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174 also, had been earnestly at work throughout the length, breadth of the land, and had delivered more than eight hundred lectures in the principal towns of Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Cambridge, Cornwall, Cumberland, Devon, Dorset, Derby, Durham, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Huntingdonshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Middlesex, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Northumberland, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Sussex, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Somersetshire, Surrey, Worcestershire, Westmorland, Wilts, and Yorkshire, besides forty-nine places in Scotland, twenty-four in Ireland, and thirty-two in Wales. This was an extensive agency, but it still needed extension. By the end of the year, arrangements had been made for a movement upon electoral districts, and several members of the council had already become missionaries to places asking for instruction, and numerous invitations had been received for such visits ; instructive tracts had been prepared; and it had been resolved greatly to increase the publications of the League. The preparations were formidable, for it was felt that the opposition to be encountered was formidable. A nation had to be educated in the true principles of political economy—a nation had to be convinced of the folly and injustice of its past commercial policy—and "stout hearts" set themselves determinedly to climb the "steep hill."