Chapter XXII (7)

The adoption of what, by a pleasant fiction, is called “Free Trade,” was, at the time, described by some of our wisest statesmen as “an experiment.” This was the expression used by the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis of Lansdowne in reference to free trade in corn; and the Earl of Aberdeen, at an agricultural meeting in Scotland, characterised it as a “problem.” The language was ominous! To “experiment” on the largest interest in the kingdom, and that which admittedly forms the very basis of national prosperity—to experiment on the capital, industry, and welfare of millions of the most loyal and best conditioned of the people—was surely a very daring enterprise in the annals of modern statesmanship. And yet there was candour in the confession. Tremendous was the “problem;” but in describing it as such, the parties implied a readiness, in the event of failure, to retrace their steps, and to retrieve the injury they had been instrumental in inflicting. But, as an “experiment,” is Free Trade to be ranged in the same category with one of those problems in morals or in politics to which allusion has been made, and which, from their very nature, never can admit of such a certain solution as to render the question at issue no longer doubtful or debatable? Assuredly not. It is certainly an experiment, the success or failure of which can be tested by its fruits. It is, in truth, an _experimentum crucis_, the results of which admit of ocular demonstration. It may be allowed, indeed, that the Free Trade policy is a system so vast and complex in itself, and that the influences which contribute to eliminate its results, more especially in the department of agriculture, are so many and various, and so slow and operose in developing themselves, that it would require some time to elapse ere honest but inexperienced observers could be convinced of the actual effect of the change. There can be no doubt, for instance, that the unpreparedness of the Continental nations to avail themselves of the boon bestowed on them by the British Legislature with such cosmopolitan liberality, and the diminution of human food caused by the potato failure, contributed for three years to retard the full effect of Free Trade on the agriculture of the kingdom.[6] After the natural consequences of the change began to appear, the depreciation of agricultural produce was alleged, by the admirers of the Free Trade policy, to be temporary. This was a dishonest pleading upon the part of these gentlemen; for the avowed object of their own measure, in abolishing the Corn Laws, was permanently to cheapen agricultural produce. If it was not, they were duping the manufacturing world; and if it was, they were now deceiving the agricultural community, by asserting that the low price of corn was temporary and evanescent; and on one or other of the horns of this dilemma they impaled themselves. In such disingenuous and ambidexter see-saw it is lamentable to think that her Majesty’s ministers have largely indulged. In the Royal Speech of 1850 the Ministry talked lightly of the “complaints” of the agriculturists;

“And, without sneering, taught the rest to sneer.”

The organs of the Free Trade press took the hint, and enjoyed a brilliant season of sneering at the Bœotian stupidity and ridiculous melancholy of the “agricultural mind.” These were halcyon times for the wits; for then to call a farmer “a chawbacon,” “a clodpole,” “a horse-shoe idiot,” was enough to prove you endowed with the _mens divinior_. The experiment, however, proceeds;—another year passes away and contributes its quota of evidence. A host of new facts have emerged in the interval; and the truth has assumed so prominent an aspect that Lord John Russell’s courage, great as it is, begins to quail, and he feels it necessary to pitch his voice in a lower key. Accordingly, in the Queen’s Speech of 1851, he admits that “the owners and occupants of land are suffering,” to the great consternation and manifest inconvenience of the Free Trade press. To have allowed that the suffering was permanent in its nature, would have falsified predictions of his own but lately broached, and would have compelled him, at the very least, to devote the surplus revenue at his command to the relief of the agricultural suffering. He suggested, therefore, that the suffering was temporary, and incidental to the state of transition in which the agricultural interest was placed; and the other classes being prosperous, (so he thought,) he expressed his conviction that the agricultural community must soon participate in the general prosperity. The Minister has never propounded the reasons on which this conviction is based, and it may be presumptuous in us to divine what they may be. Probably he meant to imply that the prosperity of other classes would enable them to consume more bread and butcher-meat, and would thus increase the demand for the products of agriculture. According to the Free Trade writers, the nation, during the past year, has consumed from nine to ten millions of quarters of bread-stuffs more than it ever did; but it would seem that John Bull’s stomach is an abyss of measureless capacity; that his appetite is insatiable, and his powers of deglutition and digestion are unbounded. But if it were so, how would the national voracity benefit the British agriculturist, if unlimited supplies of corn and cattle, at the present prices, as is now proved, can be poured into our market? The logic of the Minister, too, seems not very conclusive or infallible. There are about eight