Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/12

 —till it shall have flooded the whole length and breadth of the empire, and swept away the last fragment of that monopoly-barrier which a tyrannous and sordid legislation has interposed between industry and its righteous reward, between hunger and its needed food, between the wants of one people and the superfluities of others, between the commercial and manufacturing energies of this mighty nation and the open market of the world. Of the ultimate result of this agitation no man can doubt who knows what a principle is, and what power there is in right to work itself victoriously through all the obstructions and entanglements of wrong. All things help it, as they help every cause that has on its side facts of experience and laws of nature. Good harvests and bad harvests, financial deficit, and income-tax to fill up that deficit (which does not fill it up), landlord violence and unreason, and ministerial moderation and plausibility—all things help us, if we will but help ourselves at the same time. Much work is to be done—a work of conviction for the yet unconvinced, and excitement for the apathetic; we must go on accumulating our facts and our reasonings, informing ignorance, and rending sophism; we must all work together, in a cause which is the cause of all, with warm English hearts and cool English heads—and the end will come, as surely as the rising of the morrow's sun will come.

And this is what I wish to show you this evening; that the end will come, and is coming. It is not my purpose in this lecture so much to expose the iniquity of monopoly legislation, or to illustrate, in any detail, the mischiefs which it inflicts on all our economical and social interests, as to examine the present state of the question between monopoly and free trade; to show you how far we have got in this controversy, and whereabouts we now are; to compare the state of the question now with what it was when this agitation began. We shall find that the progress of events has amazingly simplified and cleared the matter. A whole battalion of fallacies and sophisms has been routed and demolished. All along the lines of monopoly, we have posts formally surrendered