Seven English Cities | Page 7

Manchester was the mother of this
tricksy master-spirit of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I
failed to visit either house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is
precious to a larger world than mine; and the name of the stalwart
Quaker friend of man is dear to every American who remembers the
heroic part he played in our behalf during our war for the Union. It is
one of 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