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A Petition of the Manufacturing Hosiers of the Town and County of the Town of Nottingham, was presented to the House, and read, setting forth —
That the Petitioners, with great humility, approach the natural guardians of all that is valuable to them, and beg leave to represent the impending ruin of the trade and commerce of the said flourishing Town and neighbourhood; that the produce of the Manufactories tinder their direction has hitherto, in a very great proportion, been exported to the American Colonies, and on the demand from thence depends the employment of many thousands of their ingenious and industrious Artificers. The entire cessation of this important trade, has not only shut up in their warehouses a great part of their property in different sorts of Goods provided for the American market alone, but obliges them daily to dismiss from employment their dependent
Ordered, That the said Petition be referred to the consideration of the Committee of the Whole House, to whom the Petition of the Merchants, Traders, and others, of the City of London, concerned in the commerce of North America, is referred.
The Orders of the Day being read,
Petition of the Manufacturing Hosiers
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workmen, who have no resource but in the exercise of that trade; every day will add to the number, from the utter inability of the Petitioners to proceed in the accumulation of an useless stock; and a short time must consign great part of the most useful but most necessitous members of their community to absolute idleness, and all its dreadful train of evils; distressed in themselves, they have no hopes of administering that relief to their wants, which, in every ordinary exigence, humanity has prompted them to; and if not prevented by the timely interposition of Parliament, they see no possibility of repelling that poverty, distress, and ruin, in which the said Town and neighbourhood must be soon involved, whatever be the fate of the Kingdom at large. Abhorring the thought of stimulating the dissensions of this Nation, and urged only by sober important truth, interesting in its extensive operation to every individual, they humbly recur to the wisdom of Parliament in this their alarming situation; trusting that the faithful depositories of the people' s welfare will find some temperate and honourable means of conciliating the differences of the British Empire, which will revive the hopes of the Manufacturer, and enable him to call back into the arms of industry the poor distressed Artificer.