Great alarm was excited, some expected nothing less than a general insurrection; at length the rioters were attacked, dispersed, a large number arrested, tried, and seventeen hanged. Since that period not one but scores of mechanical improvements have been introduced into the woollen manufacture without occasioning disturbance, and with benefit in increased employment to the working classes. The case of the Luddites was one of the few on which Lord Byron spoke in the Upper House, and Horace Smith sang for Fitzgerald . . . "What makes the price of beer and Luddites rise? What fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies?" The population is about 30,000, and returns one member to the House of Commons. About half a mile from the town is Lockwood Spa, of strongly sulphurous waters, for which a set of handsome buildings have been provided. LEEDS. LEEDS, seventeen miles from Huddersfield, is the centre of five railways, by which it has direct connection with Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, on the east, and Carlisle on the west coast, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby, and Birmingham, in the Midland counties, possesses one of the finest central railway stations in the kingdom, and has also the advantage of being in the centre of inland navigation (a great advantage for the transport of heavy goods), as it communicates with the eastern seas by the Aire and Calder navigation to the Humber, and westward by the Leeds and Liverpool to the Mersey. The town stands on a hill, which rises from the banks of the river Aire. Leeds has claims to antiquity, but few remains. When Domesday Book was compiled it appears to have been an agricultural district. Wakefield was formerly the more important town. Lord Clarendon, in 1642, speaks of Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford, "as three very rich and populous towns, depending wholly upon clothing." The first charter was granted to Leeds by Charles I., and the second by Charles II., on petition of the clothworkers, merchants, and others, "to protect them from the great abuses, defects and deceits, discovered and practised by fraudulent persons in the making, selling, and dyeing of woollen cloths." The principal manufacture of Leeds is woollen cloth. Formerly the trade was carried on by five or six thousand small master clothiers, who employed their own families, and some thirty or forty thousand servants, and also carried on small farms. But the extension of the factory system has somewhat diminished their numbers. There are still, however, in connection with Leeds, several small clothing villages, in which the first stages of the operation are carried on, in spinning, weaving, and fulling.