Friedrich Engels: The Great Towns

In an except from, The Great Towns, Friedrich Engels expresses his insights about the physical separation of classes in the city. Using Manchester as an example, Engels rips into the aristocracy. He raises the point that members of the of the upper class, who traditionally live in the country and commute into town, "take the shortest roads through the middle of all the laboring districts to their places of business without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grim and misery that lurks to the right and left." The highways are gilded passageways, like the blinders fitted on racehorses shielding the wealthy from any sense of moral obligation. Further, the businesses and storefronts lining the financial and business districts serve a similar unspoken purpose of, "sufficing to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the compliment of their wealth." Engels uses no restraint in his use of words like grime, filth, foul, slime, and offal, to describe his experience of what lay behind the buffer of storefronts that conceal the slums that exist in such close proximity for the purpose of serving the wealthy. Engels accuses the aristocracy of maintaining an, 'out of sight, out of mind,' mentality. When the filth and decay of the working-class quarter is exposed, it is quickly concealed under the "cloak of charity." The state of the slums is described as, "impossible for a human being in any degree civilized to live in," the environments is deemed, "injurious to health."  Critisism falls on the aristocracy, for their 'inhumane' neglect of the working class that affords them a padded life; that they are blissfully unaware of the atrocity that exists conveniently out of sight. The excerpt ends abruptly with a lengthy and unsavory description of the conditions of the slums, which left me with the perception, "Okay, so... Manchester sucks? Or at least it did at the time of this publication (over one hundred years ago), so what." The same story is said to exist in similar fashion around the world. I could not help but question whether it was the aristocracy that concealed the poor, or whether the poor too, wished to separate themselves from the aristocracy. Exposure to the wealthy might be degrading and depressing. Another statement I question is Engel's definition of the wealthy as "the happier class." Happiness is not defined by money or social class. Social boundaries of class are not defined by happiness and in fact, I am not opposed to a level of separation between the classes; they function differently and have unique standards of success and failure based on culturally deriven value constraints. I view their separation in the same respect as the segregation of ethnic communities for cultural reasons. The people who live in ethnically defined neiborhoods tend to do so because they feel cultural connection to the community. The main issue that this paper impressed on me is that such a terrible environments exist in the presence of such wealth. It is not in human nature to consciously promote baseless suffering of others by doing nothing. What concerns me is the measures taken by the wealthy, outlined in the excerpt, to conceal the filth thus allowing the wealthy to promote the suffering of the poor unconsciously.