68 ENGLISH SAGA

hovels housing three hundred and eighty people boasted not
even a single privy, the joint founder of modern Communism
obtained his famous view of the Irk from Ducie Bridge:

"The view from this bridge, mercifully concealed from
mortals of small stature by a parapet as high as a man, is
characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows,
or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-
smelling stream full of debris and refuse which it deposits
on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string
of the most disgusting, blackish-green," slime pools are left
standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles
of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench
unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above
the surface of the stream. ... It may be easily imagined,
therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. Below
the .bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse,
nidi, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here
each house is packed close behind its neighbour and a piece
of each is visible, all black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with
broken panes and window frames. . . . Here the background
embraces the pauper burial-ground, the station of the
Liverpool and Leeds Railway, and in the rear of this, the
Workhouse, the * Poor-Law Bastille * of Manchester, which,
like a citadel, looks threateningly down from behind its
high walls and parapets on the hilltop upon the working
people's quarter below."1

To comprehend the dual nature of early nineteenth century
Britain and the legacy of discontent and social division we still
inherit from its tragic dualism, this picture drawn by Engels
from Ducie Bridge must be set against Wordsworth's sonnet
written on its fellow English bridge at Westminster.

As Engels justly asked, how could people who were compelled
to live in such pigstyes, and who were dependent for their water
supply on this pestilential stream, live natural and human lives
or bring up their children as anything but savages? And what
kind of posterity was England, in her feverish search for wealth,
breeding to preserve and enjoy that wealth? It was a question
to which economists gave no answer.