Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/24

 hold their tongues; it won't do any longer; they can't quite understand why or how it is that times are so much changed—indeed, nobody tells them, but so it is; the question is ruled against them; some of them must say something, but they are told that they must leave off saying what they used to say, and they don't know yet what else to be at."

In Parliament it is so with them; in the country it is the same. They preach free-trade doctrines one day; get lectured and scolded by their own press for desertion on the next; and recant and explain on the third. The argument is over. There is no argument. We cannot get up any argument. They give us nothing to argue about; the monopoly minister looks round on the monopolist majority that made him minister, with infinite coolness and complacency, and says, "I believe that on the general principle of free trade there is now no great difference of opinion, and that we all agree in the general rule that we should purchase in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest." There is no argument. Monopoly will not, cannot, dare not argue; has not one single point or principle to stand on. The whole question is in one great and glorious unsettlement. The Corn-Law has been thrown into what Sir Robert Peel calls the "Lottery of Legislation," and we have all drawn one universal blank. No human creature dreams of its finality. Every man with eyes in his head sees there is no finality,—there can be none. They whine and whimper, and beg for ten years' trial—only ten years. "Ten years' trial!"—it will not get two years' trial; it was tried, convicted and condemned before it was born,—condemned by fourteen years* trial of slides and averages,—condemned by the lips of the very nurses that cradled the sickly, hateful abortion, the unclean progeny of bribery and lies.

This is the state of the question as regards the monopolists:—all uncertainty and unsettlement: their old opinions disavowed, their old reliances shaken, the ground they stand on all hollowed out under their feet. How stands it with the free-traders the while? What mistakes have they made? From what positions have they been driven? Where are the sulky, coward concessions they have had to make? All