Toil goes steadily on, and the working-folk
certainly have the advantage of starting in the bright morning hours,
before the air has become befouled; but, as the sun gains strength, and
the close air of the unlovely streets is heated, then the torment to be
endured is severe. In Oldham and many other Lancashire towns a most
admirable custom prevails. Large numbers of people club their money
during the year and establish a holiday-fund; they migrate wholesale in
the summertime, and have a merry holiday far away from the crush of the
pavements and the dreary lines of ugly houses. A wise and beneficent
custom is this, and the man who first devised it deserves a monument. I
congratulate the troops of toilers who share my own pleasure; but, alas,
how many honest folk in those awful Midland places will pant and sweat
and suffer amid grime and heat while the glad months are passing! Good
men who might be happy even in the free spaces of the Far West, fair
women who need only rest and pure air to enable them to bloom in beauty,
little children who peak and pine, are all crammed within the odious
precincts of the towns which Cobbett hated; and the merry stretches of
the sea, the billowy roll of the downs, the peace of soft days, are not
for them.
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