Page:Six lectures on the corn-law monopoly and free trade.djvu/27

 and the myriads of women and children dead of over-work to buy monopoly bread—(not in factories only, by the way; well for them they have had the factories—better factory work and wages than the life-in-death of rural serfdom and seven shillings a-week):—we have had these things, the curse has worked, the hour is come, and the men are come to do the hour's work.

How this agitation has grown and grown upon us, since that 18th day of December, 1838, when the Manchester Chamber of Commerce first met, to "take into consideration the propriety of petitioning Parliament for the repeal of the existing Corn-Laws!" Manchester men meet for something else now than to take into consideration the propriety of petitioning. How it has grown upon us! bigger and bigger, louder and louder. We all remember how, for some two years and more, the allegations of present, and the predictions of coming distress were scouted by the Statesman who now for a while seems to rule us; "predictions without argument" they were, "apprehensions not sustained by official returns." Then the distress was softened down and explained away. It was temporary; or it was partial; or it was exaggerated; — the Savings' Banks returns, and the Custom-House export returns, [showed that there ought to be great prosperity. And then, when there was no denying it, they began "accounting" for it. It was the joint stock banks; it was monetary pressure; it was over-production; it was machinery. It was this thing, and that thing, it was every thing rather than the famine-law. At last it was found out and confessed that the accounts of distress were frightfully accurate: "frightfully accurate"—and they tinkered it up with a new sliding scale, and income-tax to match.

Year by year have we been repulsed from the door of the Legislature—our prayers for inquiry rejected, our allegations of distress disbelieved, our complaints of wrong scouted. And yet year by year this agitation has gone on, widening and deepening; gathering force, intensity and volume; drawing two ministries into its vortex; making a monopoly premier enunciate free-trade aphorisms as good as if they were