en, in its
neighbourhood, such as Ince Hall and Crooke Hall. It must have been
a picturesque town in the time of the Commonwealth, when Cavaliers
and Roundheads met there in deadly contention. Wigan saw a great
deal of the troubles of that time. The ancient monument, erected to
the memory of Colonel Tyldesley, upon the ground where he fell at
the battle of Wigan Lane, only tells a little of the story of
Longfellow's puritan hero, Miles Standish, who belonged to the
Chorley branch of the family of Standish of Standish, near this
town. The ingenious John Roby, author of the "Traditions of
Lancashire," was born here. Round about the old market-place, and
the fine parish church of St Wilfred, there are many quaint nooks
still left to tell the tale of centuries gone by. These remarks,
however, by the way. It is almost impossible to sunder any place
entirely from the interest which such things lend to it.

Our present business is with the share which Wigan feels of the
troubles of our own time, and in this respect it is affected by some
conditions peculiar to the place. I am told that Wigan was one of
the first--if not the very first--of the towns of Lancashire to feel
the nip of our present distress. I am told, also, that it was the
first town in which a Relief Committee was organised. The cotton
consumed here is almost entirely of the kind from ordinary to
middling American, which is now the scarcest and dearest of any.
Preston is almost wholly a spinning town. In Wigan there is a
considerable amount of weaving as well as spinning. The counts spun
in Wigan are lower than those in Preston; they range from 10's up to
20's. There is also, as I have said before, another peculiar element
of labour, which tends to give a strong flavour to the conditions of
life in Wigan, that is, the great number of people employed in the
coal mines. This, however, does not much lighten the distress which
has fallen upon the spinners and weavers, for the colliers are also
working short time--an average of four days a week. I am told, also,
that the coal miners have been subject to so many disasters of
various kinds during past years, that there is now hardly a
collier's family which has not lost one or more of its most active
members by accidents in the pits. About six years ago, the river
Douglas broke into one of the Ince mines, and nearly two hundred
people were drowned thereby. These were almost all buried on one
day, and it was a very dist