This leads us to the mention of one of those topics of Mr Laing's Observations, in which his opinions seem to be more ingenious than correct; we allude to the apparently paradoxical view he takes of the ultimate consequences of abolishing agricultural protection.
Mr Laing is not an observer who runs any risk of being entangled in the obvious meshes of the Free-Trade net. He has seen too much of other countries, and has too just an appreciation of the practical value of politico-economical theories, to be deceived by the common sophisms of the Manchester dialectics. No one has more ably exposed the cardinal fallacy on which the whole system hinges—that a permanently low price of corn is necessarily beneficial to the people. In the former series of his Observations, published at a time when the common-sense of the country was beginning to give way before the bold and clamorous assertions of the League, he showed, by arguments sufficient to have convinced any one who would have listened to calm reason, that, in a country like Great Britain, the cheapness of imported corn, though it may enrich the employer of labour, cannot in the long run be an advantage to the working man. He pointed out clearly, too, the fallacy that ran through all the calculations of Dr Bowring and Mr Jacob, as to the supply of grain which the Northern countries of Europe could send us, and the price they could afford to take for it. Every week's experience is now showing the utter worthlessness of the large mass of estimates and returns compiled by these great statistical authorities, and confirming what Mr Laing foretold in opposition to all their calculations—that our principal imports would be drawn from the countries whose produce reaches us through the Baltic, at prices which, in ordinary seasons, must uniformly undersell the English grower in his own markets. The reason assigned by him is a very clear one, and well deserves the attention of those landowners and farmers at home, who are still flattering themselves with the belief that the rates and quantities of the grain imports of the last two years have been occasioned by temporary causes—that the importers must have been losing largely, and will soon cease to prosecute an unremunerative trade.
"Why cannot the British farmer, with his greater skill, capital, and economy of production, raise vastly greater crops, and undersell with advantage, at least in the British market, the foreign grain, which has heavy charges of freight, warehouse rent, and labourage against it? The reason is this: The foreign grain brought to England from the Continent or Europe consists either of rents, quit-rents, or feu-duties, paid in kind by the actual farmer; or it is the surplus produce of the small estate of the peasant proprietor. In either case the subsistence of the family producing it is taken off, and also whatever is required to pay tithe, rates, and even taxes, which, as well as rent, are not paid in money, but in naturalia—in grain, and generally in certain proportions of the crops raised. The free surplus for exportation may be sold at any price in the English market, however low; because, if it bring in nothing at all, the loss neither deranges the circumstances nor the ordinary subsistence and way of living of the farmers producing it. All their rents or payments are settled in grain; all their subsistence, clothing, and necessary expenditure are provided for; and the surplus is merely a quantity which must be sold, because it is perishable; and which, if it sells well, may enable them to lay out a little more on the gratifications and tastes of a higher state of civilisation; but if it sells badly, or for nothing at all, does not affect their means of reproduction, or even their ordinary habits, enjoyments, way of living, or stock. They have not paid a price for their corn in rent, wages, manures, and other outlay of money, as the British farmer does before he brings his corn to market, and have, therefore, no minimum below which they cannot afford to sell it without ruin."[35]
Mr Laing's intimate acquaintance with the habits and condition of those countries, which now seem destined to stand in the same relation to Great Britain as Numidia did to decaying Rome, has enabled him also to point out how vain is the expectation that they will permanently extend the use of our manufactures in proportion to our consumption of their corn. No one has more forcibly shown the insanity of sacrificing, for so vague a prospect, the prosperity of those classes who chiefly maintain the home market.
"The superior importance of the home market for all that the manufacturing industry of Great Britain produces, compared to what the foreign market, including even the colonial, takes off, furnishes one of the strongest arguments against the abolition of the Corn Laws.... The home consumpt, not the foreign, is undeniably that which the great mass of British manufacturing labour and capital is engaged in supplying. Take away from the home consumers the means to consume—that is, the high and artificial value of their labour, or rate of wages produced by the working of the Corn Laws—and you stop this home market. You cut off the spring from which it is fed. You sacrifice a certain home market for an uncertain foreign market. You sacrifice four-fifths for the chance of augmenting one-fifth. If the one-fifth, the foreign consumpt, should be augmented so as to equal the four-fifths—the home consumpt—it would still be a question of very doubtful policy whether it should be so augmented: whether the means of living of so large a proportion of the productive classes should be made to depend so entirely upon a demand which political circumstances might suddenly cut off," &c.[36]
Knowing the opinions held by Mr Laing to be thus adverse to that change of the law which virtually gave to the metayeur or proprietor of Holstein, Pomerania, or Poland, a preference in Mark Lane over the farmer of Norfolk or Lincolnshire, it was with some surprise, and some apprehension for the consistency of the author, that, in turning over the table of contents of the volume before us, we came to the following heading:—"On the abolition of the Corn Laws as a Conservative measure for the English landed interest."
