Gloomy predictions are made respecting the shipping trade.
Agriculture is rapidly becoming extinguished.
English pluck, capital, and credit are struggling manfully against disaster, but the struggle cannot last much longer; capital is sustained by credit; and credit is receiving heavy and repeated blows from unremunerative industries. Meanwhile, high wages and extravagant habits are not the best training for the millions that will be thrown out of employment when the crash comes.
Your prophet, Adam Smith, though an advocate for the repeal of the Corn Laws, foresaw and forewarned you of these consequences, as follows:—
“If the free importation of Foreign manufactures were permitted, several of the Home manufactures would probably suffer, and some of them perhaps go to ruin altogether.”[54]
Verily, my Friend, you are like a shipowner who congratulates himself that his sailors were never so well off before—never went aloft less—never kept fewer watches—never remained so much in their warm beds: meanwhile the devoted ship is drifting slowly, but surely, on to the rocks.[55]
FOOTNOTES:
[52] ‘Political Economy,’ by J. S. Mill, Bk. I. Chap. V.
[53] Mr. S. Smith, M.P., who is connected with cotton industry, has recently stated that “with all the toil and anxiety of those who had conducted it, the cotton industry of Lancashire, which gave maintenance to two or three millions of people, had not earned so much as 5 per cent. during the past ten years. The employers had a most anxious life; and many, after struggling for years, had become bankrupt, and some had died of a broken heart;” and he added that he believed “most of the leading trades to be in the same condition.”