millions in the United Kingdom directly dependent on agriculture for their support, and there may be about double that number whose prosperity is indissolubly associated with the prosperity of agriculture; and that might seem an inference somewhat more reasonable and natural than what the Prime Minister enunciated, which should suppose that the prosperous classes might ere long participate in the suffering of the agricultural community; that an epidemic so widely spread might communicate contagion to the healthy; that a disease infesting the vital function might extend itself to the extremities of the body politic. But the suffering is the concomitant of “a state of transition.” The expression is happily vague and mysterious. A state of transition from what, to what? is the question which the experimenters are bound to consider and to answer. Infallibly it is a state of transition; but a state of transition from remunerative prices to prices ruinously low—to invested capital diminished and impaired—to profits obliterated and gone—to suffering severe and enduring. But in a little while a farther change seems to take place on the mind of our statesmen, whose opinions on the agricultural depression are plainly in a state of transition, and who seem to be watching, in blank ignorance, the evolutions of their own experiment. The Chancellor of the Exchequer intimated his intention to devote part of the surplus revenue to the relief of the occupants and owners of the soil. But if the calamity was temporary and evanescent, why prescribe a cure that was only admissible in the case of the suffering being constitutional and permanent? A temporary grant might, indeed, have been warrantable; but this was not the measure meditated. To alienate surplus revenue for the purpose of meeting any ephemeral evil, under which any portion of the community may for a time be labouring, is surely the merest financial charlatanry. Very true, Sir Charles Wood withdrew his proffered boon; and for a reason so exquisitely ludicrous, that the nation for a moment was convulsed with laughter. He withdrew it because the gratitude of the agriculturists was not sufficiently intense, and because they had not proclaimed his generosity in pæans of praise sufficiently enthusiastic! But even after Sir Charles Wood’s ridiculous recalcitration, Parliament has passed two measures, trivial in themselves, but implying that the sufferings of the agriculturists are permanent, and intended to minister to them some modicum of relief.[7] Upon the whole, we may now take it for granted, that the present Parliament at last allow that the agricultural depression is enduring—that the price of grain is permanently lowered. It is of consequence to fix and determine this position in the discussion. The manifold delusions long circulated on this subject will not now avail. The low price of grain was at one time ascribed to an abundant harvest; at another, the potato failure—the universal solvent of every agricultural anomaly—was the cause; now it was temporary and would pass away; and now it is the concomitant of a state of transition. The period for such poor drivel is gone. On the part of the Free Trade press it was essentially dishonest and uncandid; the avowed object of their policy being to cheapen the loaf, and permanently to lower the price of agricultural produce. The Free Trade writers, however, seem now unanimously to admit the permanency of the change effected on the price of grain by the Free Trade measures. The agricultural editorials of the _Times_ are based upon this change as an admitted fact. A late writer in the _Edinburgh Review_, in commenting upon Sir E. Bulwer’s _Letters_, proceeds upon the same hypothesis. Our Free Trade pamphleteers manfully speculate upon the present low prices of grain, not only as that which is undeniable, but as what must permanently continue. “The experiment,” then, has proceeded so far as to develop one result so clearly, as to admit neither of debate nor denial. The value of grain grown in the United Kingdom is permanently reduced by the compulsion of an Act of Parliament; and the permanency of the reduction is as certain as anything can be that is dependent upon the seasons.

The permanency of the fall being admitted, there fortunately is no room for mystifying the extent of that fall. The fiars prices of grain, judicially determined every year in the several counties of Scotland, and the averages struck in the great grain markets of England, furnish unchallengeable data, whereby the amount of the fall may be certainly estimated. Without encumbering the reader with statistics, we may mention, that after a careful collation of the prices, it would seem that the prices of grain during the last two years of unmodified Free Trade have fallen about one-third, when contrasted with its average price during the twenty preceding years of Protection. In several of the counties of Scotland, which we have compared, the fall ranges from 30 to 35 per cent. In the great county of Perth, the Yorkshire of Scotland, and which may be quoted as a fair sample of the Scottish corn market, the reduction amounts to a fraction more than 33 per cent. It is unnecessary to dwell upon this part of the case, because we are not aware that the amount of the fall in the price of grain has ever been questioned. Indeed, it is scarcely possible that it could be so. It was the permanency of the reduction that the Free Trade theorists so long and so strenuously denied—thus repudiating, with reckless effrontery, the promised blessing of their own policy.

