" Called upon by
the chairman, the Earl of Derby said:-
"My Lord Sefton, my Lords and Gentlemen,--We are met together upon
an occasion which must call forth the most painful, and at the same
time ought to excite, and I am sure will excite, the most kindly
feelings of our human nature. We are met to consider the best means
of palliating--would to God that I could say removing!--a great
national calamity, the like whereof in modern times has never been
witnessed in this favoured land--a calamity which it was impossible
for those who are the chief sufferers by it to foresee, or, if they
had foreseen, to have taken any steps to avoid--a calamity which,
though shared by the nation at large, falls more peculiarly and with
the heaviest weight upon this hitherto prosperous and wealthy
district--a calamity which has converted this teeming hive of
industry into a stagnant desert of compulsory inaction and idleness-
-a calamity which has converted that which was the source of our
greatest wealth into the deepest abyss of impoverishment--a calamity
which has impoverished the wealthy, which has reduced men of easy
fortunes to the greatest straits, which has brought distress upon
those who have hitherto been somewhat above the world by the
exercise of frugal industry, and which has reduced honest and
struggling poverty to a state of absolute and humiliating
destitution.
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