dwellings of our agricultural labourers, without a single antagonistic agency to prevent their lapse into the lowest depths of brutish immorality. With scarcely an exception, wherever salt manufactories on a large scale have existed, the population employed in them has been the disgrace and pollution of the neighbourhood, a community almost unapproachable by philanthropy and irreclaimable by religion." This is truly a hard saying, and should be taken, I hope, "with a grain of salt." It may be true of many salt works, perhaps, in times past, of all of them. But this great establishment at Stoke Prior must be excepted from the rule; for the proprietor has entirely discontinued the employment of women at the works, and the change has already taken effect on the habits and social condition of the workpeople such a manner, it is said, as to produce a social revolution in the neighbourhood.
A few miles to the eastward of Bromsgrove is Redditch, an industrious, neat, rural little town, planted in one of the greenest districts of Worcestershire. In one salient respect, it is distinguished from every other manufacturing town in England. It has virtually absorbed and monopolized the whole needle-making trade of the kingdom and of half the rest of the world and more. Other towns have each taken the lead in some manufacture, but
