urgently. In a few cases distraint has been threatened, but generally the poor are living rent free. 7. Payment of rent is almost unknown. The agent for several landlords assures me he could not from his receipts pay the property-tax, but no distraints are made. 8. The bulk of the rents are not collected, and distraints are unknown. 9. The millowners are chiefly cottage-owners, and are asking for no rents.' That leads me to call your attention to the fact that, in addition to the sacrifices they are making, the millowners are themselves to a large extent the owners of cottages, and I believe, without exception, they are at the present moment receiving no rent, thereby losing a large amount of income they had a right to count upon. I know one case which is curious as showing how great is the difficulty of ascertaining what is really done. It is required in the executive committee that every committee should send in an account of the local subscriptions. We received an application from a small district where there was one mill, occupied by some young men who had just entered into the business. We returned a refusal, inasmuch as there was no local subscription; but when we came to inquire, we found that from last February, when the mill closed, these young men had maintained the whole of their hands, that they paid one-third of the rates of the whole district, and that they were at that moment suffering a yearly loss of 300 pounds in the rent of cottages for which they were not drawing a single halfpenny. That was a case in which we thought it right in the first instance to withhold any assistance, because there appeared to be no local subscription, and it shows how persons at a distance may be deceived by the want apparently of any local subscription. But I will throw out of consideration the whole of those amounts--the whole of this unparalleled munificence on the part of many manufacturers which never appears in any account whatever--I will throw out everything done in private and unostentatious charity--the supplies of bedding, clothing, food, necessaries of every description, which do not appear as public subscriptions, and will appeal to public subscriptions alone; and I will appeal to an authority which cannot, I think, be disputed--the authority of the commissioner, Mr Farnall himself, whose services the Government kindly placed at our disposal, and of whose activity, industry, and readiness to assist us, it is difficult to speak in too high terms of praise. A better authority could not be quoted on the subject of the comparative support given in aid of this distress in Lancashire and other districts. I find that, excluding altogether the subscriptions in the Lord Mayor's Mansion House list--of which we know the general amount, but not the sources from which it is derived, or how it is expended--but excluding it from consideration, and dealing only with the funds which have been given or promised to be administered