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'Bourne,' a district purely agricultural, and where, if any. where, the farm labourers might be expected to be in favour of that protection which so many landowners and farmers declare to have been devised for their especial benefit. But even here, 'protection', such as is afforded by the Corn Laws, is sadly at a discount, and hundreds of men, spite of the threats of the farmers, their masters, to discharge them if they attended the meeting, wended their way to it after a hard day's toil, to discuss their grievances and to make them known to the public. Upwards of 1,000 persons, chiefly consisting of agricultural labourers, some of them accompanied by their wives and elder children, were present, and formed an imposing and interesting scene, assembled, as they were, under a fine old tree on the green. The meeting was conducted in the most orderly manner, and the deepest interest was exhibited by all present in the proceedings." The chairman and the speakers all belonged to the class of farm-labourers, and they described their grievances with a natural eloquence which was clearly the result of a thorough conviction united to plain common sense. David Kecle, the chairman, declared that the labourers after a hard day's work could earn no better subsistence than potatoes and salt, and his hearers responded, "We don't get half enough of that." His illustration of the coercion used by the protectionists to stifle the complaints of the labourers was equally clever and characteristic:—"Our opponents, in my part of the country, serve the people like as the carters used to do the ploughboys when I was a boy. They would give the boys the whip, and threaten that they would give it them again if they told their parents; and so it went on from day to day. The case is the same with the labourers. Your masters say, if you come forward to tell your case, you shall be turned out of employment, and thus they keep you in fear; and you will never be better as long you are kept down in this way. But if you come forward boldly