In Stockport there was a drab silence hanging over everything--the pathetic dullness of the laborer when he has nothing to do save the one thing he cannot do--think. As it was a Sunday the streets were largely empty and silent--a dreary, narrow-minded, probably religious, conventional world which accepts this blank drabness as natural, ordered, probably even necessary. To the west and the south and the east and the north are great worlds of strangeness and wonder--new lands, new people--but these folks can neither see nor hear. Here they are harnessed to cotton-mills, believing no doubt that God intended it to be so, working from youth to age without ever an inkling of the fascinating ramifications of life. It appalled me. In some respects I think I never saw so dreary a world as manufacturing England. In saying this I do not wish to indicate that the working conditions are any worse than those which prevail in various American cities, such as Pittsburgh, and especially the minor cities like Lawrence and Fall River. But here was a dark workaday world, quite unfavored by climate, a country in which damp and fogs prevail for fully three-fourths of the year, and where a pall of smoke is always present. I remember reading a sign on one of the railway platforms which stated that owing to the prevalence of fogs the company could not be held responsible for the running of trains on time. I noticed too, that the smoke and damp were so thick everywhere that occasionally the trees on the roadside or the houses over the way would disappear in a lovely, Corot-like mist. Lamps were burning in all stores and office-buildings. Street cars carried head-lamps and dawned upon you out of a hazy gloom. Traffic disappeared in a thick blanket a half block away. Most of these outlying towns had populations ranging from ninety to a hundred thousand, but in so far as interesting or entertaining developments of civic life were concerned--proportioned to their size--there were none. They might as well have been villages of five hundred or one thousand. Houses, houses, houses, all of the same size, all the same color, all the same interior arrangement, virtually. Everywhere--in Middleton, Oldham, and Rochdale, which I visited the first day, and in Boulton, Blackburn, and Wigan, which I visited the next--I found this curious multiplication of the same thing which you would dismiss with a glance--whole streets, areas, neighborhoods of which you could say, “all alike.”