The vital question immediately arises, “Can our national agriculture withstand such a tremendous diminution of its annual income? The husbandman, from the very nature of his art, cannot be speedily ruined, but can he ultimately survive such an abstraction of his means?” The highfarming fraternity were the first to volunteer a remedy, and to solve the question. With flippant confidence they propounded their panacea as the substitute for Protection; but in what high farming consisted, not two of the teachers were agreed. One summoned the farmer to grow more corn, another enjoined him to make green crop his sheet-anchor, and the recreant knight of Netherby avows his partiality for pasturage. Bullocks were “ungrateful fellows,” but pigs would do it. Sheep on pasture were profitless, but sheep on “boards” would pay. The mysterious powers of “ammonia” promised to meet the emergency, when, lo! Porcius interposed, and converted the subtle agent into laughing-gas! One wonders how such idle puerilities, such quackish nostrums, could have deluded, even for a day, any portion of the community, however ignorant of rural affairs; and yet it is undeniable that they served to mystify the question, and to prolong for a little while the reign of delusion. The high farming prescriptions, as a remedy and compensation for the 35 per cent of loss on the value of agricultural produce, were most effectually exposed, and they have passed away as entirely as Cobbet’s crotchet about locusttrees, or the cow-cabbage mania of 1836. The high farming friends of an injured agriculture have either retired from public notice, discomfited and abashed, or are totally neglected. The sufferings of the patient are too poignant to allow him to be even amused with their fantastic recreations. The Incubrations of Mr Mechi fail even to awaken a momentary interest, and the farmer of Tiptree Hall has sunk into a _Mechior insipidus_. It is impossible, however, not to admire the brave enterprise and manly candour of Mr Mechi. Robbing no tenant, and experimenting at the expense of his own pocket, he is quite an experimenter to our mind, and worthy of all approbation. Were, however, his agricultural adventure to prove profitable, of which there is an entire lack of evidence, it would be utterly chimerical to suppose that Mr Mechi’s system could be introduced into the general agriculture of the country. Mr Mechi’s capital and genius are alike awanting. His schemes can only be contemplated as curious and interesting, and likely in their progress to evolve principles which, in better times, may be made available in improving the art of husbandry. In the mean time, so far from high farming being in the ascendant, we believe that the progress of good farming is arrested.

The question how the reduction in the price of grain is to be met, remains still to be answered. The current and popular answer with the Free Trade press seems now unanimously to be _by a reduction of rent_. It is a question, say they, that concerns the landlord alone. The incidence of the evil can affect him only. In the end he must be the sole and exclusive sufferer. This doctrine is advanced as an undeniable truth by one of the latest Free Trade pamphleteers, who has rushed into the agricultural arena with a juvenile confidence that nothing but the profoundest ignorance of the subject can explain. The writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ speaks with more timidity and hesitation, as if aware of the result to which such a position must conduct. Sometimes he seems half inclined to deny the extent of the evil. He apparently fancies that his readers are so stupid as to forget, or so ignorant as not to know, that the price of wheat, under Free Trade, has been 40s., while under Protection it was 56s. He admits, however, although reluctantly, the necessity of a readjustment of rent. This question has been frequently discussed in our pages; but, as the received solution of the agricultural difficulty, it may be well to look at it again. The capital and fatal blunder which such writers fall into, is by supposing that the rent is the only payment which the tenant-farmers have to make. But on a grain farm he has other two payments to make, each of them equal to the rent. The usual allocation of the total farm-income is tripartite—one-third is the landlord’s rent, and the other two-thirds meets the farm expenditure, &c. But if the value of the cereal produce is reduced 30 per cent, and if the landlord is to be the _sole sufferer_, then the reduction of rent must be 90 per cent! Is this the readjustment of rent meditated? If it is meant that the rent should be reduced 30 per cent, and that this only is the proportion of the loss that properly falls upon the owner of the soil, then most certainly the landlord is not the only sufferer. There is still a loss of 60 per cent entailed upon the farmer and his dependants. It would be a cruel delusion, were it not utter folly, in Free Trade writers to attempt to deceive practical men on such a subject. The idea that the landlord should suffer the whole loss inflicted upon the gross annual income of the farm by Free Trade is not only visionary, but to us it would seem to be unjust. Before landlords generally can be brought to consent to sacrifice the 30 per cent even, what suffering and misery will overtake the tenant-farmers. Suppose the rent of the