"I beg to say a few words respecting the frame rent; the rent paid for lace frames, until the year 1805, was 1s. 6d. a frame per week; there then was not any very great inducement for persons to buy frames and let them out by the hire, who did not belong to the trade; at that time an attempt was made, by one or two houses, to reduce the prices paid to the workmen, in consequence of a dispute between these two houses and another great house: some little difference being paid in the price amongst the respective houses, I was one chosen by the workmen to try if we could not remedy the impending evil: we consulted the respective parties, and found them inflexible; these two houses that were about to reduce the prices, said that they would either immediately reduce the price of making net, or they would increase the frame rent: the difference to the workmen was considerable, between the one and the other; they would suffer less, in the immediate operation of the thing, by having the rent advanced, than the price of making net reduced. They chose at that time, as they thought, the lesser evil, but it has turned out to be otherwise; for, immediately as the rent was raised upon the percentage laid out in frames, it induced almost every person, who had got a little money, to lay it out in the purchase of frames; these frames were placed in the hands of men who could get work for them at the warehouses; they were generally constrained to pay an enormous rent, and then they were compelled, most likely, to buy of the persons that let them the frames, their butcher's meat, their grocery, or their clothing: the encumbrance of these frames became entailed upon them: if any deadness took place in the work they must take it at a very reduced price, for fear of the consequences that would fall upon them from the person who bought the frame: thus the evil has been daily increasing, till, in conjunction with the other evils crept into the trade, they have almost crushed it to atoms." 348. The evil of not assigning fairly to each tool, or each article produced, its proportionate value, or even of not having a perfectly distinct, simple, and definite agreement between a master and his workmen, is very considerable. Workmen find it difficult in such cases to know the probable produce of their labour; and both parties are often led to adopt arrangements, which, had they been well examined, would have been rejected as equally at variance in the results with the true interests of both.