Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/15

 tricky Acts of Parliament, with the beautiful, divine simplicity of Nature and natural law. Nature, science, commerce, civilization, have resources for preventing sudden and ruinous fluctuations of price. Widen the field from which you draw your supplies, depend not on one climate but on all climates, let casual deficiencies here be compensated by casual superfluities there—this is Nature's "system of averages;" but Sir Robert Peel and Nature are not of the same mind. It will not last: the ministerial architect proclaims to the world the rottenness of his own foundation: "it is impossible to fix the price of food by any legislative enactment."

How much we had used to hear once about the importance of the agricultural interest, meaning by "agricultural interest," the rental of owners of arable land; the importance of the agricultural interest; the dependence of national prosperity on landlords getting great rents; the national need of cherishing and coddling the rent-interest, as the great payer of taxes, the parent and benefactor of all other interests. Well I all this is settled, done with,—gone to the bottomless pit of detected and exploded lies. Within the memory of the youngest man living, we have made two sets of experiments on this question of the connexion between the rent-interest and the commercial, manufacturing and fiscal prosperity of the country:—and each time, with results which no man living can forget. These results are nowhere more lucidly expressed than in a quarter where it must be allowed one must not always look for verities—in royal speeches. On the 24th of February 1835, King William opened Parliament with congratulations on "the satisfactory state of the trade and commerce of the country, ," at the same time " deeply lamenting that the agricultural interest continued in a state of great depression." And on the 4th of February 1836, we find his Majesty addressing Parliament thus:—