farm was £500, then £1500 is the gross sum to be realised from the farm. The loss entailed on each of the three parties, the landlord, the tenant, and his dependants, is £150. Suppose the landlord has relinquished his £150, the farmer has first to consider whether his profits in the past have been such as to enable him to bear an annual loss of £150; and if he is satisfied that he can meet such a defalcation, then the next question he has to dispose of is, who is to bear the loss of the other £150? Is he sure that he will be successful in lowering the wages of his ploughmen from £15 to £10—of his female workers from 9d. a-day to 6d. Will he be able to reduce the accounts of his manure-merchant, saddler, smith, wright, grocer, tailor, &c. one-third. The farmer is the paymaster; and if he cannot bring about such an equalisation of the loss as this over all the parties implicated, he will continue to be, as he has been, the great sufferer. If, indeed, there is such an agricultural phenomenon as a Free Trade farmer who says that he is able to bear _the whole loss_—that Protection is and was unnecessary—then that man must evidently have been coining money in the past, and must be now a Crœsus of wealth. But he convicts himself, too, of having been guilty of unfair dealing. He has been defrauding the landlord of his just share of the farm-income; and he has done that on which a curse is pronounced—he has been keeping back the hire of his labourers. He has paid them with a third less wages than they ought to have received; and before he can be rehabilitated as a witness on the question, he must disgorge his ill-gotten gains. The Free Trade press anxiously conceal the consequences of their measure to the poor from the observation of their readers; and they know the reason why. Did they venture to enter into details, the tendency of their policy to trench deeply upon the hard-won wages of honest industry would be instantly seen, and their odious confiscation would expose them to national reprobation. They content themselves with vaguely asserting that the landlord must bear the whole loss. This is the solatium which they administer to the suffering tenant; and they fancy him such an idiot, and so profoundly ignorant of his own business, as to believe them. If the owner of the soil is to be the sole sufferer, then it is certain that, in his position as a proprietor, there must be some economic anomaly. The principle would not apply to any other owner of property. If the gross income of a cotton-spinner is reduced 30 per cent, then who believes that the owner of the mill who has let the building will alone suffer? Infallibly the spinner and his workpeople will suffer a depreciation of income. If, however, the landlord is to bear the whole loss, we conceive that it would be an exaggeration of that loss to state it in every case at 90 per cent. That may be in reality the amount of the depreciation accomplished by Free Trade legislation in the gross income of the farm; but from the great improvements that have of late years been made in the culture of the soil, and from the advantages generally enjoyed by the tenant-farmer from the new manures, and from railway communication—which enables him to transport not only his grain, but his root-crops, to markets formerly inaccessible—we conceive that he is able to bear some portion of the loss. In other words, we conceive, had Parliament not forcibly lowered the price of agricultural produce, that the farmer, from the causes mentioned, would have been able to give some rise of wages to the agricultural labourer, and some rise of rent to the owner of the soil. Upon this subject, very probably, the reviewer of Sir E. L. Bulwer’s _Letters_ may be near the mark. The landlord may ponder the following pregnant sentence:—“The necessity must then be put up with of returning to the rents, or nearly so, which he drew previous to the war, and before the successive Corn Laws which followed had enabled him to occupy, at the general expense, a higher position in society than is the lot of the landowner in other countries, or than was the lot of his own father or grandfather.”[8] But since the period referred to by the reviewer, the rent of land has been doubled, and in many cases there has been a threefold increase. Any one may satisfy himself of this fact, as far as this part of the kingdom is concerned, by comparing the rental as given in Sir John Sinclair’s _Statistical Account of Scotland_, 1796, with the rental given in the _New Statistical Account_, 1844.[9] So the consummation of the experiment which the candid critic points out as awaiting the landlord, is the confiscation of half his income at the very least. The reviewer, however, forgets that at the era to which he looks back the wages of agricultural labour, and the price of the implements of husbandry, were about a third less than they are now. How, then, are the labourers and implement-makers not likewise to fall back to the condition of their fathers and grandfathers? Ah! it would be unpopular—dangerous, to mention such a contingency. The friend of the poor, the advocate of the cheap loaf, cannot afford to reveal so much of the truth! It is false to say that the Corn Laws raised the landlord’s rent at the general expense. On the contrary, they likewise greatly increased the wages, and multiplied the comforts of the industrious classes.

