Member for Cork (Mr. O’Connell) was immediately invited over to take a seat at their first banquet. They there declared that the League was possessed of sufficient capital “to buy up” the landed property of the whole English nobility. But, Sir, I would ask what have the farmers to expect from these cotton lords when they have bought up the landed property of the country? It is their practice when they purchase land to have it immediately re-valued. They carry the principle of the ledger into their rent-roll; the rents are doubled; and I have known many families in my part of the country ruined by the oppression of these men. The manufacturing members of this League also want to increase their profits by reducing the price of wages; they also want to become the corn merchants of England; to convert one floor of their mills into a granary, and employ part of their machinery to grind the corn. [_Laughter._] Hon. Members may laugh, but you cannot deceive the working classes; you have tried to make them believe differently; but all your hired agitators have failed to do so. Yes, the poor of England would have to go down to these men in the manufacturing districts with money in their sacks’ mouths to buy corn, for there would be a great famine in the land. But this was only a part of their designs; now mark what would follow. Have hon. Members never been told of the Truck System? Have they never heard of the labourers’ wages being paid in goods? Lest they should not, I will expose to the House such a system of tyranny, oppression, and plunder, committed on these half-starved operatives, as is a disgrace to any Christian country. Sir, when the poor labourers go to receive their work from these manufacturers they now find that it generally consists of a very inferior article. They find the wool difficult to comb, and the warps full of flaws. On the Saturday evening—that period which ought to be the sweetest hour of the week to the working man—when the reward of his labour ought to be as freely given as it would ever be gratefully received—even this is pilfered from him. He takes his work to the mill, and who do you think receives it? Not the master of the mill—no, but an overlooker, who pretends carefully to examine it, and, of course, finds fault with it. He says to the poor fellow, “You have done this work ill; I must deduct so much from your combing.” And the poor weavers, who are perhaps only receiving three and sixpence or four shillings a week, are constantly mulcted in this manner by these overlookers, who have their own wages paid out of what they can deduct from these plundered wretches, and a percentage on the amount. Then, again, mark what follows: they have not even the small remnant paid in money; it is paid in goods, in rotten corn, in “cheap flour”; and when the poor man carries it home to his wife and family, after in vain endeavouring to induce the master to pay him his wages in money,