Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/25

 their prophecies have come true, point by point. All their principles have successively advanced, from being the speculations of the solitary student, into legislative recognition and partial legislative application. Free trade is in office, though free traders are in opposition. The wisdom of the Smiths, the Says, the Mills and Ricardos, has come forth from the closet of the philosopher, and now cries aloud in the streets and lifts up its voice in all places of public concourse: the broadest free-trade truths are proclaimed by the minister of monopoly, and await only their honest application; and the mighty League of England's bravest and wisest, with voice of thunder and a thousand arms that reach to the remotest hamlet of the land, keeps pouring into monopoly's hosts a steady, ceaseless, raking fire of facts and arguments, making the land ring again with the cry for justice.

No wavering, no halting, no falling short is here. Every step is a success, and every success is sure. Not an event in our commercial history and legislation but realises a free-trade prediction, or embodies a free-trade principle. All our prophecies come true. At the very hour the Corn-Law of 1815 passed, with the walls of the monopolist parliament guarded with fixed bayonets, it was met by that admirable Grenville protest, containing the memorable sentence, "Monopoly is the parent of scarcity, of dearness, and of uncertainty." And we have found monopoly the parent of scarcity, of dearness, and of uncertainty. Every line and syllable of that protest has come most exactly and completely true. I do not know that a single fact has turned up in all the history of this question yet, that has found the free-traders tripping. I have here a selection, made by Mr. Cobden, of extracts from the works of that man to whom we all owe so much, who was instant and urgent in his advocacy of free trade, at a time when free-trade advocacy was out of season, and who, now that it is in season, comes in again to finish the monopoly monster and be in at the creature's death—that writer of the ready wit, the iron logic, and the fervid eloquence, the exploder of fallacies and the render of sophisms, to whose "Catechism on the Corn-Laws" (or Honest Man's