Here I have listened to sermons—​voices from beyond—​more eloquent in their wisdom than many preached in latter-day pulpits. Sitting in peace and at rest in this beautiful building, the dim ripple of the outer traffic just reaching my ear, I have often wondered whether all Manchester might not be builded and furnished in the same spirit of honour and worthiness. And being faintly imbued with the Manchester spirit myself, there are times when I believe that this will really be so. For my eyes refuse to see, even in nightmares, a picture of Manchester in ruins, with tourists tracking over the desert on hired camels to visit the remains of the Town Hall with its battered frescoes, and the shell of the Rylands Library, sole relics of a vanished city.

My dreams and imagery are far otherwise, and I hold with the poet that eidolons are the entities of entities. And if I have ever appeared to the good librarians in Deansgate to have had my eyes closed in ecclesiastical slumber, it was not really so. I was seeing visions, dreaming dreams, or more truly perhaps, I had impelled my spirit into the future and had left my body, umbrella-wise, hypothecated in the safe keeping of the library officials. For in this method I have many times visited Manchester several hundred years hence, and my difficulty has always been to find the Rylands Library, or even the Town Hall, so many noble buildings of even finer proportions stood among the lawns and gardens and fountains of the city. And I had rather see visions of a New Manchester than a New Jerusalem.

I know no prettier dream, if it be one, than to sail from Eastham up the pure waters of a wider canal and see the country folk resting after their day’s work in the dainty cabarets along the shores, and as the last lock gates close behind you and you swing into the great lagoon to the south of the city, the setting sun crimsons the clean stone and marble warehouses of a noble city. For this I can prophesy—​it is information, not a tip—​that if there is to be a Manchester at all some hundreds of years hence it will be a city without smoke, its people will be healthy and handsome, its Pharisees will be fewer, and all will breathe pure air and walk clean streets, and when a citizen’s day’s work is done he will be found angling for a trout in the church pool with a better chance of success than he would have to-day.

But these futures depend on the good Genie of Manchester winning the battles of to-day. For when energy, freedom, and the power to do things depart from Manchester she will become “as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water.”

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