erly corrupted by putrefying animal and vegetable
substances. Through this quarter, a broad and measurably decent street
has been cut, Millers Street, and the background has been pretty
successfully concealed. But if any one should be led by curiosity to
pass through one of the numerous passages which lead into the courts, he
will find this piggery repeated at every twenty paces.

Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I
am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from
black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and
uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness,
ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this
single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand
inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city
of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes
to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air--and
_such_ air!--he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and
yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the _Old_
Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one
mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but
what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and
indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the _industrial epoch_. The
couple of hundred houses, which belong to old Manchester, have been long
since abandoned by their original inhabitants; the industrial epoch alone
has crammed into them the swarms of workers whom they now shelter; the
industrial epoch alone has built up every spot between these old houses
to win a covering for the masses whom it has conjured hither from the
agricultural districts and from Ireland; the industrial epoch alone
enables the owners of these cattle-sheds to rent them for high prices to
human beings, to plunder the poverty of the workers, to undermine the
health of thousands, in order that they _alone_, the owners, may grow
rich. In the industrial epoch alone has it become possible that the
worker scarcely freed from feudal servitude could be used as mere
material, a mere chattel; that he must let himself be crowded into a
dwelling too bad for every other, which he for his hard-earned wages buys
the right to let go utterly to ruin. This manufacture has achieved,
which, without these workers, this pover