Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/16

 So that it appears, according to the royal judgment, commerce and manufactures and the public revenue may be in a "highly satisfactory state," while the "agricultural interest remains in a state of great depression."

Since 1836, the experiment has been tried the other way. We have had six years of high rents—thriving agricultural interest, jubilant bread-taxry. And those six years have been years of commercial and manufacturing distress and financial deficit, bankruptcy, pauperism, and national atrophy,—reacting, in the end, in the shape of diminished power of consumption, on the great rent-interest itself. Another fallacy exploded; another cheat found out and marked, so that all men may know it again; another truth forced into universal recognition. On the 3rd of April 1840, Sir Robert Peel begged to assure the landowners that "their best friends were the manufacturers, and that the manufactures of the country, and not the Corn-Laws, were the main element of their prosperity and of the value of their land." And no later back than last November, we had one of the present monopolist majority indoctrinating his agricultural constituents with the discovery that "if ever a death blow is to be struck at the agriculture of England, it will be when the trade and commerce of the country have suffered an irreparable decline." Now these ministerial and landlord dicta, however unimportant in themselves as authorities, however unreliable as indications of purpose, have their value as showing that an impression has been made, that the country has not been stirred in vain. They mark the height to which the tide of opinion has risen. These admissions—reluctant and extorted admissions— of the representatives of the monopoly power, are signs that monopoly is shaken, and are invitations to all honest men to join hearts and hands to shake it down;—they seal the condemnation, and prophesy the swift and sure extinction of that system of monopolist legislation which is based on the assumption of the flat opposite. Here is progress: the question is advanced, and the power that has brought it thus far will carry it further. When we remember that the same man, who in 1840