The process by which he has arrived at the conclusion, that a measure confessedly so disastrous in its immediate consequences will ultimately turn out beneficial to one section at least of the landed interest, seems to be this: He thinks that, in the chief corn-growing countries of the Continent, cultivation is already so generally extended over all the soils capable of yielding any return, that the land cannot, in any circumstances, give employment to a greater number of the inhabitants than it does already; whereas Great Britain contains, in his opinion, a much larger proportional area of improvable soil, which forms a reserve or provision for the future increase of our population. A succession of bad harvests in Germany or France, or any considerable addition to their present population, would necessarily reduce these countries, he believes, to extreme famine and misery; because, the land being already fully occupied and filled up, and their surplus numbers having no considerable outlet in manufacturing or commercial industry, they have no resources to fall back upon in seasons of calamity. But in England there still remains a large extent of "woods, and groves planted and preserved for ornament, parks, pleasure-grounds, lawns, shrubberies, old grass-fields producing only crops for luxury, such as pasture and hay for the finer breeds of horses;" while a still larger area of arable ground is left uncultivated in Ireland and Scotland. Hence, as our population increases, we possess a safety-valve in our untilled soil which does not exist on the Continent; we have still the means of subsisting our daily-increasing numbers; and, so long at least as these means last, it is probable that the owners of the already cultivated lands will be left in the peaceable enjoyment of their property. But that possession would not have been secure had the abolition of the Corn Laws not been conceded at the time it was—the people might have driven the landowners from their occupations, as they did in the first French Revolution; "the free importation of food has averted a similar social convulsion, and has deprived the agitator and hireling speech-maker of his plea of oppression from class interests, and conventional laws in favour of the landowners."[37] These seem to be the grounds on which Mr. Laing regards the abolition of the Corn Laws as a Conservative measure—"which will preserve, for some generations at least, to our nobility, gentry, and landed interests, their domains, their estates, and their proper social interests."
As this line of defence seems to be a favourite one with the straggling remnant of that party, who, having been the immediate instruments by which the change was effected, nevertheless still venture to claim for themselves the title of Conservatives, we may shortly review the grounds on which it rests. So far as Mr. Laing's adoption of it is concerned, we may remark that the conclusion, taken by itself, is not absolutely incongruous with that disapproval of the measure of 1816 which the author has elsewhere expressed so strongly; because, in fact, he regards the question from two very different points of view. The political philosopher occupies a very different standing ground from a minister or senator. From his speculative elevation, his eye passes over the events and consequences nearest to him, and strives to penetrate the dim possibilities of the future; and if we look at human events from this ground, there are perhaps few even of the severest public calamities that are not followed by some compensatory, though it may be distant, benefit. If we can shut our eyes to the wretchedness and desolation caused by a great fire in a crowded town, we may look forward to a time when the narrow alleys and unwholesome dwellings, now in ruins before us, shall be replaced by roomy and well-built habitations, and we may perhaps consider the prospective health and comforts of the next occupants as counterbalancing the present misery. It may or it may not prove true, that the concession of 1816 will put an end to disaffection, and be remembered for generations to come in the hearts of a contented and grateful people; it may or it may not secure the aristocracy in the peaceable enjoyment of their patrimonial estates and privileges.
