and use in this country was met. Under
pretence of encouraging our woollen manufactures,
laws were enacted to forbid cotton
being worn by gentle or simple upon pain of
fine or imprisonment. Cotton, associated with
Protectionist principles, has, among other
enormities, been the occasion of riot and
bloodshed. Whenever distress fell upon the
labouring population it was the fashion, not
much more than a century ago, to attribute
it to cotton. In the old time the ruin of the
country, and the irretrievable misery of
"millions yet unborn," was predicted, over
and over again, from the spinning and weaving
of cotton.

The most remarkable of these prophecies
was delivered by a criminal from the scaffold
on the eve of execution. He traced all his
crimes and misfortunes simply to cotton. In
the Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer for
1734 we find, under date of May 3rd, the
following letter:—

      "From Cork in Ireland."

"This Day one Michael Carmody was
executed here for Felony; upon which the
Journeymen Weavers of this City (who labour
under great Difficulties by reason of the
Deadness of Trade; occasioned by the pernicious
Practice of wearing Cottons,) assembled
in a Body, and dress'd the Criminal, Hangman,
and Gallows in Cottons, in order to
discourage the wearing thereof: And at the
Place of Execution the Criminal made the
following remarkable Speech:

" 'Give Ear, O good People, to the Words
of a dying Sinner: I confess I have been guilty
of many Crimes that Necessity compelled me
to commit, which starving Condition I was in,
I am well assured, was occasioned by the
Scarcity of Money, that has proceeded from
the great Discouragement of our Woollen
Manufactures.

"'Therefore, good Christians, consider, that
if you go on to suppress your own Goods, by
wearing such Cottons as I am now cloathed
in, you will bring your Country into Misery,
which will consequently swarm with such
unhappy Malefactors as your present Object
is; and the Blood of every miserable Felon
that will hang, after this Warning from the
Gallows, will lie at your Doors.

"'And if you have any Regard for the
Prayers of an expiring Mortal, I beg you will
not buy of the Hangman the Cotton Garments
that now adorn the Gallows, because I can't
rest quiet in my Grave if / should see the
very Things wore that brought me to Misery,
Thievery, and this untimely End; all which
I pray of the Gentry to hinder their Children
and Servants for their own Character's Sake,
tho' they have no Tenderness for their Country,
because none will hereafter wear Cottons, but
Oyster-Women, Criminals, Hucksters, and
common Hangmen.'"

The "pernicious practice of wearing
cottons," at present sustains one-sixth of the
population of this country, and gives comfort
to every nation under the sun.

YOURSELF AT TURIN.

A VIOLENT English exodus—all the one
hundred and fifty-one bells of the Hotel
Fedor ringing at once, and the Anglo-Saxon
tongue in full swing adapting itself with more
or less success to the exigencies of the French
and Italian languages, demanding boots, hot
water, soap, garçons, bottega, voitures,
breakfasts, vetturini, couriers, and bills, up and
down all the staircases and galleries—doors
banging like feeble thunder—a savoury
vapour rising from floor to floor—college men
perambulating the passages with alpenstock
and knapsack, and dodging about for
bedrooms—excited waiters, charging madly
through the living masses on the stairs, armed
with the terrors of hot-water jugs and boiling
coffee—a clattering in the court-yard of
carriages rolling in and out, with stately
milords in fur caps inside, and brigades of
corrieri raging madly among the heaps of
struggling porters, who are always intent on
carrying off the wrong luggage. The whole
of the peripatetic portion of the British
race, in fact, on the rush for home, for
Rome, for Jerusalem, Venice, Genoa, Sicily,
Albania, America, or the Temple, filtering
through the gateway of the portly mansion
into all sorts of conveyances, and with all
sorts of noises; and the coppersmith—who
always lives hard by every Italian hostelry—
banging away next door. It being quite
impossible to get a wink of sleep more, you get
up out of the comfortable bed of maize leaves
wherein you have sunk into a little sort of
coffin, you trip gingerly over the cold tile
floor of the huge barrack-like room and look
out of the window.

You are on the fourth story; but what with
entresols and high rooms, when you peep down
you are impressed with the belief that you
have taken up your quarters, for the time, in
the top of the most lofty building in the
world. In the streets below, a gaily dressed
crowd of foreshortened mannikins and
womannikins are drifting up and down on the shady
side with great vivacity—the tall white
houses opposite have, already, their outside
wooden blinds closed against the glare of the
sun—overhead is a sheet of purple-blue, just
set off by the streaks of one fleecy little cloud.
The street is cut off abruptly at each end
by the houses of other thoroughfares, for
Turin is built with great regularity in squares,
composed of gigantic mansions; and so,
having nothing more to see up here, you dress
and creep down the tiled and marbled staircases,
which descend in great rectangles to
the ground, taking care to hold on by the
bannisters to guard against the treacherous
smoothness of the footing. Pass across the