countries, to compete with the heavily taxed labour of this country, would be to commit an act of the worst injustice to the mass of its population. It would be, in other words, for the sake of a selfish advantage to capital, unnaturally to prefer a foreign to a British workman. Dr. Adam Smith does not require, in such a case, so cruel a sacrifice; he says, "it will be generally advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign, for the protection of domestic industry, when some tax is imposed at home on the produce of the latter;" "because taxation increases the price of labour."

It can scarcely, therefore, be said with truth, in the invidious sense of the word, that the landlord is guilty of desiring a monopoly on selfish grounds. In some of the early periods of our history monopolies were granted to favourites of the Court, most detrimental and vexatious to the public in their effects. By such a grant, one individual often possessed the sole right to sell some particular article of commerce, which gave him an opportunity. he did not neglect, of enhancing the price of such article for his own sole and selfish advantage. It is in this light that some parties have endeavoured to place the protection given by the Corn Laws; which are, at the same time, stated to confer an advantage solely upon the landlord. But, as indicated above, the benefit conferred upon the landlord is an indirect and incidental one only; springing from the employment given to farmers, labourers, inland traders, home manufacturers, and others; in fact, to the great mass of the people, through the medium of the fertility of the soil.

When, therefore, we consider that a continuous cultivation of the land is of the first importance, in a national point of view; on account of the vast numbers it employs, on account of the certainty of a constant supply of food to the people which it secures, and on account of the hardy race of men which springs from the healthiness of agricultural labour-the sturdiest defenders of their country in time of need; more can scarcely be required to prove the necessity of ensuring the permanent cultivation of the soil. But to this may still be added the sanction of the same eminent authority quoted above, Dr. A. Smith-that "The land is the greatest, the most important, and most durable part of the wealth of every extensive country;" and that "the capital that is acquired to any country by commerce and manufactures is all a very precarious and uncertain possession, till some part of it has been secured and realized in the cultivation

and improvement of its lands." After such statements and authority, it can hardly with truth be advanced, that the protection of agriculture is merely a landlord's question, or that it is not one of paramount interest to the whole nation.

The "monopoly," indeed, of the landlords, arising out of the Corn Laws, may shortly be stated to be this; that when farmers and labourers are profitably employed on the soil (which the welfare of the whole people requires that they should be), the landlords receive, upon the average, rather less than three per cent. interest, in the shape of rent, on the money with which they have bought their land: whilst the possessors of many other kinds of capital during the last fifty years, and especially the owners of factories, have at times received not less than from twenty to fifty per cent. interest on the capital they have invested in their various undertakings. By no other means could men, starting in life with comparatively no capital but their intellect and industry, have risen to the possession of large fortunes in the course of half a lifetime. Instead of this being a source of jealousy or regret to those connected with land, who are not so fortunate, they consider it one of their proudest boasts, that, in this country, it is open to every man in it to raise himself to independence from the lowest position, and even to the highest in the councils of his sovereign, by his own intellectual energy and good conduct.

With respect to the tenant-farmers' interest in the Corn Laws, they have spoken for themselves. It was their honest indignation at the unfair aspersions cast on all parties connected with the soil, by the active enemies of all protection to industry, that roused them from their quiet occupations; and instigated them to associate, in order that they might better repel the untruths circulated against them, and against the laws by which they were protected. Allowing 10007. capital for every 2001. per annum of rent, there is not, probably, less than 250,000,000l. of tenants' capital invested in the soil: a sum, it is stated, larger than the whole of the capital invested in the four great manufactures of cotton, woollen, linen, and hardwares. How much of this capital could the tenants escape with out of their farms, if a repeal of the Corn Laws this year made it prudent for them to leave their farms next year? And what would be the value of their tangible capital, that stock and those instruments of tillage, which they could take with them from their farms, when probably one-fourth of the whole tenants' capital of the kingdom

would, by a repeal of the Corn Laws, be forced at the same time into the market?

