Gentlemen, a resolution has been put into my hands which I shall move with the greatest pleasure. That resolution sets forth in emphatic language a truth of the highest importance, namely, that the present corn laws press with especial severity on the poor. There was a time, gentlemen, when politicians were not ashamed to defend the corn laws merely as contrivances for putting the money of the many into the pockets of the few. We must,—so these men reasoned,—have a powerful and opulent class of grandees: that we may have such grandees, the rent of land must be kept up: and that the rent of land may be kept up, the price of bread must be kept up. There may still be people who think thus: but they wisely keep their thoughts to themselves. Nobody now ventures to say in public that ten thousand families ought to be put on short allowance of food in order that one man may have a fine stud and a fine picture gallery. Our monopolists have changed their ground. They have abandoned their old argument for a new argument much less invidious, but, I think, rather more absurd. They have turned philanthropists. Their hearts bleed for the misery of the poor labouring man. They constantly tell us that the cry against the corn laws has been raised by capitalists; that the capitalist wishes to enrich himself at the expense both of the landed gentry and of the working people; that every reduction of the price of food must be followed by a reduction of the wages of labour; and that, if bread should cost only half what it now costs, the peasant and the artisan would be sunk in wretchedness and degradation, and the only gainers would be the millowners and the money changers. It is not only by landowners, it is not only by Tories, that this nonsense has been talked. We have heard it from men of a very different class, from demagogues who wish to keep up the corn laws, merely in order that the corn laws may make the people miserable, and that misery may make the people turbulent. You know how assiduously those enemies of all order and all property have laboured to deceive the working man into a belief that cheap bread would be a curse to him. Nor have they always laboured in vain. You remember that once, even in this great and enlightened city, a public meeting called to consider the corn laws was disturbed by a deluded populace. Now, for my own part, whenever I hear bigots who are opposed to all reform, and anarchists who are bent on universal destruction, join in the same cry, I feel certain that it is an absurd and mischievous cry; and surely never was there a cry so absurd and mischievous as this cry against cheap loaves. It seems strange that Conservatives, people who profess to hold new theories in abhorrence, people who are always talking about the wisdom of our ancestors, should insist on our receiving as an undoubted truth a strange paradox never heard of from the creation of the world till the nineteenth century. Begin with the most ancient book extant, the Book of Genesis, and come down to the parliamentary debates of 1815; and I will venture to say that you will find that, on this point, the party which affects profound reverence for antiquity and prescription has against it the unanimous voice of thirty-three centuries. If there be anything in which all peoples, nations, and languages, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen, have agreed, it has been this, that the dearness of food is a great evil to the poor. Surely, the arguments which are to counterbalance such a mass of authority ought to be weighty. What then are those arguments? I know of only one. If any gentleman is acquainted with any other, I wish that he would communicate it to us; and I will engage that he shall have a fair and full hearing. The only argument that I know of is this, that there are some countries in the world where food is cheaper than in England, and where the people are more miserable than in England. Bengal has been mentioned. But Poland is the favourite case. Whenever we ask why there should not be a free trade in corn between the Vistula and the Thames, the answer is, "Do you wish our labourers to be reduced to the condition of the peasants of the Vistula?" Was such reasoning ever heard before? See how readily it may be turned against those who use it. Corn is cheaper at Cincinnati than here; but the wages of the labourer are much higher at Cincinnati than here: therefore, the lower the price of food, the higher the wages will be. This reasoning is just as good as the reasoning of our adversaries: that is to say, it is good for nothing. It is not one single cause that makes nations either prosperous or miserable. No friend of free trade is such an idiot as to say that free trade is the only valuable thing in the world; that religion, government, police, education, the administration of justice, public expenditure, foreign relations, have nothing whatever to do with the well-being of nations; that people sunk in superstition, slavery, barbarism, must be happy if they have only cheap food. These gentlemen take the most unfortunate country in the world, a country which, while it had an independent government, had the very worst of independent governments; the sovereign a mere phantom; the nobles defying him and quarrelling with