Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/23

, for a monopoly protection which is already loosened, and in whose prolonged continuance^ under any form, no man of them has faith. The uncertainty, the suspense, the unsettlement—the feeling that all existing arrangements are but provisional and temporary—this is the real "panic:" and whatever settlement is quite sure of being a settlement, a basis on which they can build their future operations, a point from which they can start afresh with confidence and certainty, knowing what they have to do and what they have to expect, would be infinitely better for the farmers (and they are daily coming round to see and acknowledge that it would be better) than any more modifications which would by and by have to be re-modified, than the delusive, half-and-half fixed duty which every man knows would presently be unfixed again. The true way out of panic is the way into justice: the justice of absolute, impartial and perfect commercial liberty.

This is the present state of the question between agricultural monopoly and free trade. Monopoly stands yet; but it stands with weakened defences, on shaken and loosened foundations: every plea of right, necessity or utility on which it stands is formally repudiated and ignored. All that ragged regiment of sophisms, fallacies and mystifications, which used to make its body-guard, has been routed again and again, and is in process of being officially disbanded. All fogs and mists are cleared or clearing away; and now we stand face to face with the plain, bare, naked, unmystified question. Shall we be the thralls of the oligarchy any more? shall the life-blood of this mighty British people be sucked any longer by the horse-leech of monopoly, that cries. Give, give, and never says. It is enough. The monopolists are uncertain, confused, dumfounded, know not what they would do, nor what they should say. As the Times wittily and truly drew their likeness some months back, they are—

"Hampered, cowed, afraid to speak out, or get straight to the subject, they find that somehow or other, they cannot quite tell why, the old class of arguments are to be hustled away; their best friends all tell them they must