Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/20

 years, we have consumed two millions and a half of quarters of foreign wheat annually; that is to say, two millions and a half of the population of this country are dependent for their existence on foreign com; dependent, not on those products of a natural and healthy commerce which would come in as they were wanted, and when they were wanted, but on such chance supplies as we can pick up in a hurry when nobody is prepared for our demand, and can get huddled over at the lucky moment, in time for consumption before the scale slides again. "Independence of foreigners!" Have we forgotten, any of us, what happened three years ago, as a direct consequence of the monopoly that is to make us independent; when the Bank of England had to sue, cap in hand, of French capitalists, for a loan to save it from stopping? "Independence of foreigners!" This stupidity is at an end; we need no more spend strength in beating this phantom. The fact of dependence is confessed, the doctrine of dependence is openly avowed, as the basis of future legislation, by the highest monopoly authorities. Their own Quarterly Review tells us that no one now " is sanguine enough to suppose that the increased supply from the British soil has been at all proportionable to the increased demand," and asks—

All the old pleas by which the landlord monopoly used to be bolstered up, have received their quietus in the controversy of these last three years. They are all going, going, and will soon be gone. The cry used to be protection to the farmer. This will not hold together much longer. Farmers are fast finding out, under the tuition of the experience that teaches even fools, that the protection they truly want is protection from their own landlords; protection from that power of the screw, the political screw and the money screw.