That is not all: Mr Farnall has told us that at present the increase of the rates in this district is at the rate of 10,000 pounds per week. That will be at the rate of half a million per annum, and, of course, if this distress goes on, that rate must be largely increased, perhaps doubled. This shows the amount of pressure which is threatening this immediate district. I have always been of opinion that this distress and suffering must be cumulative to a degree which few people have ever foreseen, because your means of meeting the difficulty will diminish just in proportion as the difficulty will increase. Mr Farnall has told us that one-third of the rateable property will fall out of existence, as it were, and future rates must be levied upon two-thirds. But that will be by no means the measure of the condition of things two or three months hence, because every additional rate forces out of existence a large amount of saleable property; and the more you increase your rates the more you diminish the area over which those rates are to be productive. This view of the case has a very important bearing, also, upon the condition of the shop-keeping class as well as the classes of mill-owners and manufacturers who have not a large amount of floating capital. There is no doubt but a very large amount of the shopkeeping class are rapidly falling into the condition of the unemployed labourers. When I was at Rochdale the other day, I heard a very sorrowful example of it. There was a poor woman who kept a shop, and she was threatened with a distraint for her poor-rate. She sold the Sunday clothes of her son to pay the poor-rate, and she received a relief- ticket when she went to leave her rate. That is a sad and sorrowful example, but I am afraid it will not be a solitary one for a long time. Then you have the shopkeeping class descending to the rank of the operatives. It must be so. Withdraw the custom of 7,000,000 pounds per annum, which has ceased to be paid in wages, from the shopkeepers, and the consequence must present itself to any rational mind. We have then another class--the young men of superior education employed in warehouses and counting-houses. A great number of these will rapidly sink to the condition in which you find the operative classes. All this will add to the distress and the embarrassment of this part of the kingdom. Now, to meet this state of things you have the poor-law relief, which is the only relief we can rely upon, except that which comes from our own voluntary exertions. Well, but any one who has read over this report of Mr Farnall, just laid before us, must see how inadequate this relief must be. It runs up from one shilling and a half-penny in the pound to one shilling and fourpence or one shilling and fivepence; there is hardly one case in which the allowance is as much as two shillings per week for each individual--I won't call them paupers-- each distressed individual.