ss--the
sacrifice gradually, one by one, of the principal articles of
furniture, till at last the well-conducted, honest, frugal, saving
working man finds himself on a level with the idle, the dissipated,
and the improvident--obliged to pawn the very clothes of his family-
-nay, the very bedding on which he lies, to obtain the simple means
of subsistence from day to day, and encountering all that difficulty
and all that distress with the noble independence that would do
anything rather than depend upon public or even on private charity,
and in his own simple but emphatic language declaring, 'Nay, but
we'll CLEM first.'

And, gentlemen, this leads me to observe upon a more gratifying
point of view, that is, the noble manner, a manner beyond all
praise, in which this destitution has been borne by the population
of this great county. It is not the case of ordinary labourers who
find themselves reduced a trifle below their former means of
subsistence, but it is a reduction in the pecuniary comfort, and
almost necessaries, of men who have been in the habit of living, if
not in luxury, at least in the extreme of comfort--a reduction to
two shillings and three shillings a week from sums which had usually
amounted to twenty-five shillings, or thirty shillings, or forty
shillings; a cutting off of all their comforts, cutting off all
their hopes of future additional comfort, or of rising in life--
aggravated by a feeling, an honourable, an honest, but at the same
time a morbid feeling, of repugnance to the idea of being indebted
under these circumstances to relief of any kind or description. And
I may say that, among the difficulties which have been encountered
by the local relief committees--no doubt there have been many of
those not among the most deserving who have been clamorous for the
aid held out to them--but one of the great difficulties of local
relief committees has been to find out and relieve struggling and
really-distressed merit, and to overcome that feeling of
independence which, even under circumstances like these, leads them
to shrink from being relieved by private charity. I know that
instances of this kind have happened; I know that cases have
occurred where it has been necessary to press upon individuals,
themselves upon the point of starvation, the necessity of accepting
this relief; and from this place I take the opportunity of saying,
and I hope it will go far and wide, that in circumstances like the
pre