It will be perceived, therefore, that this volume contains documents of three different kinds: 1. Private Communications. 2. Diplomatic Answers to the general inquiries suggested by Viscount Palmerston’s circular of the 12th of August, 1833. 3. Diplomatic Answers to the Questions framed by the Commissioners, and contained in Viscount Palmerston’s circular of the 30th November, 1833. Unfortunately, only a small portion of these documents had arrived when the Commissioners made their Report to His Majesty on the 20th February, 1834. The documents then received are contained in the first 115 pages of this volume, and were printed by order of the House of Commons, and delivered to Members in May, 1834. Those subsequently received were transmitted to the printers as soon as the requisite translations of those portions which were not written in English or French could be prepared. If it had been practicable to defer printing any portion until the whole was ready, they might have been much more conveniently arranged. But to this course there were two objections. First, the impossibility of ascertaining from what places documents would be received; and secondly, the difficulty of either printing within a short period so large a volume, containing so much tabular matter, or of keeping the press standing for six or seven months. The Parliamentary printers have a much larger stock of type than any other establishment, but even their resources did not enable them to keep unemployed for months the type required for many hundred closely-printed folio pages. The arrangement, therefore, of the following papers is in a great measure casual, depending much less on the nature of the documents than on the times at which they were received. The following short summary of their contents, may, it is hoped, somewhat diminish this inconvenience. I.--The Private Communications consist of, Page 1. Two Papers by Count Arrivabene, containing an account of the labouring population of Gaesbeck, a village about nine miles from Brussels (p. 1.); and a description of the state of the Poor Colonies of Holland and Belgium in 1829 610 2. A Report, by Captain Brandreth, on the Belgian Poor Colonies, in 1832 15 3. A Statement, by M. Ducpétiaux, of the Situation of the Belgian Poor Colonies, in 1832 619 4. An Essay on the comparative state of the Poor in England and France, by M. de Chateauvieux 2 5. Notes on the Administration of the Relief of the Poor in France, by Ashurst Majendie, Esq. 34 6. A Report made by M. Gindroz to the Grand Council of the Canton de Vaud, on Petitions for the Establishment of Almshouses 53