"We are charged earnestly to remonstrate and protest on the part of the deeply injured thousands whose property has been torn from them by the unjust and suicidal impolicy of which we complain; and still more emphatically on behalf of the millions of the industrial population dependent on them for employment, and consequently for subsistence, against the longer continuance of a system which, under the specious name of Free Trade, violates every principle of real freedom, since it dooms the taxed, fettered, and disqualified native producer to unrestricted competition in his own market with the comparatively unburdened foreigner. We not only deny the moral right of any government or of any legislature to have involved in certain loss and suffering large masses of a flourishing community, for the sake of giving trial to a mere experiment; but we assert that the experiment has been tried, and has signally and disastrously failed, and we demand therefore, as the right of those we represent, the prompt restoration of that protection from unrestricted foreign import which can alone rescue them from impending destruction. "It is painful for us to declare, but it is our duty not to disguise, that the pertinacious adherence of the Cabinet, of which your lordship is at the head, to the policy of miscalled Free Trade, and its determined rejection of the appeals of the people for a reversal of that policy, have extended to the executive government of the country the same feelings of distrust and discontent which are widely diffused with respect to the representative branch of the Legislature. We solemnly adjure your lordship to remember that discontent unattended to may ripen into disaffection. "We know that the loyalty of the people to their most gracious Sovereign, under all their grievances and wrongs, remains, and will remain, unshaken; but we are aware, and it is our duty, therefore, to warn her Majesty's Government, that the state of feeling in many districts of the country is most critical and alarming, hazardous to its peace, perilous to the maintenance of public credit, and dangerous to its established institutions; nor must we be deterred, either by our unqualified respect for your lordship's personal character, or by the just consideration we owe to the elevated position you occupy, from casting on your lordship and your colleagues the awful responsibility of all the consequences that may result from a continuance of your refusal either to redress the wrongs of the people, or to allow them the constitutional opportunity for the vindication of their rights, by dissolving the Parliament and appealing to the voice of the country. "London, May 11, 1850."