Valentine Cunningham claims that "the trustees and members were the millocracy, the benefactors, the leaders of Manchester society: corn millers, silk manufacturers, calico painters, patent-reed makers, engineers, bankers and barristers; founders of hospitals, libraries, educational institutions, charitable funds and missions to the poor."(12) The congregation, needless to say, did not take kindly to criticism of the laissez-faire economy.
Yet she could see for herself that all was not well with the liberal-bourgeois-dissenting millocracy. It failed to feed, clothe, and house adequately the poor of Manchester in the 1840s.