. Stockport followed, and by degrees they became general, improvements going on up till as late as 1830, when the crowning triumph of cotton machinery was patented as the "self-acting mule." The pride of Lancas.h.i.+re, it must be remembered, consists, after all, not in the delicacy and the beauty of its cottons, for in these respects India has not yet been out-run; but in the rapidity, the cheapness, and the boundless potentialities of the manufacture, which enable it to meet, if called upon, the requirements of every nation in the world. While any human creature remains imperfectly clad, Lancas.h.i.+re still has its work to do. To be entrusted with this great business is a privilege, and in the honourable execution consists its true and essential glory.

"Over-production," while any are naked, is a phrase without meaning.

That which wants correcting is deficient absorption.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAY-DAY IN A COTTON MILL]

Reviewing the whole matter, the specially interesting point--rendered so through inciting to profoundest reflection--is that those poor and unlettered men--Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and the others--were the instruments, under Providence (for such things do not happen fortuitously), by which the world became possessed of an entirely new industrial power, fraught with infinite capacities for promoting human welfare; and which, in its application, introduced quite new styles of thinking and reasoning, and gave new bias to the policy of a great nation. Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, had no prescience of what would come of their efforts. In no part of the transformation was there any precedent or example; it had neither lineage nor inheritance; it was antic.i.p.ated in momentousness only by the inventions of Caxton and Gioia;[17] and if in our own day the electric telegraph and the telephone reveal natural laws scarcely distinguishable from those of miracle, it may still be questioned if these latter discoveries surpa.s.s in intrinsic value the three or four that gave life to the modern cotton manufacture.

[17] Inventor of the mariners' compa.s.s.

The interior of a great cotton factory, when at work, presents a spectacle altogether unimaginable. The vast area of the rooms, or "flats," filled in every part with machinery, admits of no comparison with anything else in England, being found in the factory alone. A thousand great iron frames, exquisitely composite, and kept fastidiously clean, some by self-acting dusters, are in simultaneous movement, the arms of some rising and falling, while parts of others march in and out, and to and fro, giving perfect ill.u.s.trations of order, reciprocal adaptation, and interdependence, and seeming not only alive, but conscious. Nothing is more striking, perhaps, than to watch the shuttles as they dart alternately right and left, every movement meaning an added thread to the beautiful offspring. The poets are supposed by some to concern themselves only with fiction. Men and women who write verses are poets only when they deal with truth, though presented in the garb of fable; and a.s.suredly, for a poet's theme, there is nothing to excel a skilfully conducted human manufacture. Erasmus Darwin, it will be remembered, describes the whole series of processes in connection with cotton as observed by him in Arkwright's original factory upon the Derwent.

A common practice is to have the looms in a "shed" upon the surface of the ground. To be as near the earth as possible is a desire no less with the spinner, who, like the weaver, finds the lower atmospheric conditions much more favourable to his work than the upper. In any case, where the power-looms are, long lines of slender pillars support the roof, presenting an unbroken and almost endless perspective; and between the machinery and the ceiling, connected with the horizontal shafts which revolve just below it, are innumerable strong brown leather straps that quiver as they run their courses. According to the department we may be in, either threads or coils of cotton whiter than pearl, and of infinite number, give occupation to those thousand obedient and tireless slaves--not of the ring or the lamp, but of the mighty engine that invisibly is governing the whole; and in attendance are men and women, boys and girls, again beyond the counting. Their occupations are in no degree laborious: all the heavy work is done by the steam-engine; muscular power is not wanted so much as delicacy and readiness of hand and finger. Hence in the factory and the cotton-mill there is opportunity for those who are too weak for other vocations.

Machinery in all cases has the merit of at once increasing the workman's wages and lessening his fatigue. The precision in the working of the machinery enforces upon those who attend to it a corresponding regularity of action. There is no re-twisting or re-weaving; everything, if done at all, must be done properly and at the proper moment. Apart from its being a place wherein to earn creditably the daily bread, if there be anything in the world which conduces pre-eminently to the acquisition of habits such as lie at the foundation of good morals,--order, care, cleanliness, punctuality, industry, early rising,--a.s.suredly it is the wholesome discipline of the well-ordered cotton factory. Whatever may befall _outside_, there is nothing deleterious _inside_; the personal intercourse of the people employed is itself reduced to a minimum; if they corrupt one another, it is as people _not_ in factories do. In the rooms and "sheds" devoted to weaving, the rattle of the machinery forbids even conversation, except when the voice is adjusted to it. In the quieter parts the girls show their contentedness not infrequently by singing--

"The joyful token of a happy mind."

