On Tuesday, Mr. Cross, the Home Secretary, and Mr. Sclater-Booth,
the head of the Local Government Board, gave answers in relation to the distress existing in the manufacturing districts, answers in some respects of i reassuring kind. Mr. Cross read telegrams he had received from the Chairman of the Board of Supervision, Edinburgh, and the Mayors of Liverpool and of Man- chester, stating that though they expected great distress, they did not expect distress of a kind to which voluntary agency and the ordinary methods of relief would not be equal,—but this reply did not include the iron districts, from which the Home Secre- tary had not had time to get detailed information. Mr. Sclater- Booth's reply was more specific. He said that in the first week of December, in twenty of the largest Lancashire Unions, the increase of paupers was 13,482; in fifteen of the West-Riding Unions, 3,063; in the whole of Durham, 196; in seven Unions in Staffordshire, 1,141; in South Wales, 747; in the Metropolis, 52. In 1862, the year of the cotton famine, on the contrary, there were in Manchester, at the end of November, 39,023 paupers, where there are now but 6,423. That is substantial evidence that we have no absolutely unique distress on us, as yet, but it is clearly no proof that we have a right to hope, as Lord Beacons- field told us on the first night of the Session, that the worst is over. No doubt, the worst is yet to come.
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