DARK SATANIC MILLS 67

and extent of their growth which made them seem terrible to
contemporaries. There had always been filthy slums in the
small, semi-rural cities of the older England; nobody had dreamt
of regulating them. Nor was sanitary carelessness confined to the
poor of the new towns. Even at royal Windsor the footmen in
the pantry suffered perpetually from sore throats until 1844
when more than fifty unemptied cesspits were discovered under
the castle. A people still rustic regarded bad drains as a joke
in the same category as high cheese and "old grouse in gunroom,"
and even welcomed^ their stench as a useful warning of bad
weather. But those *of the better-to-do classes who had to pass
through the new factory towns found the nuisance there beyond
a joke. It had become, as Disraeli later reminded the House of
Commons, not a matter of sewerage but a question of life and
death.

In Little Ireland, Ancoats, Engels, seeking material for his
great work on the proletariat of south Lancashire, described the
standing pools, full of refuse, offal and sickening filth, that
poisoned the atmosphere of the densely populated valley of the
Medlock. Here "a horde of ragged women and children swarm
about, as filthy as the "swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps
and in the puddles. , » . The race that lives in these ruinous
cottages behind broken windows mended with oilskin, sprung
doors and rotten door-posts, or in dark wet cellars in measureless
filth and stench . , , must really have reached the lowest stage
of humanity. ... In each of these pens, containing at most
two rooms, a garret and perhaps a cellar, on the average twenty
human beings live. . . . For each one hundred and twenty
persons, one usually inaccessible privy is provided; and in spite
of all the preachings of the physicians, in spite of the excitement
into which the cholera epidemic plunged the sanitary police by
reason of the condition of Little Ireland, in spite of everything, in
this year of grace, 1844, ^ k ^n almost the same state as in i83i.5>1

But Engels encountered worse. Groping along the maze
of narrow covered passages that led from the streets of the
old town of Manchester into the yards and alleys that lined the
south bank of the Irk, he found a courtyard at whose entrance
there stood a doorless privy so dirty that the inhabitants could
only pass in and out of the court by wading through stagnant
pools of excrement In this district, where one group of thirty