Its murky air, ungainly factories and buildings generally, impress the stranger with its intensely practical spirit. The poetry of existence reveals itself in the cosy interiors and the charming outskirt residences. It has romance in its history and associations. Mancastra was a Roman camp in the reign of Titus. Under the Saxons and the later Normans it fashioned itself to the times just as it did to the magic wand of the nineteenth-century genius. It fought for the Parliament against the Royalists. For more than three centuries it led in woollen and, latterly, cotton manufactures. Its district is rich in coal-mines. The Bridgewater Canal dates from 1761, the principal one in the country. A greater, though apparently a less wise, because unprofitable, enterprise, has been the ship-canal. American cotton has always been unshipped at Liverpool, by which its brokers have greatly profited. To save tolls, delays and cost of rail transport, Manchester men made an imitation Suez Canal by deepening and adapting certain waterways, by which ships can pass into the new port of Manchester without troubling Liverpool. It may be hard to realize that Manchester can scarcely hope to become again the world’s cotton factory, seeing that she has not only taught other nations how to do her work, but has long been selling them her machinery and coal for that purpose. A momentous sign of the times is the rapid migration of her capital and brain to Japan and India, where operatives of sufficient skill are content with a mere fraction of the home-workers’ wage, and ocean transport is saved.
The sight-seer will be charmed by the noble city hall with its tall tower, its peal of twenty-one bells, and the public recitals on its great organ. Manchester possesses the oldest free library in the world, Chetham’s, with 40,000 rare old books ranged on the shelves in the old mansion rooms where some of them have reposed for nearly three hundred years. It also has the first of modern free libraries on the grand scale, opened in 1851, a gift from a citizen, greatly enlarged since. Its famous Free Trade Hall has echoed with the eloquence of the world’s famous men and women, in speech and song. Scarcely an American statesman or orator of note, being in England since 1856, but has been cheered by its audiences. The public meetings of all kinds in this hall have been among the most valuable educational influences of the half century. It was said by Lord Salisbury, many years before he became Premier, that “as Manchester thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow,” and it used to be true.
The traveller should try to be in Manchester in Whitsun Week, to see its most striking characteristic. It is the Sunday-school children’s gala time and all business is demoralized in their honor. On the Monday twenty or thirty thousand Church of England scholars march with bands to a service in the Cathedral, the whole town and country around crowding the streets. Tuesday is the only off-day. Every other one is a half-holiday for those who do not take whole ones. Each church gives its scholars picnics in parks or on local farms in the afternoons, and a whole day’s country outing on one day. Friday is the grown folks’ picnic day, and on Saturday the Total Abstainers’ parade. They are called Tee-totallers, because one of the founders, a Lancashire man, happened to stammer in a speech in trying to say total abstinence.
The Cathedral is not a great edifice, but has many remarkable fifteenth-century carvings and side chapels. It is affectionately known, in the local vernacular, as “t’owd church,” the old church. On Easter Mondays the villagers and working folk used to crowd in to be married, as many as two hundred couples being despatched at a blow, the same service answering for all simultaneously. The city may be proud of its Victoria University, the development of Owen’s College, founded in 1847. Of its many famous characters, the names of De Quincey and Harrison Ainsworth are perhaps the best known in literature.
Liverpool is thirty-six miles from Manchester and three from the sea. Its first charter was granted in 1229 and it sent two members to Parliament in 1296, yet its population until the seventeenth century was only about one thousand. It has the distinction of having made the first dock, penning up with flood-gates sufficient water to keep ships afloat between the fall and rise of tides. This was built in 1709. It is unkind, though true, to record that Liverpool’s first fortune was made in the slave-trade. Its ships went to the west coast of Africa and took in cargoes of natives whom they then transported to the West Indies as slaves, being paid for by cargoes of sugar and rum, brought home to Liverpool. This traffic began about 1720. It was suppressed by Parliament in 1807, the number of ships then engaged in it being 185, carrying over forty thousand slaves annually. A good deal of privateering was carried on during the eighteenth-century wars, an echo of which survived until the American Civil War of 1861-65.
Liverpool has many unique features of interest. It has not many manufactures, and only four or five ship-building establishments, for reasons which will appear in the pages on Glasgow. Its commercial growth has been extraordinary. In 1800 the population was under 78,000; in 1900 it was about 750,000. In the first-named year the tonnage of its ships was 450,000, and is now nearly 10,000,000. Its commerce is chiefly with America. A magnificent sight is its endless array of docks, stretching along both shores of the Mersey in a line, measured continuously, of over thirty miles. Many a stately procession of great ships glides up the spacious river, laden with precious cargoes not to be estimated by statistics. Over fifty thousand Americans, it is said, visit England each summer, entering by this majestic water-gate. Who shall tell the influence of this mingling of kindred peoples, the moral and national worth of all they bring and all they take?
It is a new city, as towns go in the old country, with few visible marks of its history. The public buildings are not specially imposing, but St. George’s Hall stands on a commanding site and in exterior and interior holds its own with the best civic temples, in spaciousness and grace. The great public library near by does honor to the city and to its donor. The art gallery is remarkable for its construction, as for its exhibits. It has a circular floor of one hundred feet in diameter without columns or any intermediate support, and beneath it is an amphitheatre, used for lectures, with its benches hewn out of the solid rock.
To ferry across the river to Birkenhead and Bootle, and down to New Brighton and other popular resorts, is an excellent way to appreciate the greatness of this famous port. As a city it has little charm, except in its surroundings.
All the excitements of the transatlantic voyage may be had in miniature (except the mal de mer) in crossing the lively channel to Dublin. The metropolis of Ireland must not be judged by commercial and cosmopolitan standards.