One of the stale and commonplace fallacies repeated _usque ad nauseam_ by the Free Trade economists, and greatly relied on by them, is the following. Farmers, say they, are inveterate grumblers. They have always grumbled. They grumbled in 1815, when the price of wheat was 80s.;—and they give copious quotations from the evidence of practical agriculturists, taken by Parliamentary Committees, to prove their charge. The statement, and the intended inference from it, are based, however, upon an inexcusable ignorance, or a most criminal concealment of the facts. The unparalleled taxation and other expenses of the _peculiar_ period referred to, rendered even the 80s. a poor remuneration to the home-grower. In 1815 the annual expenditure of the nation amounted to £100,000,000, while the population was only 13,000,000—the rate of contribution being thus about £7, 15s. per head. At present, the national expenditure is about £52,000,000, and the population about 20,000,000, (Census 1841)—that is, £2, 12s. per head. The truth is, with wheat at 56s., we believe that the farmer of the present day would be better able to maintain his position than the farmer of 1815 was with wheat at 80s. It is marvellous to consider what unconscionable drafts the Free Trade sophists make upon the ignorance of their readers. Abolish taxation and lower wages to the Continental rate, and the energy and enterprise of the British farmer will enable him, even with his inferior climate, to compete with the agriculturists of more favoured climes.

There is another enigma involved in the greatest experiment of modern times, requiring elucidation. The rent of land is maintained; in some cases even there is a rise of rent, it is said; and it is triumphantly added, this settles the question irrevocably, and ends the debate. This position is supported by individualising vacant farms that have been re-let at the former rents, or for which the new tenant has promised a rise of rent. This has been an admirable instrument of delusion in the hands of the Free Trade press, and we believe that many honest observers of the experiment, but totally ignorant of rural affairs, have held it as quite conclusive of the question at issue. Free Trade landlords are willing to be deluded, and they have greedily swallowed the anodyne, while the circumstance has contributed to conceal from others the true state of the case. It seems certainly inexplicable how, with the value of agricultural produce reduced thirty per cent, there can be any good reason for a rise of rent, or how, in such circumstances, the old rent even can be paid, without impairing grievously the income of the farmer and the wages of the labourer. Is it not the fact, too, that very generally landlords have been granting reductions of from ten to thirty per cent to their tenantry? Upon the theory that the rent of land is rising, this must seem a very Quixotic liberality, and argues a singular blindness to their own interests. According to the Parliamentary Returns, the estimated rental of land is £45,755,610. Mr Villiers stated, in his place in Parliament last year, on unquestionable authority, that the depreciation in the value of agricultural produce, effected by Free Trade, amounted to £91,000,000; and yet rent of land is rising! It may be remarked that it is in Scotland only that we hear of any rise of rent; and we venture to assert that only a few isolated cases of this kind in peculiar localities, each one of which is characterised by specialties of its own, can be pointed out. It is an immense leap that the Free Trade logician makes, when he concludes from such premises that the rent of land is rising generally over the kingdom. If a man is content to reason in this fashion, he may certainly be able to satisfy himself of the flourishing position of any one branch of trade, which, nevertheless, is notoriously going to rack and ruin. The duration of the lease in Scotland is generally for nineteen years. The farm may have been greatly under-rented, and it may have been greatly improved during the currency of the lease; and in such a case it is conceivable, even with present prices, that it may bear some rise of rent. This is not all. In agriculture, as in other departments of trade, there are wild speculators who will promise any rent. Whether they will pay it, remains to be seen. Most probably, too, a few farmers have been imposed upon by the fallacies of the Free Trade press. They have been confidently told that the depression was temporary, and would pass away. They may have believed the philosophers, and acted upon their doctrine. Sometimes, too, a penniless adventurer, without character or skill, gives the rise of rent, which an experienced tenant with abundant capital feels unable to offer. A new tenant was lately asked how he expected to be able to continue to pay his rent, which he had somewhat raised. His answer was prompt and full of meaning. “I do not expect to be able to pay it at present prices. There must be a sweeping reduction of rent over the country, or there must be a rise in the value of grain from some cause or other. In either event, I will share in the general benefit. If neither of these things occur, my farm being in high order, I will tide over a season or two, and then, whatever be the case with the farm, I will not be in a worse condition than I at present am.” We do not hazard these statements at random, but as the result of patient investigation. They will be found to explain the cases where there has been an alleged rise of rent; but they do not fully exhibit the present position of British agriculture. During the last nineteen years an immense amount of capital has been expended by the tenant-farmers of the nation in the permanent improvement of the soil. Since 1849, £2,500,000 of the public money has been granted for the purposes of drainage. It is impossible to ascertain accurately what money from private sources has been expended for the same purpose. We may safely state it at £1,500,000, so that £4,000,000 have been lately expended in the drainage