Page:The corn law question shortly investigated.djvu/7

5 creased, or have foreign manufactures increased in a relative ratio? If neither of these have taken place, are not the premises of the repealers wholly erroneous, and their conclusions good for nothing? There is not a doubt, that so far from our foreign trade having decreased, it has most materially increased, which I shall show by facts and figures, which cannot be controverted or misunderstood. Before doing so, however, I do think that nothing can be more extraordinary than to assert, that because a flax-mill happens to be set agoing in Belgium, or a cotton-mill in Germany or Switzerland, or a woollen-mill in Saxony, that that is any proof of our manufacturing decline. Belgium and Holland, it is well known, grow the finest flax in the world—were the original seat of the linen and woollen trade centuries ago—and besides, are the most densely peopled country in Europe, and equally civilized as ourselves, consequently have all the adaptation for a manufacturing country. Can it therefore be surprising, that after twenty-five years' peace, they should turn their attention to manufactures, and the more civilized arts of life, which they saw this and other countries so successfully following? One would really be led to believe that our mill-spinners and manufacturers imagined that they had a kind of patent right to supply the whole world with their wares, looked upon the fact of a pair of stockings being spun in Saxony, or a piece of cotton or wool wove in Belgium, as acts of a most outrageous description, which, unless immediately put an end to, betokened their immediate ruin, and that of all England! Does it follow that the corn act is the fruitful source of all this misery, and that its immediate repeal is the only means of cure, and of increasing our home and foreign trade? some carrying their nostrums so far as to declare British agriculture a curse to the country, and that were not a boll of corn grown in the country, so