Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/169



"has become striking even to themselves, I should think. When men have nothing to conceal they may talk freely; but not otherwise, especially if they have been found out. Sir Robert Peel, I believe, has admonished his friends that silence is golden; but the League has driven the squires mad, and they will not be advised—they will talk. Formerly they could say many things with impunity in Parliament that now they cannot say with the least safety anywhere. They used to tell the House how prosperous the farmer was, how happy and how contented the labourers were, and how they loved their lords. The farmers and labourers never heard what they said, and the Members for Wolverhampton were told, if they ventured to object, that they knew nothing of the farmers and labourers. Lately, however, the squires have been saying these things in the counties, and within earshot of the farmers. And at last the poor farmers all over the country have been roused into thinking for themselves. And they are asking themselves and one another, how it is that the Corn Laws can have been so beneficial to them, seeing that no good at all has ever been done them; that for the last twenty-eight years they have been very badly off—never certain of anything—in short, worse off than their neighbours. It is a little more than they can stand, to be told that laws passed to keep up rents are all for their good, and that the landlord cares nothing about his rent. The farmers have been questioning and thinking about this for the last year; and at last, as if they can endure it no longer, a thing has happened, the like of which, I suppose, has never happened in this country before: two real live farmers from different parts of the country, not known to each other, but both precisely the kind of farmers said to be benefitted by the"