It is obvious that an official who discharged these duties efficiently would be very valuable; and the Royal Commission, which enquired into Civil Service organisation, proposed[46] to assist him by relieving him of his “small” district work; (SMALL, they said!). So far from following this suggestion, the Board have steadily increased the local work by enlarging the areas and diminishing the subordinate staff; so that in my last half year, when the district population had increased to 880,000, though I had a splendid staff in number and in efficiency, I found my time and energies entirely absorbed by local claims. Fortunately, the Division could boast an admirable body of District Inspectors, and appeals and enquiries were exceedingly rare. I gave myself up to Manchester and Salford. Hitherto I had regarded Manchester as the place where one changed trains if one wanted to go from Chester to York. The London and North Western thoughtfully arranges an interval of an hour or more, and there is time to stroll into the town. There is a river more gloomy than the Styx, more foul than the Pegnitz of Nuremberg, or a back canal of Venice at low water. Beyond that is a cathedral, smoke-begrimed outside, filled with an impenetrable gloom inside. Beyond the cathedral I had never ventured, for it usually rains, and there is an oft recurrent fog. In this town I was to spend four years, if I survived. When you have realised the rain and the fog, and the smoke, you begin to grasp the ceaseless uproar of traffic. There are electric trams screaming, and whirring, and clanging, and crashing. There are lorries, chiefly laden with mineral-water bottles, which make a specially irritating rattle, and jar. There are drays groaning under the weight of huge bales of calico. And everywhere there is stone pavement; granite setts, that multiply, and intensify the clanging and crashing and groaning. And this granite paving is not confined to the main thoroughfares, where the wear and tear of traffic might almost justify a poverty-stricken corporation in its selection; might at least reduce the charge of sleep-murder to culpable somnicide: it extends over the whole town. A few, a very few favoured spots have a short stretch of wooden pavement: everywhere else, even in the most remote side street of a back quarter, there is granite. This does not strike a Manchester man as being objectionable. How could it do so? When the Romans built Mancunium they laid down a stone-paved road, and the roads in Manchester have ever since been stone-paved, and what Manchester has always done is right. They even build schools on the edges of these “stony griefs”; and while I was there, I used to watch day by day the gradual rise of an enormous hospital bounded by one of the noisiest of main thoroughfares. That was not my business, but the schools were my business, and I never ceased to protest against the tortures inflicted on teachers and children in those places.