"Every working tailor must come to this at last, on the present system; and we are lucky in having been spared so long. You all know where this will end--in the same misery as 15,000 out of 20,000 of our class are enduring now. We shall become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middle-men, and sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to fare as the rest have--ever decreasing prices of labour, ever increasing profits, made out of that labour by the contractors who will employ us--arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of hirelings--the competition of women, and children, and starving Irish--our hours of work will increase one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half. And in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of improvement in wages, but even more penury, slavery, misery, as we are pressed on by those who are sucked by fifties--almost by hundreds--yearly out of the honourable trade in which we were brought up, into the infernal system of contract work, which is devouring our trade, and many others, body and soul. Our wives will be forced to sit up night and day to help us--our children must labour from the cradle, without chance of going to school, hardly of breathing the fresh air of heaven--our boys, as they grow up, must turn beggars or paupers--our daughters, as thousands do, must eke out their miserable earnings by prostitution. And after all, a whole family will not gain what one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed. You know there will be no hope for us. There is no use appealing to Government or Parliament."[14] [14] _Alton Locke_, vol. i. p. 149-50. We shall only add to these copious extracts and documents one illustrative of the state to which the West Highlands of Scotland have been brought by Free Trade in black cattle and barilla, the staple of their industry:-- Price of the Estate, £163,779. | | Expenditure on Years.| Receipts. | Estate. 1847 |£4,134 0 0 |£7,305 0 0 1848 | 1,781 0 0 | 4,253 0 0 1849 | 1,109 0 0 | 1,294 0 0 1850 | 1,345 0 0 | 1,126 0 0 --_Inverness Courier._ Couple this with the facts that, in 1850, in the face of average prices of wheat at about 40s. a quarter, the importation of all sorts of grain into Great Britain and Ireland was about 9,500,000 quarters--of course displacing domestic industry employed previous to 1846 in this production; so that the acres under wheat cultivation in Ireland have sunk from 1,048,000 in 1847, to 664,000 in 1849; and there will be no difficulty in explaining the immense influx of the destitute from the country into the great towns--augmenting thus the enormous mass of destitution, pauperism, and wretchedness, with which they are already overwhelmed. * * * * *