of the soil. It would not be easy to state the exact amount of the increased value which thorough drainage gives the land; but that it adds greatly to its productive powers is undeniable. The cost of such drainage has been from £4 to £8 per imperial acre; the higher price being incurred until the cost of making tiles was reduced by improved machinery and the multiplication of tile-works. Taking the average cost of thorough drainage at £5 per acre, this, at four per cent interest, burdens the land with 4s. per acre. The £4,000,000, at the same rate, must have drained 800,000 acres; and these acres, at 4s. per acre, must give an additional annual rent of £160,000 to meet _the expense of the drainage alone_. If the old rent, then, is merely maintained, the four millions have evanished. They have been consumed on the altar of Free Trade. Besides, however, the fertilising effects of drainage, flowing from the altered condition of the soil, both mechanically and chemically, the soil has likewise been enriched by the application of extraneous manures. Not less than £200,000 worth of bone-dust, and £800,000 of guano, have been annually applied to it. Guano is supposed to be evanescent in its action, from its abundance of ammonia; but it contains fifteen per cent of phosphates, while bone-dust contains twenty-five per cent, and the fertilising properties of phosphates continue. The effect of these agencies, not only in themselves, but in adding to the quantity, and in developing the virtues of the ordinary farmyard manure, cannot be estimated at less than 3s. per acre; so that, unless a farm that has been so drained and so manured for years realises a rise of 7s. per acre of rent at the present date, the rent virtually has largely declined. We have only adduced two kinds of expenditure, but more might be stated whereby the value of the soil has been greatly enhanced. This is the true light in which to contemplate this specious delusion. Even if it were possible to maintain the old rent, we see what an immense amount of money has already been expended in the most extravagant experiment ever indulged in by any nation, and the folly of which continues to excite the wonder of the greatest statesmen in Europe and the western continent. We have considered only the value of soil that has lately received the advantage of thorough drainage; but in the case of old arable soils, that have not required drainage, the loss will come out more clearly and observably. Nobody now, saving, perhaps, Sir James Graham and a few more Free Trade landowners, believes that the present rents can be maintained; and the Free Trade press with one voice loudly demand from landowners a “readjustment,” which, when explained, means the loss of half their income, and degradation from their present position to the comparative poverty and barbarism of their “grandfathers.” The owners of the soil have not been more elevated by the tide of national advancement than the other classes of society: the very reverse is the case. But in the midst of an alleged national prosperity, they must retrograde to the position held by their ancestors a century ago! Will they fall, or, indeed, can they, without dragging along with them the occupants of the soil, and the millions of others immediately dependant on its cultivation?

But the Free Trade philosophers are quite disposed to sacrifice the agricultural community in one vast holocaust at the shrine of their idol, in order that their experiment may be fairly wrought out; and they give us the vaunted proof of the undoubted success of their measure, the immense importation of bread-stuffs into the kingdom, and the consumption of these by the people. The people have eaten upwards of nine million quarters of bread-stuffs more than they did before. The additional supplies are the undeniable measure of the dreadful privations they suffered in former years! The plausible sophism has been sported by Parliamentary orators, and expatiated upon by the experimenters, as an unanswerable vindication of their policy; and, with a tender care of the poor, they say that with them it is a sacred moral duty to continue to uphold a measure that for the first time has furnished the people of this country with a sufficiency of food. Most laudable and amiable would such benevolence be, were it not indulged at other people’s expense. The hypothesis is itself sufficiently startling. It implies that the industrious poor of the kingdom have hitherto been only half-fed. It implies that the labourer and the mechanic were wont to rise up from every meal hungry, with their appetite unsated, having had only half a diet. Does any sane man, not besotted with the prejudices and passions of the Free Trade experimenters, believe this? Is it only now that John Bull has had a bellyful? He never had enough to eat before, it seems; but now he is waxing fat. The idea is certainly original, and as certainly visionary. We believe that the quality of the food of the labouring poor has been changed—_not its quantity_. Wheaten bread is much more largely consumed over the kingdom than it was; but whether the oaten-meal cake or _porridge_, and the occasional dish of “flowery” potatoes, were not as nutritious and salubrious food as the imported substitutes, may admit of serious doubt. Cheap bread must be an undoubted boon to the labourer, provided he continues to be fully employed, and provided his wages are not lowered. This latter process is rapidly taking place among the agricultural labourers of England. Earl Fitzhardinge, a Free Trade peer, tells us that in his county “the wages of agricultural labourers are already lower by at least £5 per annum,” (_Times_, April 1851;) and it is notorious that the manufacturing capitalists, with grinding rapacity, are screwing down, bit by bit, the wages of their workpeople; so that immediately the cheap loaf will be to them a mockery, as it has been a delusion and a snare. In Scotland, saving where they are paid in _kind_, the agricultural labourers have as yet scarcely experienced the effects of Free Trade. It