and there—as they tasted the sweetness of the
first sips of knowledge, and were taught to
think and reason—the seeds of future greatness.
I saw one young fellow of this sort
who was working a problem of Euclid on his
slate. These were not the men for whom it
was necessary that monitors should be
provided, part of whose duty it was to keep them
awake. Yet this was one of the duties of the
monitors, sleep not being allowed in school-
hours, and brain-culture having a tendency to
produce somnolency in some constitutions.
These old boys are good boys, and the
superintendent of this very school of which I am
speaking told me there had been no
insubordination during the whole six weeks that it
had been in operation. Old boys, indeed!
There was a man there fifty-seven years old,
and this was the first time he had ever been in a
school!

That same superintendent told me that the
ordinary theory that boyhood is the best time
for learning, by no means corresponds with the
results of his experience, but that it appeared
to him that men learned more quickly than boys.
This is easily to be comprehended. The boy
approaches his task, not of his own free-will and
feeling, but rather in a spirit of vicious
antagonism and determination to profit by it as
little as possible. The man comes to his
lesson willingly; he wants to know a thing
which it will tell him, to ask a question which
the book will answer, and so as the book
answers he listens and lays up what he hears
as so much gained towards the attainment of
that object which his whole soul is in earnest
to reach.

Among the advantages which we may look for
as likely to accrue, in after time, from the great
cotton failure of '62, will be the acquirement by
the men of habits of studying together and helping
each other, and those habits may be
preserved even when the distress which brought the
thing about is a thing of the past. It is a
very great thing for all the women to get
a knowledge of the use of their needles.
Such knowledge cannot fail to be useful to
them hereafter. It is a good thing, again, for
the masters and the men to be brought into
familiar contact, and for the employed to be able to
see that the employer takes a real interest
in his well-being, and does not look upon him
as simply part of the machinery of his trade.
Perhaps in future difficulties between masters
and men, the memory of kind offices
rendered during the "bad time," may come in
to the rescue, and help to make peace between
them.

It is a happy thing that the tendency which
existed in the earlier days of the cotton famine
to throw doubt on the necessity of a general
fund to which all England should subscribe, is
less heard of now. The cry of "raise the poor-
rate" is less heard lately. The weight of that
irresistible argument that just in proportion as
you raise the poor-rate you reduce the number
of those who can pay it, is beginning to be felt,
and we see that to impose a tax which that large
class, the small traders and shopkeepers, could by
no possibility pay, would do very little towards
supplying the funds so urgently required. It
has been well said that the peculiar industry
which is carried on in Lancashire has tended to
relieve the parishes in other parts of England,
by taking away large instalments of their poor
population and settling them on its own
townships.

Such wholesale distress as that in Lancashire,
so widely spread, so long continued, is beyond
the reach of townships or boards of guardians,
or any purely local machinery. And the
demand upon our charity is likely to be a long-
continued one. An attack of disease so sharp
and serious as this which has fallen upon
the cotton trade, is likely to be followed by
a convalescence which will not be the affair
of a day or two, but rather of many weeks
and months. It is not improbable that, when
the news shall reach us that the American
difficulty is near to its solution, some of us will
rush to the conclusion that the Lancashire
difficulty is over too, and that our help is
no longer needed there. Such a conclusion
would be a very false one. After a settlement
with America shall have taken place, an
interval of three or four months must elapse
before the mills can be got into thorough working
order.

The question—how far the mill-owners of
Lancashire have done their duty in the present
crisis, has been much discussed. There is too
prevalent an impression abroad that all mill-
owners and manufacturers are millionnaires, that
their works are on an enormous scale, that
their profits are equally enormous, that they
live in gorgeous palaces, and in a luxury
of which Londoners can form no idea. It
is doubtless true enough that a great many
of these Lancashire manufacturers have made
very large fortunes, and that some of them live
in considerable luxury. These are the men
we hear of, and these have come to be looked
upon as fair specimens of what the cotton trade
does for those who follow it as a means of
acquiring wealth and distinction. Absorbed in
contemplation of the riches of the cotton lords,
we have been apt to overlook another class,
who are very largely represented in Lancashire.
These are the manufacturers in a small way,
the men of little or no capital, the men whom
any mischance of the present kind knocks
over almost as utterly as it does the mill-hands
themselves.

As I was passing down a certain street in
one of the cotton towns, in company with a
gentleman well acquainted with the place and
its inhabitants, a young man with rather a care-
worn and anxious look passed us. "Do you
see that gentleman?" asked my companion.
"Two or three years ago he was possessed of a
sum of £25,000; the cotton trade was then in a
very flourishing state, and he invested the
whole of it in the building of a mill and fitting
it up with machinery. From the time that the