What
interested me more were the miles and miles of comfortable-
looking little brick houses in which, for all I knew, the mill-
labor dwelt. Very possibly it did not; the mills themselves are
now nearly all, or mostly, outside of Manchester, and perhaps for
this reason I did not find the slums, when shown them, very
slummy, and I saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and dirt as in
Liverpool. We passed through a quarter of large, old-fashioned
mansions, as charming as they were unimagined of Manchester; but
these could not have been the dwellings of the mill-hands, any
more than of the mill-owners. The mill-owners, at least, live in
suburban palaces and villas, which I fancy by this time are not
--"pricking a cockney ear,"
as in the time of Tennyson's "Maud."
What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have
greatly made the greatness of England have in all times suffered
from their poets and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not
be a very blind devotee of commercialism or industrialism to
resent the affronts put upon them, when one comes to the scenes
of such mighty achievement as Liverpool, and Manchester, and
Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to have taken it all--with
what a meek subordination and sufferance! One asks one's self
whether the society of such places can be much inferior to that
of Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St.
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