Page:Thoughts on the Corn laws, addressed to the working classes of the county of Gloucester.djvu/24

20 their not being able to procure shoes and stockings; and yet shoes and stockings might be dispensed with easier than food. A large proportion of the women in Ireland are not in the habit of wearing them, or at least they only put them on when they come to a fair or market, and take them off again when they start to return home, thus using them only from motives of ostentation, or, as they call it, to keep up a respectable appearance.

But if the food they subsist on was dearer as compared with the price of shoes and stockings, or, what is the same thing, if shoes and stockings were cheaper as compared with their food, this would no more be the case in Ireland than it is in England.

Every contrivance that tends to economise labour, occasions the article in the production of which it is introduced to exchange for a smaller amount of food. Cotton goods have within the last century fallen perhaps a hundred per cent. as compared with food or with money. These improvements, therefore, though they will not enable a day's wages to exchange for a greater amount of food, will bring within the reach of the labouring man many comforts that before were confined to the rich, if not wholly unknown.

Now, if the price of corn, and, with it the rate of wages, were permanently to fall, the condition of the labourer would go back a step. His food would remain as it was, but his comforts would be reduced as his wages fell. The only person that