"That, by the present fashion, your Petitioners are compelled to a breach of the command of God and man, and a course of disobedience to your Majesty's proclamation, wisely intended for the benefit of all your Majesty's subjects; for the Lord's day, designed for their instruction and confirmation in the principles of virtue and piety, is to such of your Petitioners as can yet find employment, the day, of all others, on which they are most hurried and confused; and a refusal to comply with any order from their employers on that day amounts to a resolution of starving at once. This is a hardship of so peculiar a nature, that your Petitioners humbly conceive no considerable body of your Majesty's subjects labour under it in any manner proportionally as they do. May they be permitted to say, that they tremble for themselves and their children, lest by this unavoidable absence from the sacred duties of that day, and the misemployment of it entirely to worldly pursuits, they become as those that knew not God, while their fellow-subjects are happy in the inestimable privilege of attending and discharging their religious duties, and imbibing continually the precepts that teach to bear a conscience void of offence, to fear God, and honour the King? "Pressed by the weight of these sufferings; feeling their trade failing under them; sensible of the impending ruin of the several manufactories dependent on them, beholding great and daily increasing numbers of their journeymen in a starving and despairing condition; beholding also the subjects of France feeding on the only fragments they might hope to subsist on; and urged by every consideration interesting to human nature; your Petitioners have at last ventured on an application to the only earthly power able to save them from the torrent which is bearing them down to destruction. Their hearts prompt them to believe, that to know and to relieve the distresses of your subjects, is the same thing with your Majesty; in which sentiment they are fully confirmed by many Royal Acts since the commencement of your reign, and by none more than that which rescued the poor from the scourge of the oppressors, by reducing the price of provisions. Your Petitioners feel this effect of Royal paternal care, and gratefully bless the protecting hand.