life was a continued scene of enlightened benevolence displayed in action. Fortunately for the district which owes so much to Thomas Ashton, the inheritors of his name and fortune are also worthy representatives of his virtues: his spirit will still direct the establishment at Hyde; his name be upheld as a bright example in the manufacturing districts, and his memory have a living monument in the continuation of his noble principles, developed in equally noble practice."
In Herbert's painting of the Council of the League, now in the museum of the Peel Park, Salford, the portraits of Sir Thomas Potter and Mr. Ashton are represented as adorning the walls of the Council Room, where they had so often given their aid to the movement.
Miss Martineau, referring to the debates on the Corn Law, in her "History of the Thirty Years' Pence," says:—"Meantime, it had begun to rain. It began to rain, after a cold and late spring, at the beginning of the summer: and it seemed as if it was never going to leave off again. In some parts of the country, the sun was scarcely seen from the month of May till the next spring. Those who first marked the soft perseverance of the soft falling rain, thought of the budding and blossoming promised in scripture, where the snow and rain are shown forth as illustrations of the fertilizing influences of Providence; and thus far there was nothing but hope of good. Then, as the fall went on with less softness and more chill, and fewer intermissions, men began to fear for the harvest, and to calculate that much dry foreign wheat would be necessary to mix with our own damp and unripened grain. Then arose the fear that our own inferior grain would not keep, so thoroughly ready for sprouting would some of it appear to be; and, in the midst of this, it became clear that throughout Europe, with a few local exceptions, the harvest would prove a deficient one; so that, unless there was unusual abundance in America, the prospect was a fearful one. Still the most sagacious and the most timid were far from conceiving what the rain was doing by its persevering continual soaking into the ground. First a market gar-
