was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either house. The
renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world than
mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear
to every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our
behalf during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing
anomalies of the British constitution, that the great city from
whose political fame these names are inseparable should have had
no representation in Parliament from Cromwell's time to
Victoria's. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, without
a member of Congress!

[Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER]

The "Manchester school" of political economy has long since
passed into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword
is a potent weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and
I am not myself so extreme a _laissez-faireist_ as to have
thought of that school with pathos in the city of its origin; but
I dare say it was a good thing in its time. We are only now
slowly learning how to apply the opposite social principles in
behalf of the Man rather than the Master, and we have not yet
surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the experiment. It
is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like this, any
sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population
suffers for the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small
majority, or a very powerful minority. Probably the most liberal
and intelligent populations of Great Britain are those of
Manchester and Birmingham, names which have stood for a hard and
sordid industrialism, unrelieved by noble sympathies and
impulses. It is quite possible that a less generous spirit than