Probably in times of prosperity this feeling is not
increasing--we are strongly inclined to think it is diminishing; but it is a
question not to be neglected. Manchester men, of the class who run at the
aristocracy, the army, and the navy just as a bull runs at a red rag, will
perhaps be very angry at our saying this; but we speak as we have found mobs
at fires, and chatty fustian jackets in third class trains on the Lancashire
and Yorkshire line; and, although a friend protests against the opinion, we
still think that the ordinary Manchester millhand looks on his employer with
about the same feelings that Mr. John Bright regards a colonel in the guards.
We hope we may live to see them all more amiable, and better friends.
Manchester during the last seventy years, has been peopled more rapidly than
the "Black Country" which we have described, with a crowd of immigrants of
the most ignorant class, from the agricultural counties of England, from
Ireland, and from Scotland. These people have been crowded together under
very demoralising circumstances.
But we do not dwell or enter further into this important part of the
condition of Manchester, because, unlike Birmingham, the Corn Law discussions
have, to the enormous advantage of the city, drawn hundreds of jealous eyes
upon the domestic life of the poor; and because men of all parties, Church
and Dissent, Radicals and Conservatives, are trying hard and as cordially as
their mutual prejudices will allow them, to work out a plan of education for
raising the moral condition of a class, who, if neglected in their dirt and
ignorance, will become, in the strongest sense of the French term,
Dangereuse!
But to return to the Manchester of to-day; it has become rather the
mercantile than the manufacturing centre of the cotton manufacture.
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