just if the capitalists in these one or two branches of manufacture were to demand, that all protection should be abolished on all the industry of the country; which is engaged in its present occupations, on the faith that protection would continue? Especially, would it be reasonable that this demand to abolish all protection should be made, when the parties from whom it emanated constituted not more, with all the workmen they employed, than a fraction of the population?

Let it be supposed that a section of the cotton manufacturers are the most active in their exertions to abolish protection; and let us compare the employment they give to British labour with the employment given by agriculture. According to the return of the factory inspectors, the number of persons employed in the various cotton factories of the United Kingdom, in 1836, was, in all, men, women, and children, 220,134: viz., males, 100,495; females, 119,639. Or compare the total number of persons then employed in the factories of the four manufactures of cotton, wool, silk, and flax: there were of men, women, and children, males, 158,555; females, 196,818; in all, 355,373. The labourers employed in agriculture, according to the census of 1831, were more than double this number, exclusive of their wives and families. Adding these to their number, and the occupiers of the soil, they amounted to 6,000,000. To which number add almost the whole population of Ireland; and, without reckoning the artisans employed in making the instruments of agriculture, or the inhabitants of the country towns, we should find half the population of these islands to be purely agricultural.

In proportion to the greater quantity of labour employed in the agriculture of this country, as compared with its manufactures; in the same proportion is the prosperity of agriculture of greater importance to its working classes. Inasmuch, however, as neither agriculture, nor manufactures, can thrive unless their produce fetches such a price in the market, as will pay for the labour employed upon such produce; so is it the interest always of the man that works at any trade, that the produce of such trade should fetch a good price: because the profit ensuing from that good price both enables his master to give him fair wages, and disposes all the masters to employ more workmen in that trade; and this increased demand for workmen causes also a rise in wages. The advantage the labourer gains by the good sale of the work of his hands, far more than compensates for the

increased price he has to give for the little of that produce which he himself consumes.

To tell a workman that a good price for the article he produces is injurious to his interest, is what he knows to be untrue: although to enter into a learned disputation with a sophist on the subject be not always in his power. When the price of cotton manufactures becomes so low, that a master manufacturer is induced to turn off his workmen; no one thinks of addressing these discharged operatives in the following manner :— "You appear to be ill clothed, but you cannot be distressed; because cotton is so cheap that you can buy it for a halfpenny a yard. You are under an error of judgment, if you do not consider cheapness of advantage to you." A man so addressing such an audience would not merely be considered a deceiver, but as intending to add to its distress, by mockery and insult. To more than half the population of this country, to be congratulated that corn was so cheap that it did not pay the expenses of its growth, would be equally offensive and insulting.

Yet this is really the language addressed, by certain parties, to all the workmen of this country at the present day. To divert men's minds from the real question, they always endeavour to make it appear that the public are consumers alone:—that corn, or agricultural produce, is to be looked upon only in the light of an article of consumption. They neglect to add that the growing of agricultural produce, of its corn, its grass, its roots, and its cattle, is the great trade of the country. They forget to state that, taking Great Britain and Ireland together (and comprehending all the agricultural towns and villages), the artisans, the labourers and their families, the occupiers, the owners, and the manufacturers of the home trade, form at least twenty millions of our population. These twenty millions, connected with the agriculture of the United Kingdom, are all interested in a remunerating price of agricultural produce. If agricultural produce falls beneath this proper price, the effect is felt, not by owners, or occupiers, or agricultural labourers alone; but it is felt by the tradesmen and artisans of all towns and villages, and by the great mass of the manufacturing operatives ;-because the largest body of consumers of their manufactures cannot then afford to buy them.

It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose that the majority of the manufacturing operatives have an interest in corn being so low in price, as not to pay the home grower of it. If this statement

wants confirmation, let them examine the following estimate, by Mr. Macqueen, of the comparative value of the home and foreign trade of the United Kingdom, in the principal articles of export, in 1834:

Since what is not exported, is consumed at home, nothing can show more clearly than the above table where lies the real interest of the working classes of this country. Five-sixths of their employment, even in manufactures, come from the home trade: and when to this source of employment is added the cultivation of the land, which employs so much more labour than all the manufactures of the country put together, are they wrong, who place the main dependence of our peasantry and working classes on protection to agriculture? For the same reasons, if this country employed twenty millions of people in the cotton manufacture, no cotton manufacturer would be in favour of a free trade bringing in cheaper cotton than England could make. Neither he nor any well-wisher to his country would favour so great a blow to its industry.

