all men, but the price you have paid for them is obvious to many--
surely to yourselves most of all: I do not say that they are not
worth the price; I know that England and the world could very ill
afford to exchange the Birmingham of to-day for the Birmingham of
the year 1700: but surely if what you have gained be more than a
mockery, you cannot stop at those gains, or even go on always piling
up similar ones. Nothing can make me believe that the present
condition of your Black Country yonder is an unchangeable necessity
of your life and position: such miseries as this were begun and
carried on in pure thoughtlessness, and a hundredth part of the
energy that was spent in creating them would get rid of them: I do
think if we were not all of us too prone to acquiesce in the base
byword 'after me the deluge,' it would soon be something more than
an idle dream to hope that your pleasant midland hills and fields
might begin to become pleasant again in some way or other, even
without depopulating them; or that those once lovely valleys of
Yorkshire in the 'heavy woollen district,' with their sweeping hill-
sides and noble rivers, should not need the stroke of ruin to make
them once more delightful abodes of men, instead of the dog-holes
that the Century of Commerce has made them.

Well, people will not take the trouble or spend the money necessary
to beginning this sort of reforms, because they do not feel the
evils they live amongst, because they have degraded themselves into
something less than men; they are unmanly because they have ceased
to have their due share of art.

For again I say that therein rich people have defrauded themselves
as well as the poor: you will see a refined and highly educated man
nowadays, who has been to Italy and Egypt, and where not, who can