each other; the great body of the population in a state of servitude; no middle class; no manufactures; scarcely any trade, and that in the hands of Jew pedlars. Such was Poland while it was a separate kingdom. But foreign invaders came down upon it. It was conquered: it was reconquered: it was partitioned: it was repartitioned: it is now under a government of which I will not trust myself to speak. This is the country to which these gentlemen go to study the effect of low prices. When they wish to ascertain the effect of high prices, they take our own country; a country which has been during many generations the best governed in Europe; a country where personal slavery has been unknown during ages; a country which enjoys the blessings of a pure religion, of freedom, of order; a country long secured by the sea against invasion; a country in which the oldest man living has never seen a foreign flag except as a trophy. Between these two countries our political philosophers institute a comparison. They find the Briton better off than the Pole; and they immediately come to the conclusion that the Briton is so well off because his bread is dear, and the Pole so ill off because his bread is cheap. Why, is there a single good which in this way I could not prove to be an evil, or a single evil which I could not prove to be a good? Take lameness. I will prove that it is the best thing in the world to be lame: for I can show you men who are lame, and yet much happier than many men who have the full use of their legs. I will prove health to be a calamity. For I can easily find you people in excellent health whose fortunes have been wrecked, whose character has been blasted, and who are more wretched than many invalids. But is that the way in which any man of common sense reasons? No; the question is: Would not the lame man be happier if you restored to him the use of his limbs? Would not the healthy man be more wretched if he had gout and rheumatism in addition to all his other calamities? Would not the Englishman be better off if food were as cheap here as in Poland? Would not the Pole be more miserable if food were as dear in Poland as here? More miserable indeed he would not long be: for he would be dead in a month.
It is evident that the true way of determining the question which we are considering, is to compare the state of a society when food is cheap with the state of that same society when food is dear; and this is a comparison which we can very easily make. We have only to recall to our memory what we have ourselves seen within the last ten years. Take the year 1835. Food was cheap then; and the capitalist prospered greatly. But was the labouring man miserable? On the contrary, it is notorious that work was plentiful, that wages were high, that the common people were thriving and contented. Then came a change like that in Pharaoh's dream. The thin ears had blighted the full ears; the lean kine had devoured the fat kine; the days of plenty were over; and the days of dearth had arrived. In 1841 the capitalist was doubtless distressed. But will anybody tell me that the capitalist was the only sufferer, or the chief sufferer? Have we forgotten what was the condition of the working people in that unhappy year? So visible was the misery of the manufacturing towns that a man of sensibility could hardly bear to pass through them. Everywhere he found filth and nakedness, and plaintive voices, and wasted forms, and haggard faces. Politicians who had never been thought alarmists began to tremble for the very foundations of society. First the mills were put on short time. Then they ceased to work at all. Then went to pledge the scanty property of the artisan: first his little luxuries, then his comforts, then his necessaries. The hovels were stripped till they were as bare as the wigwam of a Dogribbed Indian. Alone, amidst the general misery, the shop with the three golden balls prospered, and was crammed from cellar to garret with the clocks, and the tables, and the kettles, and the blankets, and the bibles of the poor. I remember well the effect which was produced in London by the unwonted sight of the huge pieces of cannon which were going northward to overawe the starving population of Lancashire. These evil days passed away. Since that time we have again had cheap bread. The capitalist has been a gainer. It was fit that he should be a gainer. But has he been the only gainer? Will those who are always telling us that the Polish labourer is worse off than the English labourer venture to tell us that the English labourer was worse off in 1844 than in 1841? Have we not everywhere seen the goods of the poor coming back from the magazine of the pawnbroker? Have we not seen in the house of the working man, in his clothing, in his very looks as he passed us in the streets, that he was a happier being? As to his pleasures, and especially as to the most innocent, the most salutary, of his pleasures, ask your own most intelligent and useful fellow citizen Mr Robert Chambers what sale popular books had in the year 1841, and what sale they had last year. I am assured that, in one week of 1845, the sums paid in wages within twenty miles of Manchester exceeded by a million and a half the sums paid in the corresponding week of 1841.
