Choose your motto. "Advance" or "recede." Many countries are watching with anxiety the selection you may make. Determine for "advance," and it will be the watchword which will animate and encourage in every state the friends of liberal commercial policy. Sardinia has taken the lead. Naples is relaxing her protective duties and favoring British produce. Prussia is shaken in her adherence to restriction. The government of France will be strengthened; and backed by the intelligence of the reflecting, and by conviction of the real welfare of the great body of the community, will perhaps ultimately prevail over the self-interest of the commercial and manufacturing aristocracy which now predominates in her chambers. Can you doubt that the United States will soon relax her hostile tariff, and that the friends of a freer commercial intercourse—the friends of peace between the two countries—will hail with satisfaction the example of England?
This night, then—if on this night the debate shall close—you will have to decide what are the principles by which your commercial policy is to be regulated. Most earnestly, from a deep conviction, founded not upon the limited experience of three years alone, but upon the experience of the results of every relaxation of restriction and prohibition, I counsel you to set the example of liberality to other countries. Act thus, and it will be in perfect consistency with the course you have hitherto taken. Act thus, and you will provide an additional guarantee for the continued contentment, and happiness, and well-being of the great body of the people. Act thus, and you will have done whatever human sagacity can do for the promotion of commercial prosperity.
You may fail. Your precautions may be unavailing. They may give no certain assurance that mercantile and manufacturing prosperity will continue without interruption. It seems to be incident to great prosperity that there shall be a reverse—that the time of depression shall follow the season of excitement and success. That time of depression must perhaps return; and its return may be coincident with scarcity caused by unfavorable seasons. Gloomy winters, like those of 1841 and 1842, may again set in. Are those winters effaced from your memory? From mine they never can be…..
These sad times may recur. "The years of plenteous-ness may have ended," and "the years of dearth may have come"; and again you may have to offer the unavailing expressions of sympathy, and the urgent exhortations to patient resignation…..
When you are again exhorting a suffering people to fortitude under their privations, when you are telling them, "These are the chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficent purpose, it may be, to humble our pride, or to punish our unfaithfulness, or to impress us with the sense of our own nothingness and dependence on His mercy," when you are thus addressing your suffering fellow-subjects, and encouraging them to bear without repining the dispensations of Providence, may God grant that by your decision of this night you may have laid in store for yourselves the consolation of reflecting that such calamities are, in truth, the dispensations of Providence—that they have not been caused, they have not been aggravated, by laws of man, restricting, in the hour of scarcity, the supply of food!
VII
LORD SHAFTESBURY INTRODUCTION TO THE CAUSE OF LABOR
[In February, 1833, when the failure of Michael Sadler to be returned to Parliament left his "Short Time Bill" without a champion, Lord Ashley (afterwards known as Lord Shaftesbury) was asked to lead the cause. His decision was thus announced to the local "Short Time Committees" in the manufacturing towns.]
Rev. G. S. Bull to Short Time Committees.
London, February 6, 1833.