is curious, however, to observe with what stealthy steps the pressure approaches them. Very many farmers are trying to labour their land with fewer servants, or are substituting raw lads, at half wages, for the experienced ploughmen they formerly employed. We have noticed, too, during the harvest which has just closed under such auspicious circumstances, that, in many districts where it was not formerly used, the scythe has suddenly usurped the place of the sickle. Murderous has been the havoc which the unskilful workmen, unaccustomed to wield the implement, have in many instances made in the corn-fields. But thus the farmer has largely abridged his harvest expenditure—and thus, too, very many labourers have been driven from the harvest-field. To our certain knowledge, a vast number of female workers in our rural villages and hamlets have, for the first time this season, wanted employment in cutting down the corn, who formerly with their harvest earnings paid the rent of their cottages, or provided themselves with warm clothing against the inclemency of the season. Our parochial boards may probably hear more of this during the approaching winter. To postpone his own impoverishment, the agriculturist is compelled to adopt every parsimonious expedient; and nothing can be more certain than that foreign labour, in the shape of foreign produce, will eventually lower to the Continental level the wages of British labour. Reaping machines and improved implements are not necessary to effect this result. The introduction of new and improved implements, instead of diminishing, rather diverts labour into new channels; but at present, the diminution of employment arises from the straitened circumstances of the agriculturist. Before the full effects, however, of the experiment in this direction can be exhibited, more time must elapse. If, again, we descend to the unhappy class below the industrious poor, who win and eat their own bread, do we find fewer begging their bread, and fewer perishing of inanition and want? How, then, it may be asked, do we dispose of the immense importation of foreign corn? The answer to this query may be easily found by any impartial inquirer. We have only to look to the agricultural condition of Ireland for the past two years to discover almost the complete solution of the supposed difficulty. From the agricultural returns it is undeniable that nearly 250,000 acres have been thrown out of wheat cultivation in Ireland, and it is certain that in many districts of that country a large extent of acreage formerly in cultivation has been lying waste. We speak of the years 1849–50. The _Edinburgh Review_ makes a most feeble and disingenuous attempt to deny, or rather to explain away the fact, while that sage _Economist_, Mr Wilson, is at the very time contending in Parliament for the undoubted existence of the phenomenon, and quotes it as a sufficient explanation of the depression under which the Irish millers are now labouring. But, in fact, the position can be demonstrated on grounds independent of the agricultural returns. Formerly agricultural produce used to be imported into Liverpool from Ireland in very large quantities; now, with the exception of live stock, the importation is trivial. Formerly Ireland used to send both flour and wheat to Glasgow; now the Glasgow market is supplied with foreign wheat from Leith—quite a new trade. Formerly large quantities of oats—to the extent, we believe, of 2,000,000 quarters annually—were shipped from the western ports of Ireland, Galway, and Limerick, for the London market. Now this trade has dwindled down almost to nothing, and London is chiefly supplied with feed-oats direct from Denmark and the Baltic. Formerly Ireland used to export largely—now that country imports as largely. With an immensely diminished population, how can this fact be otherwise explained but upon the supposition that there has been a greatly diminished cultivation? The conclusion, apart from authoritative statistics, is inevitable. The potato failure in Ireland would naturally have led to an increased cultivation of wheat; but Free Trade intervenes, and the Irish and English markets are inundated with French and American flour: and thus the Irish millers and grain-growers are depressed and impoverished. To this solution of the imagined dilemma other considerations may be added. From the extremely low price of grain, it has of late been largely used in the feeding of stock. In this way there has undoubtedly been a greatly increased consumption of grain. In the cotton manufactures a great deal of starch is required. This article used chiefly to be extracted from the potato; but the being scarce and dear, and grain plentiful and cheap, it is now manufactured from wheat. Some years ago Porter stated the quantity required for this purpose at 200,000 quarters; the quantity at present needed, we have heard estimated at 500,000 quarters. For this and similar purposes there has no doubt been a large additional employment of wheat. By means of these explanatory causes, we are enabled clearly to see how the enormous importations of foreign corn have been disposed of, without credulously fancying that the labouring poor have been eating a third more food, and that until now they have been always under-fed. But the additional supplies have been consumed, and therefore they have been needed, it is contended. These supplies, however, would not have been wholly required, had Free Trade not paralysed the agriculture of Ireland, and depopulated her shores; and even if they had, Continental nations would have abundantly supplied our wants, and paid at the same time a reasonable import duty; thus adding to our revenue, mitigating our intolerable taxation, and maintaining such a price for our home-grown corn as would have offered fair remuneration to the cultivators of our soil. The sole difference seems to be, that we have paid away to the cultivators of foreign lands, and to the enslaved serfs and degraded labourers of Continental nations, what we formerly paid to our own people.

