"That your Petitioners feel the utmost reluctance to prefer complaints to your Majesty. But the great distresses which they already labour under, and the expectation and even certainty of the continual increase of them unless timely averted, compels them to cast themselves at your Majesty's feet, and humbly implore your gracious attention to their sufferings: "That themselves, and the several manufacturers depending on them, such as hair-manufacturers, ribbon-weavers, cawl-makers, &c. do amount to such a number, that they fear they should not be credited if they were to give a modest estimate of it; for they conceive the thousands thus employed are little if at all inferior to what can be boasted by any one manufactory in your Majesty's dominions: "That out of this number of your Majesty's most loyal and dutiful subjects, there is a multitude already actually reduced to the want of the common necessaries of life; and that the whole body must seek subsistence in some different employ, at the risque of perishing miserably by a failure in the attempt, unless some means can be speedily found to support their falling trade, fatally wounded by the present mode of fashion which so generally prevails, of men in almost all stations wearing their own hair: "That this mode, pernicious enough in itself to their trade, is rendered excessively more so by swarms of French hair-dressers already in these Cities, and daily increasing, who by artifice more than merit, as your Petitioners humbly presume, and by that facility with which your Majesty's British subjects are too much inclined to prefer French skill and taste in every article of dress (by which the most considerable manufactories in these kingdoms, as well as those of your Petitioners, do greatly suffer), find means to get employment, to the privation of that pittance to your Majesty's natural subjects which the fashion itself would still leave in their power to obtain: