Those who desire to pursue closely the state of the operative population in Manchester, will find ample materials in the annual reports of factory inspectors, and school inspectors, under the Committee of the Council of Education, and of the municipal officers of health.

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Fires.—­Dreadful fires occur occasionally in Manchester.  If such a catastrophe should take place during the stay of a visitor, he should immediately pull on an overcoat, even although it be midnight, and join in the crowd.  An excellent police of 300 officers and men renders the streets quite safe at all hours; and a fire of an old cotton factory, where the floors are saturated with oil and grease, is indeed a fearfully imposing sight.  It also affords an opportunity of some familiar conversation with the factory hands.

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In taking leave of Manchester, which is indeed the great heart of our manufacturing system, we may truly say that it is a city to be visited with the deepest interest, and quitted without the slightest regret.  On our political railroad we are under deepest obligations to the Manchester stokers; but Heaven forbid that we should be compelled to make them our sole engineers.

THE ROAD TO YORKSHIRE.

Middleton.—­And now, before taking a glance at the woollens and hardware of Yorkshire, we suggest, by way of change from the perpetual hum of busy multitudes and the whizzing and roaring of machinery, that the traveller take a holiday, and spend it in wandering over an agricultural oasis encircled by hills, and so far uninvaded by the stalks of steam-engines, where the air is comparatively pure and the grass green, although forest trees do not flourish.

The visit requires no distant journey.  It is a bare six miles from the heart of Manchester to Middleton.  Nine times a-day omnibuses ply there.  These original, if not primitive vehicles, are constructed to carry forty-five passengers, and on crowded market-days may sometimes be seen loaded with seventy specimens of a note-worthy class.

Middleton, lately a dirty straggling town, of 15,000 inhabitants, a number at which it has remained stationary for ten years, built without plan, without drains, without pavement, without arrangements for common decency, stands on the borders, and was the manorial village, of the Middleton and Thornham estates, which had been in the family of the late Lord Suffield for many hundred years.  In the village, land was grudgingly leased for building, and no steam-engine manufactories were permitted.  The agricultural portion of some 2500 acres of good land for pasturage and root crops, celebrated for its fine supplies of water and for its (unused) water-power, was divided into little farms of from twenty to seventy acres, very few exceeding fifty acres, inhabited by a race of Farmer-Weavers, who, from generation to generation, farmed badly and wove cleanly in the pure atmosphere of Middleton.  They were, most of them, bound to keep a hound at walk for the Lord of the Manor.