Gentlemen, both the capitalist and the labourer have been gainers, as they ought to have been gainers, by the diminution in the price of bread. But there is a third party, which ought not to have gained by that diminution, and yet has gained very greatly by it; and that party is Her Majesty's present Government. It is for the interest of rulers that those whom they rule should be prosperous. But the prosperity which we have lately enjoyed was a prosperity for which we were not indebted to our rulers. It came in spite of them. It was produced by the cheapness of that which they had laboured to render dear. Under pretence of making us independent of foreign supply, they have established a system which makes us dependent in the worst possible way. As my valued friend, the Lord Provost (Mr Adam Black.), has justly said, there is a mutual dependence among nations of which we cannot get rid. That Providence has assigned different productions to different climates is a truth with which everybody is familiar. But this is not all. Even in the same climate different productions belong to different stages of civilisation. As one latitude is favourable to the vine and another to the sugar cane, so there is, in the same latitude, a state of society in which it is desirable that the industry of men should be almost entirely directed towards the cultivation of the earth, and another state of society in which it is desirable that a large part of the population should be employed in manufactures. No dependence can be conceived more natural, more salutary, more free from everything like degradation than the mutual dependence which exists between a nation which has a boundless extent of fertile land, and a nation which has a boundless command of machinery; between a nation whose business is to turn deserts into corn fields, and a nation whose business is to increase tenfold by ingenious processes the value of the fleece and of the rude iron ore. Even if that dependence were less beneficial than it is, we must submit to it; for it is inevitable. Make what laws we will, we must be dependent on other countries for a large part of our food. That point was decided when England ceased to be an exporting country. For, gentlemen, it is demonstrable that none but a country which ordinarily exports food can be independent of foreign supplies. If a manufacturer determines to produce ten thousand pair of stockings, he will produce the ten thousand, and neither more nor less. But an agriculturist cannot determine that he will produce ten thousand quarters of corn, and neither more nor less. That he may be sure of having ten thousand quarters in a bad year, he must sow such a quantity of land that he will have much more than ten thousand in a good year. It is evident that, if our island does not in ordinary years produce many more quarters than we want, it will in bad years produce fewer quarters than we want. And it is equally evident that our cultivators will not produce more quarters of corn than we want, unless they can export the surplus at a profit. Nobody ventures to tell us that Great Britain can be ordinarily an exporting country. It follows that we must be dependent: and the only question is, Which is the best mode of dependence? That question it is not difficult to answer. Go to Lancashire; see that multitude of cities, some of them equal in size to the capitals of large kingdoms. Look at the warehouses, the machinery, the canals, the railways, the docks. See the stir of that hive of human beings busily employed in making, packing, conveying stuffs which are to be worn in Canada and Caffraria, in Chili and Java. You naturally ask, How is this immense population, collected on an area which will not yield food for one tenth part of them, to be nourished? But change the scene. Go beyond the Ohio, and there you will see another species of industry, equally extensive and equally flourishing. You will see the wilderness receding fast before the advancing tide of life and civilisation, vast harvests waving round the black stumps of what a few months ago was a pathless forest, and cottages, barns, mills, rising amidst the haunts of the wolf and the bear. Here is more than enough corn to feed the artisans of our thickly peopled island; and most gladly would the grower of that corn exchange it for a Sheffield knife, a Birmingham spoon, a warm coat of Leeds woollen cloth, a light dress of Manchester cotton. But this exchange our rulers prohibit. They say to our manufacturing population, "You would willingly weave clothes for the people of America, and they would gladly sow wheat for you; but we prohibit this intercourse. We condemn both your looms and their ploughs to inaction. We will compel you to pay a high price for a stinted meal. We will compel those who would gladly be your purveyors and your customers to be your rivals. We will compel them to turn manufacturers in self-defence; and when, in close imitation of us, they impose high duties on British goods for the protection of their own produce, we will, in our speeches and despatches, express wonder and pity at their strange ignorance of political economy."