But still the cry of the Free Trade philanthropists against what they call “a bread-tax,” is clamorously proclaimed. There never was a happier phrase to serve the ends of faction! The compendious watchword suffices for argument and proof, and appeals directly, as intended, to the angry passions of the masses. What a horrid thing, say these gentlemen, is a tax on the bread of the poor! How iniquitous, how cruel, what a sin! And, their benevolence warming, they launch out into a flood of grandiloquent indignation at all who venture to gainsay them. They write and speak as if it were a matter of high principle—a thing as sacred as the holiest article of their creed, and as soon to be abandoned. Can these men be honest? They forget, or affect to forget, that by their own one-shilling duty they are at this moment taxing the bread of the poor to the amount of some £700,000 per annum. A bread-tax, then, cannot be a question of such holy import—a matter so vital to their consciences as they represent it to be. But, in their histrionic horror of a bread-tax, they are quite callous about taxing the beer of the poor, the butter and cheese of the poor, the boots and shoes of the poor, the tea and tobacco of the poor, the knowledge of the poor! What precious morality is this, and what tender-conscienced gentlemen are these! Never in our memory was there a more hollow or unprincipled piece of cant palmed upon a great nation than this hypocritical cry about a bread-tax. In determining to hold their cheap loaf, it might become these parties to remember, what they do not now deny, that they are thereby impoverishing ten thousands of tenant-farmers and their families; that even now in many localities they are entailing deep injury on the industrious classes, which, if their policy is persevered in, will grow and extend itself until the whole rural population are environed in want and misery. In this recollection, can such kind-hearted politicians eat their “big loaf” pleasantly and with quiet consciences? In men so kind and good, it is a marvel that such a morsel has not stuck in their throat long ago. One principal object of the tax, so odiously nicknamed, was to protect the poor. It defended them against competition with the serf labour of Continental countries; and it kept them from the physical, intellectual, and moral degradation in which the toil-worn sons of labour in many other lands are so deeply sunk. It gave them employment, and it secured them “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.” “To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest,” is the stereotyped dogma of the new experimental philosophy. Labour is the commodity which the workman has to sell, and it must be bought at the cheapest cost—at the Russian rate of 4½d. a-day. This is the pleasant prospect held out by the new friends of the poor to the industrious classes. The maxim is a selfish and self-destructive sophism. To buy in the cheapest market cannot be good to the seller, and selling in the dearest market cannot be good to the buyer. According to this sapient principle of commerce, the business of one half of the industrious community is to ruin the other half. It is playing at the old and pleasant game of “beggar my neighbour.” One limb of the aphorism cripples the other, and sends it forth a deformed monster of political immorality. With one class, indeed—the idle, moneyed, and non-producing class—the maxim ought to be in especial favour. It suits them precisely, and for them it has been evidently coined. They have nothing to sell, and they cleave to the first clause of the rubric, and buy in the cheapest market—a most agreeable prescription to those who think it immaterial whether the industrious classes of the nation shall be allowed to live comfortably upon the fruit of their labour. It requires remarkable courage in the Free Trade press to uphold the practical wisdom of this theorem. Do they practise it? Why should we not have our newspapers as cheap as our American cousins? Did the _Times_, in proof of his sincerity, volunteer to sell his journal at 3d. when the cry of a cheap press was raised? No: he saw that that would destroy his profits and his capital, and with admirable ability he exposed the fallacious clamour. Cheap newspapers, like many other cheap things, are trashy and noxious, and he demonstrated that, with the taxes and wages which he paid, he could not, without certain ruin, furnish the public with cheap editorials. It is the very case and argument of the agricultural community. With the enormous load of taxation lying on them, and the wages which they have at present to disburse, they cannot continue to grow the cheap loaf without ultimate ruin. The _Times_ itself seems to concede this. In April last, the _Times_ said of farmers, “If their payments and receipts continue long at the present rate, they must be utterly ruined;” and more lately (7th July) it adds, “For nearly two years and a half, agricultural prices have been below a remunerative level.”