DARK    SATANIC    MILLS	65
on the least expensive and therefore most congested model
attainable. Unrestrained individualism was the order of the day.
Since the rate of profits was not affected if their inhabitants
died prematurely no consideration was paid to matters of sanita-
tion and health. The dwellings which housed the factory
population were run up by small-jerry builders and local car-
penters, who like the millowners were out for the maximum of
profit with the minimum of responsibility. They were erected
back to back and on the cheapest available site, in many cases
marshes. There was no Ventilation and no drainage. The
intervals between the houses which passed for streets were
unpaved and often followed the line of streams serving a conduit
for excrement.
The appearance of such towns was dark and forbidding.
Many years had now passed since the first factories appeared
among the northern hills. Now the tall chimneys and gaunt
mills had been multiplied a hundredfold, and armies of grimy,
grey-sfated houses had encamped around them. Overhead hung
a perpetual pall of smoke so that their inhabitants groped to
their work as in a fog. There were no parks or trees: nothing
to remind men of the green fields from which they came or to
break the squalid monotony of the houses and factories. From
the open drains and ditches that flowed beneath the shade of
sulphurous chimneys and between pestilential hovels arose a
foetid smell. The only symbols of normal human society were
the giijshops. Here on the rare days of leisure the entire popula-
tion vftmld repair, men, women and children, to suck themselves
into insemibility on "Cream of the Valley" or Godfrey's Cordial.
In a • terrible passage in one of his novels of the 'forties,
Disraeli'described such a town. "Wodgate had the appearance
of a vast squalid suburb. As you advanced, leaving behind you
long lines of little dingy tenements, with infants lying about
the r8Sd, you expected every moment to emerge into some
streets^"aSid encounter buildings bearing some correspondence,
in theiinstee and comfort, to the considerable population swarm-
ing atfS busied around you. Nothing of the kind. JThere were
no public buildings of any sort; no churches, chapels, town-hall,
institute, theatre; and the principal streets in the heart of the
towifin whidTVere.situated the coarse and grimy shops . . .
were*^>egually7 narrow, and if possible more dirty. At every
fourth/ dr^fifth house, alleys seldom above a yard wide, and