Getting High Read Online Free Page B

acknowledged as the saviours of the country.
    Their first move was to sweep away the old feudal system. Under this arrangement a Lord would give his workers land to farm, dwellings to live in and a wage, which was swiftly returned to him through rent charges.
    In Manchester’s case, the ruling power was the Moseley family. Their power was supposedly absolute, but to the new Mancunian it was spurious. The Moseleys were perceived as weak masters, ditherers who had no firm grip or vision. Manchester had no municipal infrastructure and very little in the way of administrative organisation. It laid the way open for change. In other words, if you wanted to build a factory and you had the money, power and vision, then it was yours to build. No one could stand in your way.
    Unfettered by local laws or government, the new Mancunians zealously went to work, building huge factories and filling them with all the new machinery. They deliberately began a campaign to create a climate of enterprises, an ‘every man for himself’ ethos which rivalled Thatcherism in its brazen fanaticism.
    As a speaker put it at the Manchester Mechanics organisation, ‘Man must be the architect of his own fame.’ The message was clear: it was everyone for themselves.
    For many of the newly arrived Irish hand-loom weavers this was an unexpected development. By the time they had settled in, they literally had been displaced by machines and forced into factories. For these country dwellers who had fought and loved nature all their lives, it was hell on earth.
    First of all, their rural lifestyle hadn’t prepared them for city life. It was noted that many of them walked the streets barefooted, while their obvious Catholic fervour did little to impress their new Protestant neighbours. Furthermore, their willingness to accept such small wages (yet double their paypacket back home) intensely annoyed those organisations that had sprung up in an attempt to reform the city’s work conditions. For these concerned cabals, run by middle-class liberals, the factories symbolised all that was evil in this brave new world. It wasn’t hard to see why.
    Ugly, filthy and dangerous, these factories had no ventilation, no heat in the winter. The workers were forced to work nineteen hour shifts for wages of just four shillings a week. And most of that went on rent and food.
    Furthermore, their accommodation provided no respite from these conditions. The Irish squeezed into minute cottages, most of which had walls which were only one brick thick. In wintertime they huddled together against the biting winds that would howl through their small rooms and extinguish their fires. There was no ventilation and few sanitary amenities.
    The Irish and their children were being crushed and, by severe poverty and disease, sacrificed to the new Mancunian’s greed and inhumanity. Many children, some as young as seven years old, worked in factories; often they died before their years reached double figures. Many babies died through the administration of sleeping medicines, given to them by desperate mothers who simply didn’t have the time to tend to them. These mothers were forced into the factories and away from their babies’ side; the alternative meant they would all starve to death.
    Cholera festered in the water and indiscriminately struck down whole families. So too did the cyclical nature of capitalism, where a boom-time is always followed by a slump.
    As Manchester expanded, so it became a schizophrenic city with two strikingly different realities. The first was the one the businessmen were keen to promote: that is, Manchester as the world’s first industrialised city. Its fame was worldwide, and observers came from many continents to study this civic success. Unfortunately, often they returned home depressed and shocked by the second reality, the atrocious living conditions from which they couldn’t avert their eyes.
    Henry Coleman, a