ment 130 honest labouring men breaking stones in the workhouse. A jeweller told him that within the last ten weeks he had purchased fourteen or fifteen wedding rings, which had been brought to him by mothers of families to procure food for their children they were not pledged, but sold, because the parties had no hope of ever being able to redeem them. The general feeling in the minds of the working classes was of a most awful description. In Bilston and its neighbourhood there were twenty-nine furnaces; fifteen of those were out of work, and the number of unemployed in that town could not be less than 3,000. The workhouse was so full that the guardians were obliged to have beds made on the floor, and the old poorhouse, at Bradley, had been ordered to be repaired for their reception.
Mr. Taunton and Mr. Taylor, jun., of Coventry, gave an account of the distress in that city, and the forenoon's sitting was closed with an eloquent speech from Mr. Geo. Thompson.
At the evening meeting, the veteran Colonel Thompson ventured to predict that, as the agitation in the country went on increasing, government would find out that it had been wrong, and that the delegates were right. Mr. Dixon, of Accrington; the Rev. Mr. Lowe, of Forfar; Mr. Smith, and the Rev. Mr. Lustworth, of Leicester; and Mr. Ridgway, of the Staffordshire Potteries, testified to the extreme distress in their respective localities. In the course of the evening, a delegate said:—"Why should we hear these details of distress? We all know of its existence;" to which the chairman replied, that London should know of it, and every part of the country, and every man in the country should know of it and certainly the statements were made widely public by the reports in the London newspapers.
At the Thursday meeting, the Rev. Mr. Ferguson, of Bicester, said that the best field labourers in his own
