101 
ART IN THE MANUFACTURING DISTRICTS. 
By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. March 27th, 1877. 
The silent course of change has been going forward in our time 
more rapidly, perhaps, than in the time of our fathers, certainly 
much more rapidly than in the time of our grandfathers. You 
know better than I can tell you the nature of the change that 
has long been going on in the manufacturing districts. Quiet 
country places that were little better than sleepy villages have 
become active and populous communities like so many minor Man- 
chesters. They are not generally pleasant places to look at, and 
strangers always wonder how anybody can live in them. But 
the inhabitants find ample compensations in the interests of 
business life, or in the maintenance of old habits, old friendships, 
and associations. Then as these towns increase in wealth and 
population, they also gradually become centres of intelligence. 
In a very small place a man of any high intellectual culture is 
miserably isolated, but in a large town he finds opportunities for 
intercourse with men as well informed as himself, so that the 
painful sense of isolation is removed, and his mind becomes 
heaithier and happier by intercourse with his intellectual equals. 
The necessity for such intereourse is the cause which always 
inevitably produces such societies as yours in towns of any con- 
siderable importance, at least in all the intelligent countries of 
Europe and America. The good done by such literary and 
scientific clubs is that they make life better worth having. 
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay !—which 
being interpreted into plain prose may be expressed as follows. 
It is better to live a moderate number of years in an intelligent 
place than any length of time in a stupid one. People may ask 
what is the use of knowledge. Few ask that question in these 
days, but some do, and others who do not ask it openly show 
their perfect indifference to mental culture by all the habits of 
their lives. The answer to such a question or to such indifference 
is easy, and may be made plain to anyone. We cannot think 
rightly and justly about anything in the world without having 
sound and accurate knowledge about that particular thing, and 
we may always assume that it is desirable to think justly if we 
think at all. Now in many situations of life knowledge of certain 
kinds is not necessary simply because in those situations men 
are not called upon to think of the things to which knowledge of 
those kinds refers. In a very simple state of society knowledge 
itself is simple and limited. A savage knows that boiling water 
produces steam, but it is not necessary that he should have any 
scientific knowledge of the expansive force of steam, In modern 
