Leeds occupies not more than five yards square of land, and usually
consists of a cellar, a living room, and one sleeping-room. These
contracted dwellings, filled day and night with human beings, are another
point dangerous alike to the morals and the health of the inhabitants."
And how greatly these cottages are crowded, the Report on the Health of
the Working-Classes, quoted above, bears testimony: "In Leeds we found
brothers and sisters, and lodgers of both sexes, sharing the parents'
sleeping-room, whence arise consequences at the contemplation of which
human feeling shudders."

So, too, Bradford, which, but seven miles from Leeds at the junction of
several valleys, lies upon the banks of a small, coal-black,
foul-smelling stream. On week-days the town is enveloped in a grey cloud
of coal smoke, but on a fine Sunday it offers a superb picture, when
viewed from the surrounding heights. Yet within reigns the same filth
and discomfort as in Leeds. The older portions of the town are built
upon steep hillsides, and are narrow and irregular. In the lanes,
alleys, and courts lie filth and _debris_ in heaps; the houses are
ruinous, dirty, and miserable, and in the immediate vicinity of the river
and the valley bottom I found many a one, whose ground-floor, half-buried
in the hillside, was totally abandoned. In general, the portions of the
valley bottom in which working-men's cottages have crowded between the
tall factories, are among the worst built and dirtiest districts of the
whole town. In the newer portions of this, as of every other factory
town, the cottages are more regular, being built in rows, but they share
here, too, all the evils incident to the customary method of providing
working-men's dwellings, evils of which we shall have occasions to speak
more particularly in discussing Manchester. The same is true of the
remaining towns of the West Riding, especially of Barnsley, Halifax and
Huddersfield. The last named, the handsomest by far of all the factory