Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/168

 "whom," said Mr. Villiers, "I may term the apostles of Freedom of Commerce."

"You were never deceived," said Mr. Villiers, "by the jargon of Monopoly, which sought to prove, if it sought to prove anything, that scarcity is a blessing." To which fallacy Mr. Villiers once heard a working man give this answer: "If scarcity is such a good thing for the working classes, what a blessing no food at all would be!"

In the course of his speech Mr. Villiers gave some interesting illustrations of that strange hallucination by which the landlords jumbled up together in a sort of family party themselves as lords of the soil, the tenant farmers, and the labourers, and gave it the name of the landed interest.

"'The League,' says Mr. Villiers, 'is now grappling well with its two great opponents, Interest and Ignorance. It is facing those who assert their interest in the Corn Laws, and it tells them that the Laws are as foolish as they are wrong. It seeks to enlighten the ignorant and to infuse a little spirit into those who dare not call their souls their own. It has drawn the great men of monopoly from their retirement; it has brought them before the public; it has made them speak out and show cause why these Laws should not be abolished. And a pretty mess the great men have made of their case. The wisdom of their former silence"