I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very
cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the
wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics
of the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps
the finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of
“the cotton-spinning chorus” which has sent its name so far. The cotton
is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood
of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our
Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills
of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my
luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one
or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief
stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start
up for the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and
I had to come away without mine.
I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great
Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I
asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there,
_there_ it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very
straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those
which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on
the planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not
my fault; and I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of
Manchester, was not running. I dare say I was not in the right hands,
but this was not for want of trying to get into them. In the local
delusion that it was then summer, those whose kindness might have
befriended the ignorance of the stranger were “away on their holidays”:
that was exactly the phrase.
When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne
to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important
scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of
Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is
very noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride
in seeing our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great
Britain at one end of the room, but these were the only things American
in the impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening
groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange
found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the
vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk
toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The
marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement
of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring (there
is no other phrase for it) tumult as rises from the mad but not malign
demons of that most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants,
alike staid, whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing
in a common type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three
o’clock, they were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even
then there was no uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied
shouting; but from the crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men,
there rose a sort of surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking
into a shriek of torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for
its commercial importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which
could offer itself to the eye in the whole world.
[Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL]
I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable
deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and
dedicated as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of
Manchester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to
them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are
not opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head
without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon
the Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the
cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of this gas was the least merit
of the beautiful old Chetham College, with its library dating from the
seventeenth century, and claiming to have been the first free library in
England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness
of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found
myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting
in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I
had come to Manchester for.
* * * * *