Bradshaw tells us that we can get from Littleborough to Manchester in 11 hours—­via Rochdale, Heywood, and Millshill—­but it is not clear how we are to get to Littleborough.  So we follow an alternative route, the canal.  It is a fashionable method of transit for mineral traffic and paupers.  Mr. Muggeridge, the emigration agent, tells us how he transported the southern paupers in 1836.  ’The journey from London to Manchester was made by boat or waggon, the agents assisting the emigrants on their journey.’[37] When we got up our geography for the tour out of Thomas Dugdale’s ‘England and Wales’ this is what we read at every turn:  ’Keighley:  in the deep valley of the Aire, its prosperity had been much increased by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal which passes within two miles.’  ’Skipton:  in a rough mountainous district.  The trade has been greatly facilitated by the proximity of the town to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.’  So the Leeds and Liverpool canal shall be our guide.

We leave Bradford, Halifax, and the worsted districts to the left of us, and passing by Shipley, approach the cotton district near the Lancashire border.  ’The township of Shipley is the western-most locality of the Leeds clothing districts; it runs like a tongue into the worsted district.  In like manner the worsted district blends with the cotton district at Steeton, Silsden, and Addingham.’  We are passing, the Commissioner tells us, from high wages to low.  ’The cloth weavers of Shipley work for wages little, if any, higher than those of the worsted weavers; while the worsted weavers north-west of Keighley are reduced down to the cotton standard.’[38]

At Keighley we bend sharply south and soon reach Colne in Lancashire.  Dr. Cook Taylor describes the conditions there in the early part of 1842: 

’I visited eighty-eight dwellings, selected at hazard.  They were destitute of furniture save old boxes for tables or stalls, or even large stones for chairs; the beds are composed of straw and shavings.  The food was oatmeal and water for breakfast, flour and water, with a little skimmed milk for dinner, oatmeal and water again for a second supply.’  He actually saw children in the markets grubbing for the rubbish of roots.  And yet, ’all the places and persons I visited were scrupulously clean.  Children were in rags, but they were not in filth.  In no single instance was I asked for relief....  I never before saw poverty which inspired respect, and misery which demanded involuntary homage.’

From Colne we journey to Accrington.  Of its 9,000 inhabitants not more than 100 were fully employed.  Numbers kept themselves alive by collecting nettles and boiling them.  Some were entirely without food every alternate day, and many had but one meal in the day and that a poor one.[39]

Our last stage is Burnley, where the weavers—­to quote again from Dr. Cook Taylor—­’were haggard with famine, their eyes rolling with that fierce and uneasy expression common to maniacs.  “We do not want charity,” they said, “but employment.”  I found them all Chartists, but with this difference, that the block-printers and hand-loom weavers united to their Chartism a hatred of machinery which was far from being shared by the factory operatives.’