§ Lord Miltonsaid, he would take that opportunity of requesting an answer to the question which he had, on a former night, put to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, as to whether it was the intention of government to propose any grant for the Relief of the Distressed Manufacturers. He repeated his question then, as he feared he should not on that evening have the legitimate opportunity of ascertaining the intention of the government through the motion of the hon. member for Coventry, which he supposed would not come on. He considered that the calamities under which the manufacturing districts were labouring were of a nature to justify the interference of parliament.
Mr. Secretary Canningobserved, that 1283 he was perfectly ready to answer the question put to him by the noble lord, by stating that his majesty's ministers had no intention of proposing to parliament any proposition of the nature alluded to by the noble lord; and in making that statement he wished that he might not be understood as saying that no possible case could arise in which it would be politic in the government to step in with pecuniary aid, but that such an interference could only be justified by an inevitable and overwhelming necessity; and he felt assured that the House would agree with him, when he stated, that the circumstances of the present distresses in the manufacturing districts were not such as to warrant a departure from that legitimate principle, which prohibited the grant of public money towards the relief of partial distresses. Those distresses had been borne with exemplary patience and fortitude, and that consideration had raised a desire in the government to contribute to their mitigation, even at the expense of an acknowledged principle. But relief had come from another source: private charity had flowed in with so rapid a stream as greatly to remove the difficulty under which the government laboured. That stream was yet unexhausted. It continued to flow, and would increase when there ceased to be any uncertainty as to the part that the government would take, as he knew that private contribution had been restrained from an idea that there would be no necessity for it. He therefore felt it to be his duty to state that, after the fullest and most anxious consideration which the government had bestowed on the subject, it had come to the determination of not proposing any grant of public money, as such a grant would have the effect of checking the tide of private charity. The accounts from the distressed districts assumed now a more consolatory appearance, and there was every reason to hope that the worst had been experienced; but still they were not of such a nature as to supersede the effects of private bounty, but only to remove the overruling necessity for the interference of the state. If, therefore, in the present case, parliament should offer aid, they could not withhold it in future, whenever any particular distress existed. He felt persuaded that the resolution which the government had come to was founded in found policy, and he trusted that the 1284 country and the House would do them the justice to admit that an insensibility to the distresses of the manufacturing classes formed no feature in the resolution, which ministers had adopted on the present occasion.