VIII.] ENGLISH STRAW PLAT. 143 



bands of abject slaves. But let the landholder mark 

 how the change has operated to produce his ruin. He 

 must have the labouring MAN and the labouring 

 BOY; but, alas! he cannot have these, without hav- 

 ing the man's wife, and the boy's mother, and little 

 sisters and brothers. Even Nature herself says, that he 

 shall have the wife and little children, or that he shall 

 not have the man and the boy. But the Lords of the 

 Loom, the crabbed-voiced, hard-favoured, hard-heart- 

 ed, puffed -up, insolent, savage and bloody wretches 

 of the North have, assisted by a blind and greedy 

 Government, taken all the employment away from 

 the agricultural women and children. This manu- 

 facture of Straw will form one little article of em- 

 ployment for these persons. It sets at defiance all the 

 hatching and scheming of all the tyrannical wretches 

 who cause the poor little creatures to die in their fac- 

 tories, heated to eighty-four degrees. There will need 

 no inventions of WATT ; none of your horse powers, 

 nor water powers; no murdering of one set of wretches 

 in the coal mines, to bring up the means of murder- 

 ing another set of wretches in the factories, by the 

 heat produced from those coals ; none of these are 

 wanted to carry on this manufactory. It wants no 

 combination laws; none of the inventions of the 

 hard-hearted wretches of the North. 



233. THE KNITTING. Upon this subject, I 

 have only to congratulate my readers that there are 

 great numbers of English women who can now knit, 

 plat together, better than those famous Jewesses of 

 whom we were told. 



234. THE PRESSING. Bonnets and hats are 

 pressed after they are made. I am told that a proper 

 press costs pretty nearly a hundred pounds ; but, then, 

 that it will do a 'prodigious deal of business. I would 

 recommend to our friends in the country to teach as 

 many children as they can to make the plat. The 

 plat will be knitted in London, and in other consider- 

 able towns, by persons to whom it will be sold. It ap- 

 pears to me, at least, that this will be the course that 

 the thing will take. However, we must leave this to 