Such has been the policy of Her Majesty's Ministers; but it has not yet been fairly brought to the trial. Good harvests have prevented bad laws from producing their full effect. The Government has had a run of luck; and vulgar observers have mistaken luck for wisdom. But such runs of luck do not last forever. Providence will not always send the rain and the sunshine just at such a time and in such a quantity as to save the reputation of shortsighted statesmen. There is too much reason to believe that evil days are approaching. On such a subject it is a sacred duty to avoid exaggeration; and I shall do so. I observe that the writers,—wretched writers they are,—who defend the present Administration, assert that there is no probability of a considerable rise in the price of provisions, and that the Whigs and the Anti-Corn-Law League are busily engaged in circulating false reports for the vile purpose of raising a panic. Now, gentlemen, it shall not be in the power of anybody to throw any such imputation on me; for I shall describe our prospects in the words of the Ministers themselves. I hold in my hand a letter in which Sir Thomas Freemantle, Secretary for Ireland, asks for information touching the potato crop in that country. His words are these. "Her Majesty's Government is seeking to learn the opinion of judges and well informed persons in every part of Ireland regarding the probability of the supply being sufficient for the support of the people during the ensuing winter and spring, provided care be taken in preserving the stock, and economy used in its consumption." Here, you will observe, it is taken for granted that the supply is not sufficient for a year's consumption: it is taken for granted that, without care and economy, the supply will not last to the end of the spring; and a doubt is expressed whether, with care and economy, the supply will last even through the winter. In this letter the Ministers of the Crown tell us that famine is close at hand; and yet, when this letter was written, the duty on foreign corn was seventeen shillings a quarter. Is it necessary to say more about the merits of the sliding scale? We were assured that this wonderful piece of machinery would secure us against all danger of scarcity. But unhappily we find that there is a hitch; the sliding scale will not slide; the Ministers are crying "Famine," while the index which they themselves devised is still pointing to "Plenty."
And thus, Sir, I come back to the resolution which I hold in my hand, A dear year is before us. The price of meal is already, I believe, half as much again as it was a few months ago. Again, unhappily, we are able to bring to the test of facts the doctrine, that the dearness of food benefits the labourer and injures only the capitalist. The price of food is rising. Are wages rising? On the contrary, they are falling. In numerous districts the symptoms of distress are already perceptible. The manufacturers are already beginning to work short time. Warned by repeated experience, they know well what is coming, and expect that 1846 will be a second 1841.
If these things do not teach us wisdom, we are past all teaching. Twice in ten years we have seen the price of corn go up; and, as it went up, the wages of the labouring classes went down. Twice in the same period we have seen the price of corn go down; and, as it went down, the wages of the labouring classes went up. Surely such experiments as these would in any science be considered as decisive.
The prospect, gentlemen, is, doubtless, gloomy. Yet it has its bright part. I have already congratulated you on the important fact that Lord John Russell and those who have hitherto acted on this subject in concert with him, have given up all thoughts of fixed duty. I have to congratulate you on another fact not less important. I am assured that the working people of the manufacturing districts have at last come to understand this question. The sharp discipline which they have undergone has produced this good effect; that they will never again listen to any orator who shall have the effrontery to tell them that their wages rise and fall with the price of the loaf. Thus we shall go into the contest under such leading and with such a following as we never had before. The best part of the aristocracy will be at our head. Millions of labouring men, who had been separated from us by the arts of impostors, will be in our rear. So led and so followed, we may, I think, look forward to victory, if not in this, yet in the next Parliament. But, whether our triumph be near or remote, I assure you that I shall not fail as regards this question, to prove myself your true representative. I will now, my Lord, put into your hands this resolution, "That the present corn law presses with especial severity on the poorer classes."