When field or garden labour can be combined with factory work, the miseries of the manufacturing system are much removed, and manufactures in such a case become serviceable under judicious and moral management: the present state of the town of Lancaster affords some illustration of this. It verges on a purely agricultural district, and now contains both manufacturing and farm labourers. Upon the introduction of cotton manufactures (and half the few mills now existing there were established only seven years ago), the wages of each individual workman were rendered less than they had been before, _but_ the earnings of his _whole family_ increased considerably. Children before that period were burdensome to their parents, who when making application for parish aid pleaded the number of their family. Now children are sources of increased comfort to such parents; and even step-children, grand-children, nephews, and nieces, who were formerly pressed into the list of mouths to be fed from the parish rates, are now studiously kept out of sight, because they earn wages, and contribute to the support of those who would otherwise shift them off their hands. On the _whole_, those with families are better off than if without them; and the children themselves, except in times of very hurried work, and allowing for occasional abuses by employers and parents over-working them, are better off than formerly. The comparatively good state of the Lancaster operatives arises front the circumstance, that in times of difficulty in the factories many of the work people have farm work to turn to, and numbers of them have allotments of their own. In proportion as the labouring poor of any community are deprived of the advantage of gardens, is a decrease in their health, happiness, and moral state. Of this, as regards another nation, I have a proof before me in the letter of Mr T. Bastard, who in a communication from Germany (I shall only give a portion of it) to the editor of the Labourers’ Friend Magazine, says, “In regard to the allotment system in particular, as a mode of giving the labourer ‘a stake in the hedge,’ I have learnt nothing here which induces me to change my opinion of its value: on the contrary, I feel rather confirmed in the belief, that where population and capital exist in a high degree, no other practicable mode has yet been proposed, so calculated to prevent the labouring classes from falling into the degraded position, with all its train of ill consequences, of being mere machines in the hands of the capitalists; or if they have already so fallen, so adapted to restore them to a higher moral state.