Those who doubt this will do well to investigate working-class opinions for themselves, not at election time, and in such a familiar manner as to get at the truth without compliments.  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.  There are firms in Manchester which hold an interest in woollen, silk, and linen manufactures in all parts of the kingdom and even of the continent.

From a pamphlet published last year by the Rev. Mr. Baker, it appears that there are five hundred and fifty cotton manufactories of one kind or other in the cotton district of Lancashire and Cheshire.  Of these, in Ashton-under-Lyne, Dukinfield, and Mosley, there are fifty-three mills, Blackburn fifty-seven, Bolton forty-two, Burnley twenty-five spinning manufactories, at Heywood twenty-eight mills, Oldham one hundred and fifty-eight, Preston thirty-eight, Staley Bridge twenty, Stockport forty-seven mills, Warrington only four, Manchester seventy-eight.

The following is a brief outline of the stages of cotton manufacture which may be useful to those who consider the question for the first time.