Page:Life·of·Seddon•James·Drummond•1907.pdf/333

 slaving away in a workroom that was more like a Turkish bath than a place for people to work in. While he was looking over those factories his mind went back to the splendid work-rooms, with their ventilation and supplies of fresh air, in New Zealand, and he said: “If this is the result of factory life in the Old Country, and if this is to be the end of it, it will be much better for us in New Zealand never to have a factory in the country.”

In visiting his old home in Lancashire, he took advantage of the opportunity to go through the cotton mills. There, also, his mind was at work, observing, noting, and comparing. He found that during his absence of 34 years, the hours of the workers had been reduced, and their general conditions had been improved; but he said that the physical life of the community had been injured, and that there had been a degeneracy of the race.

He told people in New Zealand afterwards that he saw more evidence of real poverty in ten minutes in Glasgow than he saw in three months in his own colony. He went to Glasgow on a public occasion, when the citizens of the great city put forth an effort to make a good appearance before their distinguished guests. They were clean and tidy, but they could not hide from his eyes their bare feet and unprotected heads, their patched clothes, their wan, pinched, pale faces, and other signs of abject poverty.

London at first oppressed him with a sense of disappointment. The buildings did not seem to be any better than those he had seen in the colonies, and the narrow streets were not at all to his liking. “But when I came to see the great cathedrals, the abbeys, the churches, and the public buildings,” he said afterwards, “I was reminded at every turn that I was in a city memorable with age, rich in traditions, and enormously wealthy, as the vast traffic and magnificent pleasure-grounds abundantly testified. I then felt that there could be no city in the world like London. It is the greatest and grandest—a worthy centre of a magnificent Empire.”

In the grand array of cruisers at the great naval review he saw the reflected magnitude of the Empire’s commerce; in the review of the army at Aldershot he saw the vastness of Great