idle woman, who
litters her drawing-room with trinkets, and is ashamed to be seen twice
in the same dress, is, in your Lordship's view, the enlightened
supporter of the arts and manufactures of her country. At the close of
your letter, my Lord, you, though in measured terms, indignantly dissent
from my statement of the power of great cities for evil, and indeed I
have perhaps been led, by my prolonged study of the causes of the Fall
of Venice, into clearer recognition of some of these urban influences
than may have been possible to your Lordship in the center of the
virtues and proprieties which have been blessed by Providence in the
rise of Manchester. But the Scriptural symbol of the power of temptation
in the hand of the spiritual Babylon--"all kings have been drunk with
the wine of her Fornication"--is perfectly literal in its exposition of
the special influence of cities over a vicious, that is to say, a
declining, people. They are the foci of its fornication, and the
practical meaning is that the lords of the soil take the food and labor
of the peasants, who are their slaves, and spend them especially in
forms of luxury perfected by the definitely so-called "women of the
_town_" who, whether East-cheap Doll, or West--much the reverse of
cheap--Nell, are, both in the color which they give to the Arts, and in
the tone which they give to the Manners, of the State, a literal plague,
pestilence and burden to it, quite otherwise malignant and maleficent
than the poor country lassie who loses her snood among the heather. And
when, at last, _real_ political economy shall exhibit the exact sources
and consequences of the expenditure of the great capitals of
civilization on their own indulgences, your Lordship will be furnished,
in the statistics of their most splendid and most impious pleasure, with
record of precisely the largest existing source of "remunerative
employment"--(if _that_ were all the poor had to ask for), next after
the preparation and practice of war. I believe it is, indeed, probable
that "facility of intercourse" gives the next largest quantity of
occupation; and, as your Lordship rightly observes, to most respectable
persons. And if the entire population of Manchester lost the use of its
legs, your Lordship would similarly have the satisfaction of observing,
and might share in the profits of providing, the needful machinery of
porterage and stretchers. But observe, my Lord--and observe as a final
and in