SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



powers to buy out the owners of these slums, and to destroy them as fast as 

 was consistent with rehousing their tenants elsewhere/" 



The second half and the last decade of the nineteenth century in 

 particular saw the development of a new elemental force of which the 

 potentialities and possible applications are still unknown and almost incalcu- 

 lable. The recent and present use of electricity for traction and driving power 

 promises to revolutionize all existing systems and opens out an almost in- 

 conceivable future for Lancashire, not merely in swiftness, absence of noise, 

 and cleanliness of working, but in the removal of the atmospheric impurities 

 resulting in the use of carbon fuel. Already the experiment is being tried of 

 establishing generating stations for supplying electricity to works situated 

 miles away. Mills are already run by electric power, and have long been 

 lighted by this luminant. 



Before the century closed the wheel of mechanical invention and of 

 trade enterprise in Lancashire had come full circle. The same endeavours 

 to obtain a perfected driving power, the most direct shipment of the raw 

 material and the cheapest methods of distribution, which were conspicuously 

 agitated at the close of the eighteenth century, were once more to the front 

 a hundred years later. The spirit of mediaeval monopoly and of inter- 

 municipal jealousy which were thought to have passed with the Dark Ages 

 that gave them birth, sprang into life again, and appeared in the guise of 

 corporate despotism, railway monoply, and town rivalry. Manchester 

 commerce was greatly hampered by excessive railway freight charges between 

 the coast and the inland manufacturing centres. It lay too much at the 

 mercy of Liverpool, or at least thought so. What between dock dues and 

 railway rates the cost of raw material became so enhanced that with the 

 prevailing conditions of home and foreign competition the looked-for profit 

 on its manipulation was much reduced. How to obtain the necessary raw 

 material more cheaply, more abundantly, and more directly, was the problem 

 agitating the mind of Manchester in the eighties and nineties.*^* 



With the characteristic determination which had already raised their 

 city to eminence in the county, the people decided to solve the problem of 

 transit by cutting a deep sea and ship canal from their city to the coast, by 

 which Manchester was to be connected with the ocean, and Atlantic steamers 

 were to unload their cotton-bales and other goods directly upon the 

 Manchester wharves, without the necessity of an intermediate railway 

 transport. The scheme, which was an amazingly daring one, was initiated in 

 December, 1893, wholly by private enterprise, though eventually the 

 Manchester Corporation came to the help of the embarrassed shareholders. 

 The scheme, though a popular one with the masses, seems to have roused the 

 powerful antagonism of the merchant aristocracy of Manchester, many of 

 whom were, it appears, committed to the support of steamship lines sailing 

 from Liverpool. The railway shareholders naturally opposed the scheme 



"'Her Majesty's Commissioners' First Rep. on the Housing of the Working Classes, 1885, Liverpool, par. 

 13336-99, etc. (see Index, Liverpool). 



*'* Cf. a paper read by Mr. W. H. Hunter, chief engineer of the Ship Canal, before the Manchester 

 Association of Engineers on Harbours, Docks and their Equipment, Saturday, 24 March, 1 906 : — ' When 

 prices had to be cut owing to fierce and strenuous competition and when even with cut rates the trade 

 was found to be declining in the inland districts, the demand for cheaper carriage led to the inevitable 

 suggestion that ... it was possible and desirable to provide the dock accommodation where the works 

 and mills were situated, and where the population to be fed had its domicile and place of occupation.' 



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