 the jail, the town-hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in
the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material
aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The
M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and
the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact
between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in
figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the
dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
    A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course got
on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!
    No. Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like gold
that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing mystery of the place was, Who
belonged to the eighteen denominations? Because, whoever did, the labouring
people did not. It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday
morning, and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was
driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from their
own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they lounged
listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a thing with which
they had no manner of concern. Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed this,
because there was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members were
to be heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning
for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main force.
Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same people would get
drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at
tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal), would induce
them to forego their custom of getting drunk. Then came the chemist and
druggist, with other tabular statements, showing that when they didn't get
drunk, they took opium. Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with
more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and
showing that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden from the public
eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it;
and where A. B.
