Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/13

 to us, or maintained against us with but a faint show and make-believe of resistance, that had used to be relied on as towers of strength. Principles are enunciated, by monopoly's chosen advocates, which contain the whole of our case, and of which nothing is wanted but the honest application. By the dicta of a monopolist Ministry, and the acts of a monopolist Parliament, one heavy blow and great discouragement after another has been dealt to the monopoly power,—the fraud has been stripped of one disguise after another, and there it stands tottering to its fall, awaiting but one breath of an honest national indignation to bring it all down together. We are every day coming nearer and nearer to the point at which every man, woman and child in Great Britain will see the landlord monopoly to be a naked, unadulterated wrong and nuisance.

From the recent history of this controversy, we may make out a pretty long list of dead or dying fallacies,—fallacies once solemnly paraded before the world as elementary truths,—now for ever branded as stupid blunders, or impudent lies. I mean now to go over some of the chief of these; not intending so much to refute them, as to show how, in the natural course of events, they have refuted themselves, and, having done all the service they ever can do, are gone their way to the limbo of vanities.

First in the rank of these self-exploded fallacies, is that notion on which the whole of our landlord legislation is based, of its being possible to fix by law the price of corn. This is what legislation has been at for hundreds of years past, and never succeeded in doing yet. The more elaborate and ingeniously complicated have been the means used, the more signal has been the failure, the more manifest the impossibility—now the confessed and avowed impossibility. Within the last three centuries, some scores of Acts of Parliament have been made with a view to fix prices;—sometimes to fix them high, sometimes low—and by the most whimsically diversified expedients;—sometimes by imposing duties on importation, sometimes by offering bounties on exporta-