FOR years before going to England I had been interested in the north of England—the land, as I was accustomed to think, of the under dog. England, if one could trust one’s impression from a distance, was a land of great social contrasts—the ultimate high and the ultimate low of poverty and wealth. In the north, as I understand it, were all of the great manufacturing centers—Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester—a whole welter of smoky cities whence issue tons upon tons of pottery, linen, cotton, cutlery. While I was at Bridgely Level I spoke of my interest in this region to Barfleur, who merely lifted his eyebrows. He knew little or nothing about that northern world. The south of England encompassed his interest. However, Barfleur’s cousin, the agreeable Gerard Barfleur, told me soulfully that the north of England must be like America, because it was so brisk, direct, practical, and that he loved it. (He was a confirmed American “rooter” or “booster,” we would say over here, and was constantly talking about coming to this country to enter the theatrical business.)
I journeyed northward the last day of the old year to Manchester and its environs, which I had chosen as affording the best picture of manufacturing life. I had been directed to a certain hotel, recommended as the best equipped in the country. I think I never saw so large a hotel. It sprawled over a very large block in a heavy, impressive, smoky-stone way. It had, as I quickly discovered, an excellent Turkish and Russian bath in connection with it and five separate restaurants, German, French, English, etc., and an American bar. The most important travel life of Manchester centered here—that was obvious. I was told that buyers and sellers from all parts of the world congregated in this particular caravanserai. It was New Year’s day and the streets were comparatively empty, but the large, showy, heavily furnished breakfast-room was fairly well sprinkled with men whom I took to be cotton operatives. There was a great mill strike on at this time and here were gathered for conference representatives of all the principal interests involved. I was glad to see this, for I had always wondered what type of man it was that conducted the great manufacturing interests in England—particularly this one of cotton. The struggle was over the matter of the recognition of the unions and a slight raise in the wage-scale. These men were very much like a similar collection of wealthy manufacturers in the United States. Great industries seem to breed a certain type of mind and body. You can draw a mental picture of a certain keen, dressy, phlegmatic individual, not tall, not small, round, solid, ruddy—and have them all. These men were so comfortably solid, physically. They looked so content with themselves and the world, so firm and sure. Nearly all of them were between forty-five and sixty, cold, hard, quick-minded, alert. They differed radically from the typical Englishman of the South. It struck me at once that if England were to be kept commercially dominant it would be this type of man, not that of the South, who would keep it so.
And now I could understand from looking at these men why it was that the north of England was supposed to hate the south of England, and vice versa. I had sat at a dinner-table in Portland Place one evening and heard the question of the sectional feeling discussed. Why does it exist? was the question before the guests. Well, the south of England is intellectual, academic, historic, highly socialized. It is rich in military, governmental, ambassadorial and titled life. The very scenery is far more lovely. The culture of the people, because of the more generally distributed wealth, is so much better. In the north of England the poor are very poor and contentious. The men of wealth are not historically wealthy or titled. In many cases they are “hard greedy upstarts like the irrepressible Americans,” one speaker remarked. They have no real culture or refinement. They manage to buy their way in from time to time, it is true, but that does not really count. They are essentially raw and brutal. Looking at these men breakfasting quietly, I could understand it exactly. Their hard, direct efficiency would but poorly adjust itself to the soft speculative intellectuality of the south. Yet we know that types go hand in hand in any country with a claim to greatness.
After my breakfast I struck out to see what I could see of the city. I also took a car to Salford, and another train to Stockport in order to gather as quick a picture of the Manchester neighborhood as I could. What I saw was commonplace enough. All of the larger cities of present-day Europe are virtually of modern construction. Most of them have grown to their present great population in the last fifty years. Hence they have been virtually built—not rebuilt—in that time.
Salford, a part of Manchester, was nothing—great cotton and machine works and warehouses. Stockport was not anything either, save long lines of brick cottages one and two stories high and mills, mills, mills, mills. It always astounds me how life repeats itself—any idea in life such as a design for a house—over and over and over. These houses in Salford, Stockport and Manchester proper were such as you might see anywhere in Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore—in the cheap streets. I had the sense of being pursued by a deadly commonplace. It all looked as people do when they think very little, know very little, see very little, do very little. I expected to learn that the churches flourished here very greatly and that there was an enormous Sunday school somewhere about. There was—at Stockport—the largest in the world I was told, five thousand students attending. The thing that impressed me most was the presence of the wooden clog or shoe.
In Stockport there was a drab silence hanging over everything—the pathetic dullness of the laborer when he has nothing to do save the one thing he cannot do—think. As it was a Sunday the streets were largely empty and silent—a dreary, narrow-minded, probably religious, conventional world which accepts this blank drabness as natural, ordered, probably even necessary. To the west and the south and the east and the north are great worlds of strangeness and wonder—new lands, new people—but these folks can neither see nor hear. Here they are harnessed to cotton-mills, believing no doubt that God intended it to be so, working from youth to age without ever an inkling of the fascinating ramifications of life. It appalled me.
In some respects I think I never saw so dreary a world as manufacturing England. In saying this I do not wish to indicate that the working conditions are any worse than those which prevail in various American cities, such as Pittsburgh, and especially the minor cities like Lawrence and Fall River. But here was a dark workaday world, quite unfavored by climate, a country in which damp and fogs prevail for fully three-fourths of the year, and where a pall of smoke is always present. I remember reading a sign on one of the railway platforms which stated that owing to the prevalence of fogs the company could not be held responsible for the running of trains on time. I noticed too, that the smoke and damp were so thick everywhere that occasionally the trees on the roadside or the houses over the way would disappear in a lovely, Corot-like mist. Lamps were burning in all stores and office-buildings. Street cars carried head-lamps and dawned upon you out of a hazy gloom. Traffic disappeared in a thick blanket a half block away.
