business in 1833, leaving a property worth L60,000 to his sons, and who had, early in the distress, become security for them, was showing the works for the benefit of the creditors, at a salary of L1 a week. In families where the father had hitherto earned L2 per week, and laid by a portion weekly, and where all was now gone but the sacks of shavings they slept on, exertions were made to get 'blue milk' for children to moisten their oatmeal with; but soon they could have it only on alternate days; and soon water must do. At Leeds the pauper stone-heap amounted to 150,000 tons; and the guardians offered the paupers 6s. per week for doing nothing, rather than 7s. 6d. per week for stone-breaking. The millwrights and other trades were offering a premium on emigration, to induce their hands to go away. At Hinckley, one-third of the inhabitants were paupers; more than a fifth of the houses stood empty; and there was not work enough in the place to employ properly one-third of the weavers. In Dorsetshire a man and his wife had for wages 2s. 6d. per week, and three loaves; and the ablest laborer had 6s. or 7s. In Wiltshire, the poor peasants held open-air meetings after work--which was necessarily after dark. There, by the light of one or two flaring tallow candles, the man or the woman who had a story to tell stood on a chair, and related how their children were fed and clothed in old times--poorly enough, but so as to keep body and soul together; and now, how they could nohow manage to do it. The bare details of the ages of their children, and what the little things could do, and the prices of bacon and bread, and calico and coals, had more pathos in them than any oratory heard elsewhere." "But all this came from the Corn Laws," is the ready reply of the American protectionist. The Corn Laws were the doctrine of protection applied to breadstuffs, farm products, "raw materials." But it was not only protection for corn that vexed England in 1842, but protection for every thing and every body, from the landlord and the mill-owner to the kelp gatherer. Every species of manufacturing industry had asked and obtained protection. The nation had put in force, logically and thoroughly, the principle of denying themselves any share in the advantages which nature or art had conferred upon other climates and peoples, (which is the principle of protection), and with the results so pathetically described by Miss Martineau. The prosperity of British manufactures dates from the year 1846. That they maintained any kind of existence prior to that time is a most striking proof of the vitality of human industry under the persecution of bad laws.]