Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/17

 assured the landlords, 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"—that this same man had said, in 1839, that the result of abandoning the Corn-Laws would be "a dull succession of enormous manufacturing towns, connected by railways intersecting the abandoned tracts which it would no longer be profitable to cultivate,"—when we put these two utterances together, we have not only a true measure of the intellect and morality of the man who just now nominally rules this country-we have the measure also of the advance of another and a higher power that rules him, and compared with which all prime ministers and landlord majorities, with their speeches and votes, their inane pomposities and tricky plausibilities, are but as so much weed swayed hither and thither by the ocean tides.

Another of these extinct fallacies is that of the connexion between the price of bread and the rate of wages. How we used to hear it reiterated, to very nausea, that if bread went down, wages would go down with it,—if bread rose, wages would rise too. It seems scarcely credible, but so it is: nd: more than eight years ago, a select Parliamentary Committee, the Committee of 1835, on the case of the Hand-Loom Weavers, broached this intolerable absurdity: the report of that committee discountenanced the repeal of the Corn-Laws, lest it should lower the wages of hand-horn weaving. We have now seen the end of this. The inane sophism—the impudent and audacious hoax, rather—has done its work, and is no more for this world. Facts have blown it all to atoms. Li 1835, com was under 40s.; since then it has been above 80s.: but what man's wages have been at any time in all his life double what they were in 1835? Amazing the audacity that could ever utter this paradox, and yet more amazing the stupidity that could ever believe it. It is just saying that the more bread there is in the country, the less will be every man's share,—and the less there is to divide, the greater will be the dividend. The fact is (as every man sees at a glance who thinks, and as a hard experience has hammered