It will be stated that this would not be the practical effect of a repeal of the Corn Laws. Judging from the general character of the tenantry of these islands, it would not. But a worse fate would await them. Unlike the generality of those who receive an income from the profits of stock, they have neither the desire nor the power to transfer their capital to a foreign land. By an enduring interest, and by an almost magic influence, they are bound to their own neighbourhood, and to each cherished locality around them; and no earthly associations of interest or enjoyment enter their minds unconnected with those of their country and their home. There, by a frugal industry, by unremitting toil, by an ambition no higher than to gain a respectable livelihood, and to do their duty peaceably in that state to which they are called, they pass the even tenor of a life healthy both to body and mind. When adversity came upon them, and no returns of rent could compensate for the loss of crop, or for the inadequate price of their produce; still by more earnest exertions, though with more careworn hearts, would they struggle on. Although capital were melting away, and the means of household comfort well nigh gone, still with a strange tenacity, which a wise Providence alone has implanted, would they adhere to their homes, and struggle on; and with patient submission, at the worst, bow to the storm that wrecked them. Let no one, then, say that the farmers have not the same interest in protection to agriculture as their landlords. In spite of every attempt to poison their minds with a distorted view of a difference of interest, there always has been, there is, and there always will be, unless their characters greatly change, an indissoluble bond of reciprocal good understanding and affection between this valuable body, and the owners of the estates on which they live. And to the laws of this country in favour of protection may the high character of our farmers, and the good understanding between the different agricultural classes, be attributed. "The tenants of England," says Dr. Adam Smith, "have more confidence in their landlords than in any other country." And elsewhere, speaking of the yeomanry of England and their high respectability, he says, "That the laws passed in England favourable to them have contributed more to the grandeur of England than all its boasted regulations of commerce."

It is the high character of this sterling class which a repeal of

the Corn Laws would tend to undermine. It is their interests, more than that of the landlords, which a free trade in corn would immediately expose to uncertainty and ruin.

With respect to the peasantry and working classes of England generally, their interests are not injured, it is maintained, by the operation of the Corn Laws, or by the protective system, but the reverse. Providence has decreed-in a tranquil state of society, that is, in one removed from warfare and conquest-that man should labour for a livelihood: and it is only, as a general rule, by the labour of his mind or body that any man has risen, or that his posterity seem now, superior to the necessity of daily manual toil. What the father saved from wages, the son trades with, either on the land, in manufactures, or commerce: and so commences that accumulation of wealth which succeeding generations are born to, as the natural heirs of the reward of their fathers' successful industry. To labour, therefore, is to fulfil one main purpose of every man's existence; and from the full development of this law, and from the inequalities of its operation, and of its success-arising out of the variety of individual character and conduct-are elicited some of the most attractive interests and charities of social life. Labour, therefore, being a necessary condition of humanity, and, as regards sustenance, indispensable to life, the certainty of obtaining the wages of labour must be the object of the first importance to the mass of the population of every country.

England, for a long period, was distinguished above all other nations by the prosperous condition of its working classes, by the success of its manufactures, by the indisputable character for integrity of its merchants, and by the general certainty of a profitable return from the occupation of its land. It was, indeed, its successful agriculture that gave birth to all the country villages and market towns, and to most of our manufacturing towns. The gradual growth of the character and excellence of our agriculture, and trade, was under that system of protection, which a certain class, at this day, designates monopoly. For centuries, to every branch of British industry was protection secured; and in the same proportion does the country seem to have flourished. The custom of our forefathers appears to have been to consider the full employment of the people, and the easy interchange of their respective products among themselves, as the test of general prosperity. The practice with some of the present generation seems to be, to test the prosperity of the people,

not by their comfort and employment, but by the number of millions of yards of manufactures exported; and by the quantity of foreign labour imported into this country in exchange, in the shape of foreign goods. In the accomplishment, however, of this large export trade, there has arisen a competition so fierce, according to some manufacturers, as to be, both to labour and profit, almost destructive. Our forefathers considered our export trade as useful; but as incidental, and accessary only to our home trade. A not uncommon habit, now, is in a measure to overlook our home trade, for the sake of cultivating the foreign trade. But as the home trade employs all the labour for both the parties, in an exchange of goods; and as the export trade only employs British labour for the goods that go out, employing foreign labour for the goods that come in; a more prudent principle would be, on this ground alone, to prefer cultivating the home trade as the principal one; and to look upon the export trade as incidental, for the surplus of our produce. An additional reason, and the main one, for arriving at this conclusion of preferring the home trade to the foreign-is that, if compared, where the foreign trade employs one, the home and colonial trade would probably be found to employ ten British workmen. And even those of our countrymen who are employed in working for the foreign trade, can feel no security that the demand for their labour will continue. Every year foreign countries are becoming more and more restrictive, and less inclined to receive the produce of British labour: notwithstanding that, for the last twenty years, the free trade theory has been constantly inducing Parliament to sacrifice more and more of its former protection to British labour, in the fallacious hope that, if we neglected the interests of our own industry, other nations would do the same by theirs.

It is impossible to deny that British agriculture, manufactures, and commerce have been gradually growing up to their present height, for many centuries, under protective laws. When by tyranny and intolerance the artisans of other nations were driven from their own lands, they were received with open arms and protected in this. The result is that great bodies of the people are now engaged, and a large amount of capital is invested, in producing their respective fabrics. If, by means of this protection and security to industry, one or two branches of our manufactures have risen superior to the manufactures of the Continent, even in spite of the weight of our taxation; would it be fair or