Sir,—That a period of severe commercial suffering is approaching us, in which the ruinous condition of the agricultural classes will recoil disastrously, not only upon the selfish Free-trade agitators in the manufacturing districts, but also upon the importers of foreign produce, the broker, the factor, the shopkeeper, and the labourers in our towns, has for some months been patent to all who have dispassionately watched the current of events, and been able to draw correct conclusions from what is going on before their eyes. It is not to official tables of exports and imports that such men look as the indices of the nation’s prosperity. They turn rather to _the results_ of these operations, as disclosed in our commercial circulars; to the degree of confidence displayed by bankers in their dealings with their customers, and by merchants in their transactions with each other; to the movements of produce in our leading markets, and to the amount of activity which characterises the internal trade and the consumption of the country. They are guided, too, very materially, by the general feeling of merchants and traders, expressed in their daily communications with each other, on ‘Change, or in the intercourse of private life. Such a mode I propose to employ, in investigating the real condition of the cotton manufacturing districts of the north of England; and the result of this investigation, which I shall now proceed to lay before your readers, will, I fear, dissipate somewhat rudely the dream of prosperity in which her Majesty’s Ministers, and their supporters in Parliament and throughout the country, are just now indulging. In pursuing such an inquiry, the condition of the port of Liverpool, the great mart of this portion of the kingdom, naturally suggests itself as of prominent interest. In this port, by the result of our vast operations in imported foreign and colonial produce, the actual results of our export trade in manufactures, and the consuming power of the large population which draw their supplies from it, can be tested with considerable fairness. In an article in your last Number, I find a quotation from the monthly circular of Messrs T. and H. Littledale & Co., whom you truly designate as perhaps the greatest brokers in the world. A portion of this I must re-quote, in order to enable your readers the better to appreciate some later observations of these gentlemen. On the 4th of March, Messrs Littledale wrote:—