232. THE PLATTING. This is now so well understood that nothing need be said about the manner of doing the work. But much might be said about the measures to be pursued by land-owners, by parish officers, by farmers, and more especially by gentlemen and ladies of sense, public spirit, and benevolence of disposition. The thing will be done; the manufacture will spread itself all over this kingdom; but the exertions of those whom I have here pointed out might hasten the period of its being brought to perfection. And I beg such gentlemen and ladies to reflect on the vast importance of such manufacture, which it is impossible to cause to produce any-thing but good. One of the great misfortunes of England at this day is, that the land has had _taken away from it those employments for its women and children which were so necessary to the well-being of the agricultural labourer_. The spinning, the carding, the reeling, the knitting; these have been all taken away from the land, and given to the Lords of the Loom, the haughty lords of bands of abject slaves. But let the landholder mark how the change has operated to produce his ruin. He must have the labouring MAN and the labouring BOY; but, alas! he cannot have these, without having the man's wife, and the boy's mother, and little sisters and brothers. Even Nature herself says, that he shall have the wife and little children, or that he shall not have the man and the boy. But the Lords of the Loom, the crabbed-voiced, hard-favoured, hard-hearted, puffed-up, insolent, savage and bloody wretches of the North have, assisted by a blind and greedy Government, taken all the employment away from the agricultural women and children. This manufacture of Straw will form one little article of employment for these persons. It sets at defiance all the hatching and scheming of all the tyrannical wretches who cause the poor little creatures to die in their factories, heated to eighty-four degrees. There will need no inventions of WATT; none of your horse powers, nor water powers; no murdering of one set of wretches in the coal mines, to bring up the means of murdering another set of wretches in the factories, by the heat produced from those coals; none of these are wanted to carry on this manufactory. It wants no _combination_ laws; none of the inventions of the hard-hearted wretches of the North. 233. THE KNITTING. Upon this subject, I have only to congratulate my readers that there are great numbers of English women who can now knit, plat together, better than those famous Jewesses of whom we were told.