Such are the various working-people’s quarters of Manchester as I had occasion to observe them personally during twenty months.  If we briefly formulate the result of our wanderings, we must admit that 350,000 working-people of Manchester and its environs live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages, that the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured by the contractor.  In a word, we must confess that in the working-men’s dwellings of Manchester, no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible; that in such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home.  And I am not alone in making this assertion.  We have seen that Dr. Kay gives precisely the same description; and, though it is superfluous, I quote further the words of a Liberal, {63} recognised and highly valued as an authority by the manufacturers, and a fanatical opponent of all independent movements of the workers: 

“As I passed through the dwellings of the mill hands in Irish Town, Ancoats, and Little Ireland, I was only amazed that it is possible to maintain a reasonable state of health in such homes.  These towns, for in extent and number of inhabitants they are towns, have been erected with the utmost disregard of everything except the immediate advantage of the speculating builder.  A carpenter and builder unite to buy a series of building sites (i.e., they lease them for a number of years), and cover them with so-called houses.  In one place we found a whole street following the course of a ditch, because in this way deeper cellars could be secured without the cost of digging, cellars not for storing wares or rubbish, but for dwellings for human beings. Not one house of this street escaped the cholera.  In general, the streets of these suburbs are unpaved, with a dung-heap or ditch in the middle; the houses are built back to back, without ventilation or drainage, and whole families are limited to a corner of a cellar or a garret.”  I have already referred to the unusual activity which the sanitary police manifested during the cholera visitation.  When the epidemic was approaching, a universal terror seized the bourgeoisie of the city.  People remembered the unwholesome dwellings of the poor, and trembled before the certainty that each of these slums would become a centre for the plague, whence it would spread desolation in all directions through the houses of the propertied class.  A Health Commission was appointed at once to investigate these districts, and report upon their condition to the Town Council.  Dr. Kay, himself a member of this Commission, who visited in person every separate police district except one, the eleventh, quotes extracts