houses are equally bad, whether built on the Manchester side or in Ardwick, Chorlton, or Hulme.
But the most horrible spot (if I should describe all the separate spots in detail I should never come to the end) lies on the Manchester side, immediately southwest of Oxford Road, and is known as Little Ireland.
In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish.
The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys.
A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled in the worst court on the Irk.
The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.
This is the impression and the line of thought which the exterior of this district forces upon the beholder.
But what must one think when he hears that in each of these pens, containing at most two rooms, a garret and