hin the present century, contains a vast number of ruinous houses,
most of them being, in fact, in the last stages of inhabitableness. I
will not dwell upon the amount of capital thus wasted, the small
additional expenditure upon the original improvement and upon repairs
which would suffice to keep this whole district clean, decent, and
inhabitable for years together. I have to deal here with the state of
the houses and their inhabitants, and it must be admitted that no more
injurious and demoralising method of housing the workers has yet been
discovered than precisely this. The working-man is constrained to occupy
such ruinous dwellings because he cannot pay for others, and because
there are no others in the vicinity of his mill; perhaps, too, because
they belong to the employer, who engages him only on condition of his
taking such a cottage. The calculation with reference to the forty
years' duration of the cottage is, of course, not always perfectly
strict; for, if the dwellings are in a thickly-built-up portion of the
town, and there is a good prospect of finding steady occupants for them,
while the ground rent is high, the contractors do a little something to
keep the cottages inhabitable after the expiration of the forty years.
They never do anything more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and
the dwellings so repaired are the worst of all. Occasionally when an
epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary
police is a little stirred, raids are made into the working-men's
districts, whole rows of cellars and cottages are closed, as happened in
the case of several lanes near Oldham Road; but this does not last long:
the condemned cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much
better off by letting them, and the sanitary police won't come again so
soon. These east and north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on
which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the
year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories
hither, and that the working-people alone may breathe.

Southward from Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working-
men's quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached,
irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty
building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet
weather. The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to
mind. Th