‘I hereby give notice that on and after Friday, March the --th, this factory will be closed, owing to the present condition of the cotton trade, in consequence of the American war. At the same time, as I am anxious to keep my hands together, and to save them as much as possible from distress, I undertake, for the present at least, and until other circumstances should make a change desirable, to furnish them with the means of subsistence, and such of them as are my tenants will not be pressed for rent until the times improve. Each head of a family is requested to attend in the warehouse of this mill on the afternoon of Monday next, at three o’clock, when the conditions of relief will be made known, and the names and addresses of all in receipt thereof taken down. I request you earnestly, and with perfect confidence, to try, all of you, during this present trouble, to act together, and assist me in the preservation of order and the relief of distress. ‘SEBASTIAN MALLORY.’ There was a short silence; then murmurs; then, from some lips, an attempt at a cheer. Some girls and women were wiping their eyes with their aprons, and one or two men waved their hats: exclamations and murmurs arose all around. ‘Eh, but that’s reet-down kind, that is!’ ‘Th’ chap is a good sort!’ ‘Well, we needna fear to clem just yet!’ and so on. The gratitude was very real, if expressed with true Lancashire reticence and absence of effusion. But almost greater than the gratitude was the gloom--the sense of shame and degradation--the feeling that this was a draught too bitter for any amount of sugaring to sweeten, and that they had done nothing to deserve to have to swallow it. Sebastian had done wisely in committing to Wilson the delivery of the message. Wilson seemed to the work-people almost as one of themselves; he, too, must suffer somewhat from this calamity. The humiliation would have been too intense had Sebastian read the announcement himself. He, like hundreds of other masters, was making money--netting large profits at this stage of the crisis. His piled-up warehouses would be emptied at profitable prices of the accumulated results of last year’s over-production, while the impossibility of getting at the stores of cotton which were undoubtedly reposing in large quantities in Manchester and Liverpool warehouses, relieved him from the immediate expense of working, and of paying wages. That part of the ‘panic,’ as it was and is always called by the work-people, was one of unmitigated severity for the poor man--for the worker--capital added hugely to her stores. Yet every employer of any foresight was troubled to know what was to become of his work-people during the great distress--such skilful, practised, deft-handed, soft-fingered work-people as no other corner of the world could supply to him--work-people who, if they once got scattered, or emigrated, or separated from their labour, could not be replaced--the choicest of