a channel for the canal could have made a wall round the globe 6 feet high and 2 feet thick, and that enough bricks were used to make a causeway 6 feet wide from one end of the kingdom to the other. Another point we have to remember is that but for improved machinery and the use of steam and of powerful explosives, the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal in all its parts, instead of being accomplished in seven years, could hardly have been finished in half a century. [Illustration: MANCHESTER, FROM THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, SHOWING THE CATHEDRAL, THE EXCHANGE, THE TOWN HALL, ETC.] There are political as well as industrial features that cannot be overlooked in any reference to the great seat of the cotton trade. A statue of Cromwell in Victoria Street, standing on a rugged block of granite, may be taken as a memorial of the strong stand Manchester made for the Parliament in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. It was in Manchester that the first blow in that struggle is said to have been struck. Curiously enough, however, Manchester, in a moment of impulse, declared for the Stuarts in the rising a century later. Its inhabitants not only welcomed Prince Charlie in his march to the South, but went so far as to proclaim him king. They changed their minds, however, almost as quickly as they had made them up; and the Prince and his adherents received but scant courtesy from the Manchester folk some two weeks later while retreating northward. Agitation for Parliamentary reform ran to fever heat in Manchester almost from the inception of that movement, and had one lamentable incident--a charge by yeomanry at a mass meeting in St. Peter's Field in 1819, when several persons were killed. While deplorable in itself, this event, which has passed into history as the "Peterloo massacre," was not without potent influence in bringing in that better era for which the people of Manchester, in common with the inhabitants of other large towns, were clamouring. Where that memorable mass meeting took place now stands the Free Trade Hall--a suggestive reminder of the fact that in Manchester the Corn Law League, with Mr. Cobden, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Milner Gibson as leading spirits, had its headquarters. In 1832 Manchester obtained the right to send two members to Parliament, Salford getting one member. By the Reform Bill of 1867 both boroughs got an additional representative; and when, in 1885, the great towns were cut up into divisions, Manchester had its Parliamentary strength increased to six members, and Salford to three.