These, however, are results that every one will admit to be at least problematical, while there can be no doubt whatever as to the direct and immediate consequences of the measure. The most obstinate partisan no longer ventures to question the distress and ruin that is every day spreading among the larger section of the British people—the labourers, tenant farmers, and smaller landowners. And now the sufferers are told to make the most of what is left to them, and be thankful that they have escaped a revolution. It may, perchance, occur to them to question whether, in regard to their property at least, the chances of a revolution would have made their condition much worse than it is at present. Looking at the estimates of the depreciation of their possessions, which have been so triumphantly paraded by their enemies, they may be inclined to doubt whether an insurrection, or even a foreign invasion, would have cost them greatly more than ninety-one millions a-year. To the humbler and most oppressed section of the agricultural body, the congratulation on their escape from a worse fate than that they now complain of, may sound not unlike the exhortation of a highwayman who, having stripped his victim of his cash, bids him bless his stars that he is allowed to get off with whole bones, and a coat to cover them. It is true, indeed, that the pressure is not so severely felt by the lords of great domains—cannot indeed be so; for to the owner of £10,000 a-year the loss of one-fourth of his income—though it may oblige him to curtail his expenses in matters of external show, still leaves ample means for the gratification of his accustomed habits and tastes. But what comfort is it to the owner of a small estate, who is reduced to the necessity of selling it for what it will bring—perhaps for some such price as we see recorded in the transactions of the Encumbered Estates Court of Dublin—or to the farmer, who is preparing to carry his family and the remnant of his capital to some other land—or to the labourer, who finds his earnings cut down to 6s. 6d. a-week—what consolation is it to men so circumstanced, that the policy which has caused their ruin may possibly enable the great territorial lords to retain their overgrown estates, and the privileges of their order, "for some generations to come?" Mr Laing, observe, does not venture to anticipate more than a respite for them; and some will be disposed to doubt whether even their permanent safety, and the perpetuation of their rights, would not be too dearly purchased at the price we are now paying for it in the ruin of a far more numerous, and perhaps not less valuable, class of the community. We have often had occasion to express our opinion as to the alleged crisis of 1846, which is said to have been so opportunely averted—as well as to the principle which ought to animate a Government in meeting such difficulties. We are not of those who think the main business of a cabinet is to keep on good terms with "the agitator and hireling speech-maker,"—and that he is the wisest minister who is most adroit in timing his concessions, and casting off his principles at the moment they become inconvenient. Any seeming tranquillity, any truce with the enemies of constitutional order purchased by such a policy, can never be otherwise than temporary and precarious, because, it is insincere—insincere on both sides—a hollow compromise between principle and the expediency of the hour.
When we look to the reasons Mr Laing gives for the opinion we have been commenting on, they will be found to hang together rather loosely. They pre-suppose that agitation de rebus frumentariis, and specially the agitation of the League, could only proceed from the pressure of want. Now, the very week that the Bill passed, the price of wheat was 52s. 2d.—which, curiously enough, is the exact sum fixed on by Mr Wilson as the natural price of wheat in England. At that time beef was selling in London at 7s. 3d. a stone. The corn averages for the whole previous year were a fraction over 49s. 6d. The average of the ten previous years was 56s. 6d., which, by another strange coincidence, corresponds to a sixpence with the price admitted by Sir Robert Peel. With such rates of the chief articles of subsistence, how can it be said that scarcity was the cause of the Corn-Law agitation? The idea of famishing millions imploring bread may have been an appropriate figure of speech in the rabid cantations of an Ebenezer Elliot; but who seriously believes that the cry of "abolition" was the voice of a starving people, and not the mere watchword of a faction? Scarcity was only the pretext for the clamour before which the Government yielded; and is there any one weak or sanguine enough to believe that, by removing that pretext, and yielding to that clamour, we have silenced the voice of discontent, and ruined the trade of the demagogue? Is agrarian agitation no longer possible? Can we shut our eyes to what is even now passing in the north of Ireland? The fire which we are told was finally extinguished in 1846, has reappeared in that quarter, and already the sparks from it are kindling up in other parts of the empire. The demand for what is called "fixity of tenure" is but the germ of a new agitation, the future phases of which, unless it shall be met in a very different spirit from that which has characterised our recent policy, it is not difficult to foresee. It will become the new rallying point of disaffection—the centre of inflammatory action. The old machinery of the League will be set up anew, and the passions of the people will again be excited by a course of studious and systematic irritation. Ministers will hesitate, deprecate, and dally with the difficulty; rival statesmen will by turns fan the flame, or feebly resist it, as suits the party tactics of the day; until, at length, some one more yielding or less scrupulous than his competitors, will discover that the demand is founded on justice and sound policy—will concede all that is asked of him, and finally will turn round complacently and claim the gratitude of his country for having saved it from a revolution.