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 Wiltshire, and Dorsetshire. The vicar of Colne was unable to make out how they contrived to live on their wages; Mr. Bowman, a farmer in the Colne union, said that a man, his wife, and four or five children, had to be supported on his wages of eight of nine shillings a week; Mr. Hunt, a farmer in Gloucestershire, said it would not be safe to feed the inmates of workhouses on so low & dietary as the labourers had; Mr. Austin measured a room near Blandford, in which eleven persons slept, which was only ten feet square, the roof being in the thatch and in the middle only seven feet high; Mr. Phelps, an agent of the Marquis of Blandford, found twenty-nine persons living under one roof; the Hon. and Rev. S. G. Osborne saw, in a room thirteen feet square, three beds, one occupied by the mother, dying of consumption, one by a young man of eighteen and a girl of twelve, and the third by a young couple whom he had married two days before; and the same gentleman said that in Tarrant Hinton, a father, mother, married daughter and her husband, an infant, a blind boy of sixteen, and two girls occupied one bed room, and that next door there were a father and six children occupying one room. After enumerating other instances both in England and Scotland of the miserable destitution in the families of agricultural labourers, he urged upon the House the humanity and the justice of an inquiry into the truth of these allegations, and said:—

"You do not want acts of Parliament to protect the farmer—you want improvements, outlays, bargains, leases, fresh terms, Cheers.) A farmer before my committee will tell you that you may employ more labourers by breaking up land which has lain for hundreds of years in grass, or rather in mobs, to please some eccentric landowner, who prefers a piece of green turf to seeing the plough turning up its furrows. This coxcombry of some landlords would disappear before the good sense of the Earl of Ducie. (Cheers, and cries of 'Oh, oh, from the Ministerial benches.) You may derive advantage from examining men who look upon land as we manufacturers do upon the raw material of the fabrics which we make—hear, hear)—who will not look upon it with that