Most of these outlying towns had populations ranging from ninety to a hundred thousand, but in so far as interesting or entertaining developments of civic life were concerned—proportioned to their size—there were none. They might as well have been villages of five hundred or one thousand. Houses, houses, houses, all of the same size, all the same color, all the same interior arrangement, virtually.
Everywhere—in Middleton, Oldham, and Rochdale, which I visited the first day, and in Boulton, Blackburn, and Wigan, which I visited the next—I found this curious multiplication of the same thing which you would dismiss with a glance—whole streets, areas, neighborhoods of which you could say, “all alike.”
In Middleton I was impressed with the constant repetition of “front rooms” or “parlors.” You could look in through scores of partly open doors (this climate is damp but not cold) and see in each a chest of drawers exactly like every other chest in the town and in the same position relative to the door. Nearly all the round tables which these front rooms contained were covered with pink, patterned, cotton tablecloths. The small single windows, one to each house, contained blue or yellow jardinières set on small tables and containing geraniums. The fireplace, always to the right of the room as you looked in the window, glowed with a small coal fire. There were no other ornaments that I saw. The ceilings of the rooms were exceedingly low and the total effect was one of clean, frugal living.
The great mills bore pleasing names, such as Rob Roy, Tabitha, Marietta, and their towering stacks looked down upon the humbler habitations at their base much as the famous castles of the feudal barons must have looked down upon the huts of their serfs. I was constrained to think of the workaday existence that all this suggested, the long lines of cotton-mill employees going in at seven o’clock in the morning, in the dark, and coming out at six o’clock at night, in the dark. Many of these mills employ a day and a night shift. Their windows, when agleam in the smoke or rain, are like patins of fine gold. I saw them gleaming at the end of dull streets or across the smooth, olive-colored surfaces of mill ponds or through the mist and rain. The few that were running (the majority of them were shut down because of the strike) had a roar like that of Niagara tumbling over its rocks—a rich, ominous thunder. In recent years the mill-owners have abandoned the old low, two-story type of building with its narrow windows and dingy aspect of gray stone, and erected in its stead these enormous structures—the only approach to the American sky-scraper I saw in England. They are magnificent mills, far superior to those you will see to-day in this country, clean, bright and—every one I saw—new. If I should rely upon my merely casual impression, I should say that there were a thousand such within twenty-five miles of Manchester. When seen across a foreground of low cottages, such as I have described, they have all the dignity of cathedrals—vast temples of labor. I was told by the American Consul-General at London that they are equipped with the very latest cotton-spinning machinery and are now in a position to hold their own on equal terms with American competition, if not utterly to defy it. The intricacy and efficiency of the machinery is greater than that employed in our mills. I could not help thinking what a far cry it was from these humble cottages, some few of which in odd corners looked like the simple, thatched huts sacred to Burns and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” to these lordly mills and the lordly owners behind them—the strong, able, ruthless men whom I saw eating in the breakfast-room at the Midland the day before. Think of the poor little girls and boys, principally girls, clattering to and from work in their wooden shoes and, if you will believe it (I saw it at Boulton on a cold, rainy, January day), in thin black shawls and white straw hats, much darkened by continuous wear. One crowd that I observed was pouring out at high noon. I heard a whistle yelling its information, and then a mouse-hole of a door in one corner of the great structure opened, and released the black stream of mill-workers. By comparison, it looked like a small procession of ants or a trickle of black water. Small as it was, however, it soon filled the street. The air was wet, smoky, gray, the windows even at this midday hour gleaming here and there with lights. The factory hands were a dreary mass in the rain, some of them carrying umbrellas, many without them, all the women wearing straw hats and black shawls!
I looked at their faces—pale, waxy, dull, inefficient. I looked at their shapeless skirts hanging like bags about their feet. I looked at their flat chests, their graceless hands, and then I thought of the strong men who know how to use—I hesitate to say exploit—inefficiency. What would these women do if they could not work in the mills? One thing I am sure of: the mills, whatever charges may be brought against their owners in regard to hours, insufficiency of payment, indifference of treatment, are nevertheless better places in which to spend one’s working hours than the cottages with their commonplace round of duties. What can one learn washing dishes and scrubbing floors in a cottage? I can see some one jumping up to exclaim: “What can one learn tying commonplace threads in a cotton mill, taking care of eight or nine machines—one lone woman? What has she time to learn?” This—if you ask me; the single thought of organization, if nothing more. The thought that there is such a thing as a great machine which can do the work of fifty or a hundred men. It will not do to say the average individual can learn this method working in a home. It is not true. What the race needs is ideas. It needs thoughts of life and injustice and justice and opportunity or the lack of it kicked into its senseless clay. It needs to be made to think by some rough process or other (gentleness won’t do it), and this is one way. I like labor-leaders. I like big, raw, crude, hungry men who are eager for gain—for self-glorification. I like to see them plotting to force such men as I saw breakfasting at the Midland to give them something—and the people beneath them. I am glad to think that the clay whose womankind wears black shawls and straw hats in January has sense enough at last to appoint these raw, angry fellows, who scheme and struggle and fight and show their teeth and call great bitter strikes, such as I saw here, and such as had shut tight so many of these huge solemn mills. It speaks much for the race. It speaks much for thinking, which is becoming more and more common. If this goes on, there won’t be so many women with drabbly skirts and flat chests. There will still be strong men and weak, but the conditions may not be so severe. Anyhow let us hope so, for it is an optimistic thought and it cheers one in the face of all the drab streets and the drab people. I have no hope of making millionaires of everybody, nor of establishing that futile abstraction, justice; but I do cherish the idea of seeing the world growing better and more interesting for everybody. And the ills which make for thinking are the only things which will bring this about.