Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/86

 Author:William Ewart Gladstone

ON THE DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF ENGLAND

(1879)

I speak of agricultural distress as a matter now undoubtedly serious. Let none of us withhold our sympathy from the farmer, the cultivator of the soil, in the struggle he has to undergo. His struggle is a struggle of competition with the United States. But I do not fully explain the case when I say the United States. It is not with the entire United States, it is with the western portion of these States—that portion remote from the seaboard; and I wish in the first place, gentlemen, to state to you all a fact of very great interest and importance, as it seems to me, relating to and defining the point at which the competition of the