"This was the grand blow which struck at the root of our domestic happiness - this completed what the Corn Laws had begun - and like the tenth Egyptian plague, this exceeded all the commercial evils which had ever visited this once happy country.
"This machine produced a new epoch in our manufactures. One boy or girl was able to perform as much work as several handloom weavers - immense numbers, in consequence, were thrown out of employment. The handloom manufacturers were forced to reduce their wages, that they might be able to meet their rivals in the market. Reduction followed reduction until at this time, our wages are 80 to 90 percent less than they were 20 to 25 years ago.
"The power loom has done incalculable injury to the country - it has forced thousands to the workhouse - the land has been taxed to support them - rents have consequently risen - and, we venture to assert, that three fourths of that opposition which has been manifested towards any alteration in the Corn Laws may be traced to the Power Loom, and the recent improvements in machinery, as its parents."
And they concluded: "When we contrast our present circumstances with what they once were, and when we look upon our starving wives and children, and have no bread to give them - we should consider ourselves still more degraded than we are ... were we to withhold our complaint from His Majesty's Government, or to abstain from speaking in proper terms of the causes of the present unparalleled distress which exists amongst the weavers, and we implore you, Sir, by all the ties which bind the patriot to his country ... to use that influence which you possess with His Majesty's Government; towards procuring an amelioration of the condition of the most injured and oppressed of His Majesty's subjects."
Lancaster might just as well have saved his paper and ink. There was to be no Government intervention on wages and the handloom weavers decided they would have to find their own salvation.
There had been sporadic incidents of trouble already - manufacturers' house windows smashed, stagecoaches carrying businessmen stoned - but the storm really broke on Monday, April 24th.
NO RESPONSE ... this statue of then Home Secretary Robert Peel stands in Bury town centre, a few hundred yards from his birthplace and, coincidentally, from the spot where the 1826 march ended.
More than 1,000 men and women gathered on Whinney Hill at Enfield, near Accrington, many armed with pikes, cudgels and sledgehammers, and marched on Sykes's Higher Grange Lane mill two miles away, where they smashed 60 looms. Another group set off for Garnett and Horsfall's five-storey, water-powered Clitheroe mill to the North, but turned back when they were faced by a cannon outside the factory and Yeomanry Cavalry with drawn sabres.
The Accrington mob, meanwhile, moved to a small mill half a mile away, where four power looms were demolished, then on to Rough Hey, near Oswaldtwistle, where a further 20 machines belonging to the Walmsley Brothers met the same fate.
