Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/14

 sometimes by bounties on importation, sometimes by prohibiting importation and exportation both—and finally, by the dexterous juggle of the sliding scale. All in vain; the experiment has invariably failed; and the latest and most ingenious experiment has failed the most signally. , in the Corn-Law Debate of 1840, thus sums up the operation of the sliding scale of 1828; which sliding scale was intended to keep prices at 64s. a quarter. Of the twelve years from 1838 to 1839 inclusive—

So it is now coming to be understood that Acts of Parliament cannot fix prices, any more than they can fix that on which prices depend—wind, rain and sunshine; it is understood and acknowledged. The fundamental postulate of landlord legislation is declared to be a blunder. That Statesman whose whole public career, from the day that he first tied himself to the chariot-wheels of the Orange ascendency, to the hour when he declared it to be sound political economy to " buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest;"—whose whole career has been a series of reluctant concessions, grudging retractations, and forced, tardy half-conversions; that Statesman who always looks one way and moves another, and whose only unviolated pledge as yet is the pledge to sliding scales, and slippery averages, with details indeterminate—declared on the 24th of February last year, that "it is impossible to fix the price of food by any legislative enactment— declared this at the very moment that he was making a law whose professed aim was to keep the price of corn between 54s. and 58s. There is the fallacy renounced, repudiated—at the very instant that it is taken for the basis of a legislative act; an admitted absurdity, a confessed impossibility is selected, after six months, anxious meditation, as the groundwork of a great political fabric. Will this last?—this tinkering up of the legislation of Deity, this meddling, by