INHABITANTS. 



35 



have arisen where formerly there stood only agricultural villao-es and walled 

 burghs : a manufacturing district of wide extent in the north serves as a counter- 

 poise to the agricultural region of Southern England. Birmingham, Sheffield 

 Manchester, Leeds, and all the rising towns around them, are of spontaneous 

 growth, and not the creations of an all-directing capital. They lead their own life 

 and each of them has become a centre of thought, independent of London. The 

 great industrial movement of our age has originated in these towns, and spread 

 thence over Europe and the whole world. We owe to them the application of new 

 processes of manufacture and the improvements of machinery, for the factories of 

 Lancashire and Yorkshire have served as patterns to similar establishments in other 

 parts of the world. English hydraulic engineers, who were content formerly to 

 follow in the wake of their Dutch colleagues, have struck out paths of their own, 



Fig. 18. — The British Colonies. 





i,3pe i^ol' , ,. 



C.-iClStrs/isS. 



and we have seen that even in the Netherlands there exist now large works of 

 canalisation which they have carried out. 



In the manufacturing districts of Great Britain smoke mingles so largely with 

 the atmosphere as to have wholly changed the aspect of nature. There are 

 towns where the heavens are permanently obscured by smoke, where the houses, 

 including even public buildings, most sumptuously furnished in the interior, are 

 covered with soot, and a shower of "blacks" is for ever descending upon the 

 trees and lawns. The factories have thus, as it were, changed the climate ; but their 

 influence upon the social condition of the people has been even greater. They 

 have, more than any other agency of contemporaneous civilisation, influenced the 

 mode of life of the people, and laid the seeds of a great revolution. England, before 

 all other nations, found itself face to face with the formidable problem presented 

 by the modern proletariate. It is there that the great masses are involved m the 



