Probably the most liberal
and intelligent populations of Great Britain are those of
Manchester and Birmingham, names which have stood for a hard and
sordid industrialism, unrelieved by noble sympathies and
impulses. It is quite possible that a less generous spirit than
mine would have censured the "Manchester school" for the weather
of the place, and found in its cold gray light the effect of the
Gradgrind philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction in
gloom.
IV
I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it,
was very cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge
lowries, as the wagons are called, passing through the streets
with the cotton fabrics of the place in certain stages of
manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps the finished material. In
Manchester itself one sees not much else of "the cotton-spinning
chorus" which has sent its name so far. The cotton is now spun in
ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood of the
great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
other Americans well know.
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