attached to every movement of the League. The attendance at the meeting in the Manchester Free Trade Hall on Wednesday, March 5th, was shown, by the number of tickets taken at the door, to have exceeded six thousand. The gallery was filled with ladies, and there were six hundred influential gentlemen of the town and neighbourhood upon the platform. Mr. Wilson, the chairman, gave a gratifying account of the progress of preparation for the great bazaar, and said that the Messrs. Darby, of Colebrookdale, would furnish a stall with beautiful articles of their own manufacture, which, at cost price, would be £500; that thirty towns had already promised to supply a stall each, and seventy others had promised if they did not supply a stall each, to furnish a portion, and that Mr. Moore and Col. Thompson were then in Scotland in promotion of the object of the bazaar. The meeting was addressed by Mr. W. J. Fox and Mr. George Thompson, both of whom spoke at great length, and with an eloquence which excited the utmost enthusiasm of the meeting.
On the 7th March, Mr. Cobden brought forward the motion of which he had given notice, for a "Select Committee" to inquire into the causes and extent of the alleged existing agricultural distress, and into the effects of legislative protection upon the interests of landowners, tenant farmers, and farm labourers. The distress of the farmers had been declared by the protectionist landowners in their interview with the prime minister, and he thought it was from them rather than from him that his motion should have come, The farmers were distressed, but whence did the distress arise? It was for want of capital for one thing. A capital of £10 an acre would be required for arable land, and he did not believe that on an average farmers had one half that sum for each acre. Capital was seeking employment everywhere but in farming, because capitalists would not invest upon it without the security of equitable leases. No man would lay out a farthing on a
