Page:History of the Anti corn law league - Volume 2.pdf/192

 that they cannot compete with foreigners. (Hear, hear.) You bring Hong rows of figures, of delusive accounts, showing that the cultivation of an acre of wheat costs £6 or £9 per year. You put every impediment in the way of the farmers trying to do what they ought to do. (Hear.) And can you think that that is the way to make people succeed? (Hear, hear.) How should we manufacturers get on, if when we got a pattern as a specimen of the productions of a rival manufacturer, we brought all our people together, and said, 'It is quite clear that we cannot compete with this foreigner; it is quite useless our attempting to compete with Germany or America; why, we cannot produce goods at the price at which they do. But bow do we act in reality? We call oar men together, and say, 'So-and-so is producing goods at such a price; but we are Englishmen, and what France or Germany can do, we can do also.' (Loud cheers.) I repeat that the opposite system, which you go upon, is demoralising the farmers. Nor have you any right to call out, with the noble lord the member for North Lancashire-you have no right to go down occasionally to your constituencies and tell the farmers, You must not plod on as your grandfathers did before you; you must not put your hands behind your backs, and drag one foot after the other in the old fashioned style of going to work. I say you have no right to hold such language to the farmer. Who makes them plod on like their grandfathers? Who makes them put their hands behind their backs? (Loud cheers.) Why, the men who go to Lancashire and talk of the danger of the pouring in of foreign corn from a certain province in Russia, which shall be nameless-(loud cheers)-the men who tell the farmers to look to this House for protective acts instead of to their own energies—instead of to those capabilities which, were they properly brought out, would make the English farmer equal to—perhaps superior to—any in the world. (Loud cheers.) Because I believe that the existing system is worse for the farmer than for the manufacturer—because I believe that great good to both would result from an enquiry—because I believe that the present system robs the earth of its fertility and the labourer of his hire, deprives the people of subsistence, and the farmer of feelings of honest independence, I hope, Sir, that the House will accede to my motion for a select committee to enquire into the effects of protective duties on imports upon the interests of the tenant farmers and farm-labourers of this country.'"

The debate is thus described in the League:—

"Mr. Gladstone replied; and paid a deserved compliment to Mr. Cobden for the temper which characterised his speech. But of Mr. Gladstone's own speech what can be said: The President of the Board