of machinery, that the traveller take
a holiday, and spend it in wandering over an agricultural oasis encircled by
hills, and so far uninvaded by the stalks of steam-engines, where the air is
comparatively pure and the grass green, although forest trees do not
flourish.

The visit requires no distant journey. It is a bare six miles from the heart
of Manchester to Middleton. Nine times a-day omnibuses ply there. These
original, if not primitive vehicles, are constructed to carry forty-five
passengers, and on crowded market-days may sometimes be seen loaded with
seventy specimens of a note-worthy class.

Middleton, lately a dirty straggling town, of 15,000 inhabitants, a number at
which it has remained stationary for ten years, built without plan, without
drains, without pavement, without arrangements for common decency, stands on
the borders, and was the manorial village, of the Middleton and Thornham
estates, which had been in the family of the late Lord Suffield for many
hundred years. In the village, land was grudgingly leased for building, and
no steam-engine manufactories were permitted. The agricultural portion of
some 2500 acres of good land for pasturage and root crops, celebrated for its
fine supplies of water and for its (unused) water-power, was divided into
little farms of from twenty to seventy acres, very few exceeding fifty acres,
inhabited by a race of Farmer-Weavers, who, from generation to generation,
farmed badly and wove cleanly in the pure atmosphere of Middleton. They
were, most of them, bound to keep a hound at walk for the Lord of the Manor.

Now the old Lords of the Manor and owners of the estate of Middleton (the
Harbords, afterwards Barons Suffield), were proud men and wealthy, who
despised manufactures and resisted any encroachment of trade on the green
bounds within which their old Manor House had stood for ages. So when the
inventions of Crompton, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Cartwright began to coin
gold like any philosopher's stone, for well-managing cotton manufacturers,
speculators cast their eyes upon the pleasant waters of Middleton and
Thornham, proposing to erect machinery and spin the yarn or thread, and
otherwise to use the abundant water-power. But the Lords of Middleton would
have none of such profits, (and if they could afford to reject them, we will
not say that up to a certain point they were not wise), and so they gave
short answers to the applicants, who went away and