Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/42



effect of our restrictive corn-laws in hampering the commerce, depressing the manufactures, and famishing the people, of England, has been long known, and amply discussed. But that these laws are equally injurious to those classes for whose especial benefit they profess to be enacted—viz. farmers and farm-labourers—has not been so clearly made out, and is not so generally believed. The fact that any system of legislation should have the effect of diminishing the subsistence, and fettering the trade, of a great nation, ought, no doubt, to be sufficient to procure its immediate alteration. But unhappily it is not so; and in this country, as long as any numerous and powerful body of men believe, however erroneously, that their own interests are bound up in the continuance of unjust and partial enactments, so long will those enactments be maintained; or, if abolished, will be abolished only at the cost or the peril of a severe civil struggle.

The following pages, therefore, will be devoted to an examination of the real operation of our corn-laws on the welfare of farm-tenants and farm-labourers;—and if it shall appear, upon a dispassionate inquiry, that these classes have been, and are, not gainers, but sufferers, by these laws, we may hope that they will speedily join their commercial and manufacturing fellow-citizens in demanding their total abrogation. And first, as to their effect upon

I. At the very outset of the inquiry, it cannot fail to strike us as remarkable, that the very classes, professedly to promote whose interests the principles of equal justice and commercial freedom have been trampled under foot, are, generally speaking,—in the majority of cases, and in the majority of years,—about the most depressed and unprosperous in the community. If the system of legislative protection which has been so uniformly and unscrupulously followed were a sound one, the farmers ought to be the most thriving and fortunate of men; since for centuries back, but particularly for the last seven and twenty years, their prosperity has been professedly the especial care of Parliament; the agricultural interest has been the one to which all others have been at all times unsparingly sacrificed; and, if their measures have not answered,—if their end has not been attained, it can only have been either because their object was not attainable, or because their measures were unwisely adapted to their end.