e stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most
thickly built-up and the worst. Here flows the Medlock with countless
windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the
valley of the Irk. Along both sides of the stream, which is coal black,
stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men's
dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition. The bank is chiefly
declivitous and is built over to the water's edge, just as we saw along
the Irk; while the houses are equally bad, whether built on the
Manchester side or in Ardwick, Chorlton, or Hulme. But the most horrible
spot (if I should describe all the separate spots in detail I should
never come to the end) lies on the Manchester side, immediately south-
west of Oxford Road, and is known as Little Ireland. In a rather deep
hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall
factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups
of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live
about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are
old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into
ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and
sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the
atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened
by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women
and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon
the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery
furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be
equalled in the worst court on the Irk. The race that lives in these
ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung
doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless
filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this
race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity. This is the
impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district
forces upon the beholder. But what must one think when he hears that in
each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and perhaps a
cellar, on the average twenty human beings live; that in the whole
region, for each one hundred and twenty persons, one usually inaccessible
privy is provided; and that in spite of all the preachings of the