to leave a place where at present their labour is of little or no value have been found enduring distress with patience, and abstaining, sometimes to the injury of health, from making any application for relief; while others, who have been driven reluctantly to that extremity, we have seen receiving a degree of relief sufficient only to support life, often with thankfulness and gratitude, and generally without murmur or complaint.

"We feel assured that the sufferings of a population whose general character and condition are such as we have described them will meet with sympathy and consideration from all classes of their fellow-subjects; and that the interests of that branch of trade which has furnished such a population with employment will be held entitled to peculiar attention from the legislature of the country.

(Signed)

“We have, &c.

A. POWER. "E. TWISLETON."

"To the Poor Law Commissioners.”

I will not weaken the effect of this testimony by adding one word of comment, beyond stating that that it is not less applicable to Bolton, Wigan, &c., than to Stockport.

N

ALTHOUGH Stockport is locally situated in the county of Cheshire, it belongs, commercially, to Lancashire, and it is still further identified with the palatinate by the feelings, the interests, and the spirit of its inhabitants. When first I became acquainted with the town, about five years ago, I believed that there was no place in the world better assured of a long and continuous career of commercial prosperity. The incomes of operative families varied from one to three pounds per week; they lived in comfortable tenements and exhibited much pride of station, rarely mixing with the mere hand-labourers and the navigators and excavators employed on the railways and other public works. Their children were more carefully tended than I found to be the case in Manchester and Liverpool: it was rare to hear of lost children being taken up by the police in Stockport; and this attention to the young was combined with a system of providing for the aged, which is thus clearly explained by the Commissioners of Inquiry:

"Even the aged members of a manufacturing community have a different social position from that of the same class of persons in many other parts of England, so small a number of them, in proportion to the population, being found dependent on the poor-rates.

"The disposition and ability of the operatives to support their aged relatives is one explanation of this circumstance, and it may be added that many of this class, especially aged females, afford a service very appropriate to their condition, and of not inconsiderable value, by keeping house and taking care of the youngest children while the working part of the family are absent at their work, and while the elder of the children, though not of age to work, are absent at school. With such assistance in the care of her household, during her absence at the factory, many an industrious married woman is enabled to add 8s., 10s., or 12s. weekly to the income brought in by her husband and the elder of the children. It is not uncommon for aged females to become domesticated for the purpose of affording service of this nature in the families of those who have no elderly relations to support, and some of them are said to earn a livelihood by preparing and carrying to the factories the refreshments which the hands sometimes prefer taking on the premises to going home and returning during the period allowed for their meals.

"The relief lists for the township of Hyde (popula

tion in 1841, 10,151) present, for the quarter ended in September 1838, only seven aged males and nine aged females as the whole number of that class receiving out-door or in-door relief from the poor-rates; and in the quarter ended December 1841 the total number of this class was not increased."

The township of Hyde, adjacent to Stockport, was the most interesting locality to every lover of his kind that I had at that period ever visited. Mr. Felkin, of Nottingham, was so struck with its economy, that he drew up a statistical account of its condition, which he read to the British Association; the document excited much attention at the time; it was copied into nearly all the newspapers of Great Britain and America; I have inserted it in my 'Natural History of Society,' but I cannot bring myself to turn to it now, for a sad check has been given to the social happiness which I then saw growing, extending, and increasing; abundance of food has been changed into superabundance of famine; the land of plenty has become the land of destitution.

I was justified in the anticipations of continued and increasing prosperity which I formed at that period: the immense amount of the capital invested in buildings, works, and machinery pledged the proprietor to continue employment when profits were low or wholly gone, because to stop the steam-engines or the water-wheels would necessarily deteriorate his investment to a greater degree than any of the moderate

losses which might arise from the ordinary fluctuations of trade. In such a district it was reasonable to believe that " scenes of sudden and widely extended distress are not of common occurrence, and it would be only after a long-continued period of depression, involving the successive ruin and failure of the several capitalists, that we might expect to find the factory population of a large manufacturing town extensively involved in distress."

"Fuit

The prosperity of Stockport is no more. Ilium et ingens gloria Teucrorum." It is now a town in a state of social dissolution, and ere many weeks elapse, if something be not done to revive its trade, the inhabitants will have lost all chance of relief on earth, and will have nothing left but an appeal to the justice of the eternal God. I believe that there will be no outbreak; I do not dread from this instructed and intelligent people the violence of the colliers or the secret malice of Swing. They have been subject to a gradual process of exhaustion for a period of nearly four years; they have seen distress coming on with silent but certain strides; mill after mill has closed, and in last August two of the largest in the entire district stopped nearly at the same time, and threw more than two thousand hands at once out of work. During this period the appeals to the people of Stockport, not to the compassion, but to the justice of their countrymen, have been frequent, firm, and respectful. They have only besought of their rulers not to turn