[Ill.u.s.tration: IN A COTTON FACTORY]

"How often," says the type of the true Lancas.h.i.+re poet, most genial of his race,--the late Edwin Waugh,--"how often have I heard some fine psalm-tune streaming in chorus from female voices when pa.s.sing cotton-mills at work, and mingling with the spoom of thousands of spindles." That the girls in particular are not unhappy is shown by their preference of the cotton-mill to domestic service. Their health is as good as that of any other cla.s.s of operatives; and though they have to keep upon their feet, it is not for so long a time as young women in city shops. Of course there is a shadowy side to life identified with the factory. The hands do not live in Elysium, any more than the agricultural labourer does in Arcadia. The masters, as everywhere else, are both good and bad: in the aggregate they are no worse than their fellows in other places, and to expect them to be better would be premature. In case of grievance or abuse there is an "inspector" to apply to for remedy. The wages are as good as those earned by any other large cla.s.s of English work-people; and if the towns in which so many abide are unlovely, the Lancas.h.i.+re cotton-operatives at all events know little or nothing of the vice and filth of metropolitan St. Giles'.

IV

MANCHESTER

The writer of the entertaining article in the _Cornhill_ for February 1880 upon "The Origin of London" shows that had the choice of the best site for a capital to be made _now_, and for the first time, the selection would naturally fall upon south-east Lancas.h.i.+re, and on the particular spot covered by modern Manchester. Geographically, as the author points out, it is the centre of the three kingdoms; and its advantageousness in regard to commerce, all things considered, is paramount. These facts alone suffice to give interest to the locality; and that the town itself should have acquired the importance now possessed, in some respects almost metropolitan, looks not so much like accident or good fortune as the fulfilment of a law of Nature.

The locality in question is by no means picturesque. The ground, as said before, is, on the Ches.h.i.+re side, and westwards, nearly level, the country being here bordered by the Mersey, a river, as Pennant long ago remarked, utterly devoid along its course of the charms usually identified with fairly broad and winding streams. At Northen there are some pleasant shaded pathways, with willows and poplars like those upon which _OEnone_ was carved; but the bank, if much above the level, is artificial, the original having been raised with a view to protecting the adjacent fields from inundation in time of floods, such as occur not infrequently--the Mersey being formed in the beginning by the confluence of several minor streams, which gather their waters from the moors and the Derbys.h.i.+re hills, and are apt to be well filled and of rapid movement.

At a few miles' distance in other directions, or receding from the Mersey, the ground becomes slightly elevated, and in parts agreeably broken, as at Prestwich, and near Heywood, where there are numberless little dells and ravines, ferny and full of trees. These are a pleasant change after the flatness on the Ches.h.i.+re side, but are too far away to be called Manchester. To the Mersey Manchester makes no claim: three other rivers are distinctly its own--the Irwell, which divides the town from Salford, with its tributaries, the Medlock, and the Irk; and of these, though the colour is inexpressible, unless we go to mythology for a term, it is proud, since no three rivers in the world do harder work. All three pa.s.s their earlier life in valleys which in the bygones must have been delightful, and in some parts romantic. Traditions exist to this day of the times when in their upper reaches they were "silver-eddied." For a long distance before entering, and all the way while pa.s.sing through, they have now for many years been converted into scavengers; the trout, once so plentiful, are extinct; there are water-rats instead. This, perhaps, is inevitable in a district which, though once green and tranquil, has been transformed into an empire of workshops.

The Manchester rivers do not stand alone in their ill.u.s.tration of what can be accomplished by the defiling energy of "works." In the strictly manufacturing parts of South Lancas.h.i.+re it would be difficult to find a single watercourse of steady volume that any longer "makes music with the enamelled stones." The heroine of Verona[18] would to-day be impelled less to poetical similes than to epitaphs; no sylvan glade, however hidden, if there be water in it, has escaped the visitation of the tormentors. Are we then to murmur?--to feel as if robbed? By no means. Nothing can be regretful that is inseparable from the conditions of the industry and the prosperity of a great nation. The holidays will be here by and by. A couple of hours' railway journey enables any one to listen to the "liquid lapse" of streams clear and bright as Cherith. Everything lovely has its place of safety somewhere. However doleful the destiny of the South Lancas.h.i.+re streams, a thousand others that can never be sullied await us at a little distance.

[18] _Two Gentlemen_, ii. 7.