It was an inhabitant of some town jealous of Manchester—and there are plenty of them—who declared that a Manchester man, viewing Nelson’s bloodstained coat and waistcoat at Greenwich Hospital, would feel little patriotic emotion. He wonders first what cloth they were made of. It is a cruel saying, but it has at least this foundation: that Little Englandism and the old Manchester School of politics were one. _Were_ one, for the Manchester School of Bright and Cobden is dead and its corpse dishonoured. It is true that what looked like a mental aberration overtook Manchester and the country in general at the election of 1906, but that was, here at any rate, not so much political conviction as your straightforward, forthright Lancashire man’s indignation at the want of honesty, the pitiful pettifogging, that characterised the Balfour Administration. There was, moreover, a feeling that the country had not been fairly treated in 1903, when Lord Salisbury resigned his office into the hands of his nephew. The policy of “keeping it in the family,” as though the governance of the country were a prerogative of the Cecil family, was very rightly resented, even to Manchester’s overwhelming rejection of the chief pettifogger himself. VII Ten millions of people inhabit the manufacturing districts of which Manchester is the centre. It is at once the wealthiest and the poorest district in England, where wealth has an increasing tendency to accumulate in the hands of the few, and where, according to official returns, there are, at the other extreme, more paupers than anywhere else in the land, with the single exception of Middlesex, including London. The inevitable reverse to the medal of great commercial prosperity is wretched poverty existing side by side with it. It is only in poor agricultural, non-manufacturing countries that poverty is comparatively happy and endurable. If there is a remedy for such a state of things in the industrial centres, no one has yet found or applied it. There is always a large proportion here of the classes it has become the fashion to style “submerged,” and in times when prosperity wanes it increases so as to include most of the wage-earners, and to bring the smaller shopkeepers to the verge of ruin. Many of these periods of depression have been beyond human power to foresee or to avert, but others have been induced by the action of the manufacturers, in competition with one another. But in almost every instance of hard times the nearest remedy has been sought, on one side, or the other, in the strike or the lock-out. Lancashire is the home of these crude remedies. [Sidenote: _OVER-PRODUCTION_]