Industrialization in Manchester DBQ

A place more destitute than Manchester is not easy to conceive. In size and population it is the second city of the kingdom. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke: frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness, where you hear from within, the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call the wretches to their work instead of their prayers.

Diseases caused or aggravated by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings, prevail among the laboring classes. The annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation is greater than the loss from death or wounds in modern wars. The exposed population is less susceptible to moral influences, and the effects of education are more temporary than with a healthy population. These circumstances tend to produce an adult population short-lived, reckless, and intemperate, and with habits of sensual gratification.

Unless you have visited the manufacturing towns and seen the workers of Manchester, you cannot appreciate the physical suffering and moral degradation of this class of the population. Most workers lack clothing, bed, furniture, fuel, wholesome food—even potatoes! They spend from twelve to fourteen hours each day shut up in low-ceilinged rooms where with every breath of foul air they absorb fibers of cotton, wool or flax, or particles of copper, lead or iron. They live suspended between an insufficiency of food and an excess of strong drink; they are all wizened, sickly and emaciated, their bodies thin and frail, their limbs feeble, their complexions pale, their eyes dead. If you visit a factory, it is easy to see that the comfort and welfare of the workers have never entered the builder’s head. O God! Can progress be bought only at the cost of men’s lives?

People live longer because they are better fed, better lodged, better clothed, and better attended in sickness, and these improvements are owing to the increase in national wealth which the manufacturing system has produced. Mr. [Robert] Southey has found a way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufactures and agriculture may be compared. And what is this way? To stand on a hill, to look at a cottage and a factory, and to see which is prettier. Does Mr. Southey think that the English peasantry live, or ever lived, in substantial and ornamented cottages, with box-hedges, flower-gardens, beehives, and orchards?

Shouting “No Corn Laws,”*

The vast Manchester crowd was the lowest order of artisans and mechanics, among whom a dangerous spirit of discontent with the Government prevailed. Groans and hisses greeted the carriage, full of influential personages, in which the Prime Minister sat. High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling faces a loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-looking weaver, evidently set there as a representative man, to protest against the triumphs of machinery and the gain and glory which wealthy Liverpool and Manchester men were likely to derive from it.

*The Corn Laws were tariffs on imported grain.

Perhaps no part of England, not even London, presents such remarkable and attractive features as Manchester, the Workshop of the World. It is to the energetic exertions and enterprising spirit of its population that Manchester is mainly indebted to its elevation as a seat of commerce and manufacture, which it has recently attained and for which it is distinguished beyond any other town in the British Dominions or indeed the world. There is scarcely a country on the face of the habitable globe into which the fruits of its industry have not penetrated.