dividuals, whose average earnings were only sevenpence halfpenny per head per week. A public meeting was held in Stockport, October 29th, at which the Rev. Mr. Baker, and Mr. Coppock (the town clerk), gave harrowing details of the wide extent and the intensity of the suffering. While millions were in this deplorable condition, the duty on the importation of wheat was 24s. 8d., on oats 13s. 9d., on barley 10s. 10d., and rye 14s. per quarter. And this was the season at which Sir Robert Peel and his colleagues demanded four months' leisure, at their country abodes, before they could permit Parliament to take the distress of the people into consideration, their excuse being that in all the three years of comparative famine their whig predecessors had devised no remedy. The following letter from Colonel Thompson is descriptive not only of Bolton but of most of the manufacturing towns at the close of this disastrous year:—
"TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN.
Sir,—I have been at the siege of Bolton; for nothing but some such cause suggests itself as adequate to the phenomenon. And is it not a siege? not carried on perhaps by an enemy within gun shot, but by one working on a wider radius, and making his blockade by sea upon the means of life.
"Many sights it has been my chance to see. I think I know what is the minimum of help by which horse, ass, dog, hog, or monkey can sustain existence, and where it must go out for want of appliances and means of living. But anything like the squalid misery, the slow, moulding, putrefying death by which the weak and the feeble of the working classes are perishing here, it never befel my eyes to behold, nor my imagination to conceive. And the creatures seem to have no idea of resisting, or even repining. They sit down with oriental submission, as if it was God and not the landlords that was laying his hand upon them. And when their honourable representative in Parliament gave description of their sufferings, 'liar' was the best word applied to him by the organs of tyranny.
"Did you ever set eyes on a pennyworth of mutton? Come here and you shall see how rations are served out under the landlord's state of siege. It might bait a rat-trap; though a well fed rat would hardly risk his personalities for such a pittance. Pennyworths of mutton, and