containing as much matter as an ordinary shilling pamphlet, but which was charged to the various associations at three-half-pence, its cost price. Mr. Poulett Thomson's speech, occupying sixteen pages octavo, was supplied at three-farthings. Of these first publications about 10,000 of each were printed. Subsequently the impressions were of 50,000 each ; and when the appeals were to the electors of the kingdom, during the height of the agitation, as many as half a million each of the more popular tracts were printed at a time.
Amongst those was one which I wrote. I had seen around me, as great cotton spinners, machine makers, manufacturers, and merchants, the sons of farmers, Richd. Cobden, Thomas Potter (Mayor of Manchester), the Bannermans, the Brothers Grant (Dickens' "Brothers Cherryble"), and a host of others, giving employment to tens of thousands. The title of the tract was, "An Address to Farmers, on the way in which their families are to be provided for." I told the class I addressed, that my father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather had farmed land on the same estate from the time of Queen Elizabeth; that I should have been a farmer myself, but that my father used to say to his four sons: "One of you will succeed me in the farm, and the rest shall have such an education as will enable them to shift for themselves. I cannot stock four farms for you, and if I could, I would not send three of you to bid against my neighbours, and to raise their rents upon them;" and that, from that time, I had been convinced that farmers took a very mistaken view of their own interest, if they thought it could be promoted at the expense of trade, in which a great portion of their families would have to seek for employment. I gave a history of twelve families personally known to me. In these families there were forty-seven sons, who all arrived at the man's estate, and only four of them remained farmers. There were thirty-two daughters, the
