Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/135

 capital with wheat below 40s. No landlord, having his estates encumbered, can make head against his liabilities with existing prices. No labourer can have any other prospect before him but starvation and crime under such a system. To have to pay some £200,000,000 a year (out of £600,000,000) to usurers and tax-eaters would be a dire enough infliction even with wheat at 60s. and all other commodities at proportionally high prices. But to be saddled with such a liability in the face of wheat at 36s., and of the like downward progress of prices and wages in every other department of industry, is what the country cannot bear. No country on earth could stand it: England will not stand it. A furious civil war—a downright revolution—must, we repeat, be the inevitable consequence of perseverance in such a system.

Our third resolution offers the only just and feasible way of averting such revolution. We cannot restore corn-laws; we cannot go back to Protection: it is too late for that. The country has no more sympathy with the landlords than it has with the money-mongers. It wants not to bolster up one interest at the expense of the other, but to compel both to adjust their conflicting claims without robbing the public. If parliament will insist upon "keeping faith with the public creditor," let it do so at the expense of the parties properly liable. Let the owners of realised property be the only parties responsible for the "National" Debt. Sir Robert Peel and Lord Brougham declared, amid the cheers of both Houses, that this debt is a bonâ fide mortgage upon the whole realised property of the country. Very well. Let the mortgagors, then, be made to do as all other mortgagors do;—let them either redeem the mortgage (as they may do), or pay the interest till they do. And if they will not pay interest or capital, let the mortgage be foreclosed, and their estates sequestered. This is but common sense and common justice. It is only the most shameless and hardened dishonesty that could saddle such a liability upon the non-propertied classes, seeing they never borrowed the money, had no advantage from its expenditure, and have had no assets left them wherewith to pay that or any other debt. Speaking of this monstrous injustice—the injustice of taxing the working-classes for the interest of this debt—the late Mr. Cobbett indignantly asked, "What would be said of a law that should compel the children to pay the debts of the father, he having left them nothing wherewith to pay?—of a law that should make the children work all the days of their lives to clear off the score run up by a profligate and drunken father?—of a law which should say to the father, 'Spend away; run in debt; keep on borrowing; close your eyes in the midst of drunkenness and gluttony; imitate the frequenters of Bellamy's all your life; and your children and children's children shall be slaves to pay Bellamy and others, with whom you have run up the score?' Would not the makers of such a law be held in everlasting execration? And in what respect does this case differ from that of a prodigal and borrowing nation which would make its working-classes responsible for debts they had no share in borrowing or spending?"