Commons Sitting of 25 March 1817

AGRICULTURAL DISTRESS.
Mr. Howellpresented a Petition from the freeholders and others of the county of Cardigan, stating the great distress arising from causes some general, others local, particularly the imposition of the duties on coal and culm, in that county. The Petition expressed its confidence in receiving from the wisdom of parliament every possible mitigation, and prayed for relief from the duties on coal and culm.
Lord Robert Seymoursaid:—I can, from personal observation, assure the House, that a degree of distress prevails in the county of Cardigan, quite unparalleled, as I believe, even at this season of general difficulty and want, in any part of great Britain. The landholders of this county are quite without a market for their produce, whether it consist in cattle or in the articles of the dairy; their corn too, was in the last instance so ill-harvested, that a great part of it is unfit for sale, and hardly useable to the growers of it. I need hardly say, that under these circumstances the land-owners receive little or no part of their rents; this, however, is not the only or perhaps the greatest evil which now presses upon this county, for in the hilly parts of it, as well as of the county of Carmarthen, its neighbour, which lie at a distance from 30 to 35 miles from coal, and in which there is not a tree or a hedge, the inhabitants are so completely in want of fuel, that few, if any, of the cottagers have seen a spark of fire upon their own hearths for the last three or four months. They are indeed allowed to boil their pots and bake their bread on the fires of the neighbouring farmers; but for this privilege, the farmers who are nearly as much distressed as the cottagers, are obliged to make them pay. Peat is the only fuel Used by the poor of the county in question; this they cut and pile or stack in the summer months, and the farmers carry it to their cottages, when they have secured their own corn. Now, unfortunately the latter part of the corn-harvest season was accompanied by a series of heavy rain, which perfectly washed away and destroyed their heaps of peat, threw down the oats, which are the chief bread-corn of that county, before the ear was at all filled, and by producing early autumnal frosts, very much injured the potatoe crops, so that they are nearly without food and quite without firing of any kind; and I do verily believe, that unless some un-looked-to aid shall be given to them, a great part of the population of the county I have been describing, will, in the course of a few months, be under ground, typhus fever and dysentery already prevailing among them. I have stated these facts to the House with three views; in the first place, in the hope, faint as it may be, of the House interposing to save the people I have been talking of from famine; in the next to further, as far as in me lies,
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the object of the petition before us; and, in the last place, to lead the attention of the House to the very temperate and respectful terms in which this petition is couched. The temperate language of the petition does infinite credit to the good sense, judgment, and taste of these suffering petitioners.
The petition was ordered to lie on the table.