Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/21

 with which the landlord monopoly crashes them into serfdom and pauperism; protection from the fluctuations and uncertainties of the sliding scale; protection from the changes and chances of a legislation under which they have had to complain to Parliament of "unparalleled distress" five times over within twenty-five years. With such teachers from their own ranks as Mr. Hope, (whose Essay on "Agriculture and the Corn-Law" will soon be in the hands of every elector in Great Britain,) the process of farmer-conversion must go on surely, and not slowly. The doctrine of "protection to farmers" is on the wane. Their own landlords have been busy at the work of conversion. At one agricultural meeting after another, within these last few months, we have had the Mileses, and Escotts, and Aclands, giving excellent Anti-Com-Law Lectures, (unsalaried by the League,) throwing the farmer on his own resources, teaching him that not to protection any longer must he look, but to his own energies,—and that diminished protection must be compensated by improved and more scientific cultivation. Landlords may find it convenient to forget these things now, and shrink from the spirit they have evoked—but that spirit is not to be laid so easily; the ice is broken, the wedge is in, the prestige of security and inviolableness that hedged round monopoly and protected protection, is dissipated. Events are teaching the farmers—the best men of their own body are teaching them—their own landlords, and the head of the landlord Ministry, and the acts of the landlord Parliament are teaching them that the doom of protection is sealed, and that to lean on protection any longer is to lean on a broken reed.

The present state of the question is distinctly and strongly unfavourable to all compromises, expedients and half-measures. The question is not any more between sliding scale and moderate fixed duty—moderate fixed injustice and impolicy—but between restriction and freedom, between monopoly and justice, between taxed bread and untaxed bread. We have got past the half-way halting-house of fixed duty. The more the fixed duty is looked at, the stronger the objections against it, and the weaker the pleas for it. As a