Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/18

 it into the heads of those who cannot or will not think,) the rate of wages—in other words, the price of labour—depends, like the price of every thing else, on the proportion between the supply of labour and the demand for it. Wages rise, as a Lancashire operative once tersely put it, when two masters are looking after one man, and they fall when two men are looking after one master.

This wages-fallacy may be said to have died a natural death. The next which I have to mention, we may rather say has been put to death; at least it has been so battered that it may fairly be regarded as in a hopelessly moribund condition. I allude to the fallacy of there being peculiar burdens of taxation pressing on the landowners, entitling them to a monopoly by way of equivalent. The answer has been given over and over again, "If there are such peculiar burdens, take them off, and equalise taxation; or pension the landowners;—do any thing rather than make bread hard to come by." And a very good answer this is, supposing the assumption of peculiar burdens to be valid in point of fact. One of the many salutary results of this agitation, however, has been that the assumed fact has been more and more questioned, and suspected to be no fact at all. The assertion of peculiar landlord burdens has led to the investigation of some peculiar landlord frauds, and of a host of peculiar landlord exemptions; and the probability is, that as the agitation grows older, we shall hear somewhat less of the peculiar burdens affecting the agricultural interest. It is coming now to be more and more generally known (in consequence of the efforts made by that National Anti-Corn-Law League which is our best Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,) that the landlords have taken care of themselves in the matter of taxation, as in other things; that of the alleged peculiar burdens on the landowners, some are not burdens on them at all—as the tithe, which never was theirs since the days of Offa, king of Mercia, which no man of them ever inherited or bought, which is the State's reserved fund for spiritual and educational uses; that others, as the malt-tax, are borne by the consumer; that others, as the poor-rates,