The partners thought that no time could be fitter than this for explaining to the assembled people the present state of affairs as it regarded them, and the prospect which lay before them. Mr. Wallace, who, as longest known to the people, had agreed to make this explanation, mounted to the window of a neighbouring building, and, while Mr. Bernard and his sons stood beside him, thus addressed the crowd below:— “It is partly for our own sakes, though chiefly for yours, that we now offer to explain to you the condition and prospects of this concern. We still say, what we have often said, that we are accountable to no man for our manner of conducting our own affairs; but we wish you clearly to understand why we close our iron-work, in order that you may see that we cannot help doing so, and that it is through no act of ours that so many industrious and sober labourers are turned out of work in one day. We make this explanation for your sakes; because we hope that those among you who have been guilty of the intention, if not the deed of riot, will learn the folly as well as the sin of such proceedings, and that those who are innocent will train up their children in such a knowledge of facts as will prevent their ever bringing destruction on themselves and others by such errors as have ruined our concern. “When we came here to settle, an agreement was made, in act if not in words, between the two classes who hoped to make profit out of these works. You offered your labour in return for a subsistence paid out of our capital. We spent the money we and our fathers had earned in buying the estate, building the furnaces, making or improving roads, and paying the wages which were your due. Both parties were satisfied with an agreement by which both were gainers, and hoped that it would long be maintained without difficulty or misunderstanding. No promise was or could reasonably be made as to how long the labour should be furnished on the one side and the capital on the other, in the same proportions; for it was impossible for either party to tell what might happen to the other. It was possible that so great a demand for labour might take place in some other manufacture as to justify your asking us for higher wages, or leaving us if we did not think proper to give them. It was equally possible that the prices of our manufacture might fall so as to justify us in lowering your wages, or in getting a part of our work done without your assistance.