Seven English Cities | Page 7

the amusing anomalies of the British constitution, that the great city from whose political fame these names are inseparable should have had no representation in Parliament from Cromwell's time to Victoria's. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!
[Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER]
The "Manchester school" of political economy has long since passed into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a potent weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not myself so extreme a _laissez-faireist_ as to have thought of that school with pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good thing in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the opposite social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master, and we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like this, any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population suffers for the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority, or a very powerful minority. 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. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start up for the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and I had to come away without mine.
I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there, there it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on the planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not my fault; and I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of Manchester, was not running. I dare say I was not in the right hands, but this was not for want of trying to get into them. In the local delusion that it was then summer, those whose kindness might have befriended the ignorance of the stranger were "away on their holidays": that was exactly the phrase.
When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is very noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride in seeing our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great Britain at one end of the room, but these were the only things American in the impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no