s of every other factory
town, the cottages are more regular, being built in rows, but they share
here, too, all the evils incident to the customary method of providing
working-men's dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak
more particularly in discussing Manchester. The same is true of the
remaining towns of the West Riding, especially of Barnsley, Halifax and
Huddersfield. The last named, the handsomest by far of all the factory
towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, by reason of its charming situation
and modern architecture, has yet its bad quarter; for a committee
appointed by a meeting of citizens to survey the town, reported August
5th, 1844: "It is notorious that in Huddersfield whole streets and many
lanes and courts are neither paved nor supplied with sewers nor other
drains; that in them refuse, _debris_, and filth of every sort lies
accumulating, festers and rots, and that, nearly everywhere, stagnant
water accumulates in pools, in consequence of which the adjoining
dwellings must inevitably be bad and filthy, so that in such places
diseases arise and threaten the health of the whole town."

If we cross Blackstone Edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we enter
upon that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved its
masterwork and from which all labour movements emanate, namely, South
Lancashire with its central city Manchester. Again we have beautiful
hill country, sloping gently from the watershed westwards towards the
Irish Sea, with the charming green valleys of the Ribble, the Irwell, the
Mersey, and their tributaries, a country which, a hundred years ago
chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown with towns and
villages, and is the most densely populated strip of country in England.
In Lancashire, and especially in Manchester, English manufacture finds at
once its starting point and its centre. The Manchester Exchange is the
thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade. The modern art of
manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester. In the cotton
industry of South Lancashire, the application of the forces of Nature,
the superseding of hand labour by machinery (especially by the power-loom
and the self-acting mule), and the division of labour, are seen at the
highest point; and, if we recognise in these three elements that which is
characteristic of modern manufacture, we must confess that the cotton
industry has remained in advance of all other branches