SEEING ENGLAND.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3514, 28 June 1920, Page 6

SEEING ENGLAND.

..oy; . •til' n> 0 ? ■ . ~ ; ...TWO VIEW-POINTS ■ ; --c. '«- . , > v.- PfiETRY AND MATERIALISM. I -Oft JiiJ Jv. ■ —— .<;-B9 "Ast KaglisJi journalist who hac jc« mad%Jiis i reputatiqn in. pce-.war Saj r s ■e, ; jhaß lalftby 5.. .aryi a iskatCSf' j title-a i>'On ' ii Seeing/. Englahd.f-u .Ho -\tfrote'' of this jxi return rio-v the cf.fMso.bh'tlr'i'fter a lflßgtty. •abfeenea.'lafei:oa6VLto';tbei'Eng- - land .of -olean .pastures' .an'cT.A-irustie ••' woods, of. pretty, gardens villas, of loanrg uplands and', emerald f» dales. And'lie found 'his,::Engla<nd a ? land to-be proud- of, a happy, hunts ng- ') ground for the Nature-lover. i "In a little way 1 have lately been 'seeing England,' "with the eye of. an -outsider, but it was not the England of which the poets rave . . ~ writes Thomas Kelly in the. Irish Statesman. "At fort-thirty on a February morning I stood on the platform of a Manchester railway station, watching the streams of mill-hands and factory workers ow into and out of the train. They moved —men and women —as might the machines they attended, mechanically obeying the printed notices ('Have your tickets and contracts Teady'); scarce seeing the ticket-check-ers as they produced their slips of pasteboard. The 'thrump, thrump,' of the clogs echoed all over the bidding, but never a woijd wag spoken by a member of that human stream, PALLID WORKERS. "Bespectacled and ancient porters .came and went with their note-books; the women carriage-cleaners in their blue trousers moved vacantly from place to place. Scores of trucks brought hundreds of bundles labelled 'Manchester Guardian'; the ohbycang men who handled them toiled with the regularity of clockwork. ' Everyone about had-the same air of hurry, the same listless gaze into nothingness, the same dull gloo min their general mien. Not a soft line about these features, not a hint that their owMerS knew aught of smiling, not a glinnfter of thought behind those masks of blankness —and yet we know these do think. . . .

"1 found myself, in a train jgefing eastwards from Cottonopolis. The carriage was packed. The men kept their faces almost blued to their newspapers; the two girls in the compartment talked all the while. Or, rather, they jabbered, for I could not make out a solitary word they uttered —and they kept going without a stop for more than ten minutes. Passengers jerked out of the carriage, and others came in; many of them giving one the . impression that I hey were walking in their sleep. ... | FOUNDRY AND FACTORY. \ "Daylight came to show us a region of foundry and factory, a land of gaunt buildings and smoking chimneystacks, a world of hurrying clogs and ear-piercing sirens. We slipped past cotton-mills and steel-works ,by dirty canals and stagnant dams, by monotonous rows of grimy dwellings with now and, then an occasional parody on a garden, by lurid hoardings and blanklooking walls, by an orgy of railway line s which seemed to spread over the land like steel snakes, by kilns and stacks and all the soot-wreathed landmark's of latter-day Lancashire. HUNDREDS OF BELCHING CHIMNEYS. "I forgot how many hundreds of belching chimneys I counted during an four's journey, but I vividly remember that I could discover only one

church spire, and that ,one looked strangely uncomfortable. Money is the only god that commands even attention in this land of cotton boom. "There is, no fine dividing line bc,tween working and residential quarters here. Professional men live next door to factory toilers. It is a land where money is made and , guarded, where money is the constant topic of conversation, but where ft is not possible to | tell from a (man's dress the amount of J his income. The hard-headed people I

who rush to their work, who jump into starting trains, who are not afraid of labour, who take the pleasures seriously, if not. sadly, have all the same Lancashire spirit—the spirit which thinks in shares an dreams of dividends. ' ;