ABSTRACT
It will be a very natural question from any one who sees this compilation, What object could be attained, adequate to the devotion of so much time and labour to a work, not meant for publication, and which, when finished, though written with a manifold writer, must be confined to five copies only ? My answer is, that I can go much farther than even the Ettrick Shepherd. During a pretty long life, my attention has been given to wool and the woollen manufacture. Born and brought up at Leeds, that great mart of the wool and woollen trades, my early mercantile pursuits were devoted to them; I took a lively interest in every measure likely to affect them; and whenever questions were agitated, I took part respecting them. I was in early life imbued with the opinions which attached to almost every one then connected with the woollen trade; I considered the restrictions which had been almost for ages imposed on the exportation of British wool of vital importance; and when a tax on the importation of foreign wool was recommended, and it was suggested by the late Earl of Liverpool, then first Lord of the Treasury, that it would be only an act of common justice to the wool growers, if this market continued open for the sale of foreign wool, to give them the power of sending their produce to the best market they could find,—I well remember his lordship's reply to the remark of one of the manufacturers, that the prosperity of
the woollen as well as the worsted manufacture, depended upon keeping our wool at home, and the laws then in existence:—" May not those trades have prospered, and perhaps existed, in despite and not in consequence of those laws ?" The justness of that observation will be apparent in this compilation. In the year 1819, when the present Lord Bexley, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed in his budget a tax of sixpence per lb. on the importation of foreign wool, I made every exertion in my humble sphere to prevent that most injurious measure; and when by the power of the landed aristocracy in Parliament that tax was laid, I ceased not my endeavours to obtain its repeal till that object was accomplished; and when a similar measure was in contemplation in 1828, and a committee of the House of Lords appointed to inquire into the wool and woollen trades, I again took an active part, and might say, in the words of the Ettrick Shepherd, u the subject had almost made a perfect sheepfold of my understanding," and my friends, like Sir Walter Scott, " were bored with the everlasting questions of long and short sheep."