If, then, giving employment to the great body of the people by means of its greatest trade, viz. its trade of agriculture, be a monopoly; then is protection to agriculture certainly a monopoly. If securing to our population their largest and most certain employment;-if capital invested in agriculture employs more labour than the same amount of capital invested in any other species of production, ;-if encouraging a healthy occupation in a natural atmosphere, be evils to a country, then is protection to British agriculture a disadvantage to its people. But if, on the other hand, it can be shown that it is the most important, the most productive, the most secure of giving employment to labour, and the largest of all the trades of the country, and one naturally productive of quietness, stability, and vigour in the

population it employs; then is protection to the agriculture of this country not an evil, not an injustice, not a monopoly, but the greatest blessing to its industry, and the best security for its order and peace.

In advocating protection to British industry, however, it is not intended to argue for an entire prohibition of foreign commoditics, nor against our export trade. The importation of foreign articles to a certain extent, causes to be carried to a distant market that surplus of our manufactures which finds no market at home; and our exports afford thus a medium of exchange for many foreign commodities which we cannot produce ourselves thus, likewise, are stimulated both the taste and the ingenuity of our own producers. Carried too far, this competition may extinguish the trade of a whole class of producers. If that class be a large one, it should be protected by Parliament, at all events, till it can find some other means of employment. To sacrifice a portion of the industrious classes, in a crusade after cheapness, without securing to them a new demand for their labour, is an injustice, great in proportion to the dependence of this class for a livelihood on their daily toil. To throw half a million of our agricultural labourers out of employment, under a delusive idea that the Corn Laws are a monopoly, would be an act of insanity in any legislature: for, independent of the cruelty to the sufferers, their competition with the rest of the agricultural labourers, and with workmen in every branch of trade, would bring down wages to so low a level, that if wheat were lowered one-half in price, the working classes could not buy it. If, indeed, cheapness of corn brought with it no diminished power of purchasing bread to the majority of the population, then the case would be altered. But this, except very temporarily, has never been the case; and in contending for protection to native industry, this Society contends for that state of things which, through the surest employment, will give the greatest comfort to the people. The boors of Poland and Russia, in the midst of the cheapest wheat, live upon rye bread, and are clothed in the coarsest kind of dress. The famine in Ireland, in 1822, was as much a famine of money, as of food. "The late depression of prices (said the Right Hon. Maurice Fitzgerald) had nearly extinguished the middle class of farmers. The demand for labour had diminished in proportion." "A deficiency of half the potato crop then occurred." "The accumulation of these causes produced a mass of beggary which was quite frightful.”

There appears to be in some minds a mysterious value attached to a foreign trade over a home trade, not justified by the reality. To the spontaneous and unsparing profusion of the bounty of Providence alone, be it gratefully acknowledged, is mankind indebted for the staple of exchange in both instances. Corn and timber, with other crops; animals, with their flesh, wool, and hides; minerals, and other raw produce of the soil, are not only the subjects of exchange in their simple state, but, from the raw produce of the soil are also obtained the materials of the various manufactures and handicrafts, in the shape of cotton, woollen, silk, linen, leather, hardware, and other goods. If the mutual exchange of these various productions is equally the basis of the home and the foreign trade, there is no beneficial property possessed by the latter over the former; nor by the former over the latter: except always that the home trade is nearer at hand, is more certain, employs the great majority of the population, and is under our own control, which a foreign trade never can be. With many of the advantages, however, of a home trade, a system of free trade would at once interfere. Especially would it interfere to endanger the interests of that great variety of occupations among the handicrafts of a country, which, in the aggregate, form a nation's surest source of employ

Because the probable result of a real free trade would be that all, or most of the smaller occupations, which a protected home trade affords to a people, after a short competition, would be absorbed and distributed among those countries which had no great manufacture. Each of those countries would then apply its undivided powers to produce some small article of trade: whilst such countries as were favoured by nature for some manufacture, might in the end possess the monopoly of supplying the produce of that manufacture to the rest of the world. The countries which, in this deadly strife, would be the most favoured, and, in the long run, would possess a monopoly, would be those which at the same time grew the raw material, and possessed coal and iron in that near neighbourhood necessary to its cheap manufacture.

If the natural tendency of free trade must be, in the long run, to encourage, more or less, in each nation, one great absorbing species of industry, to which all the energies, both of the mind and the body, of a nation would be exclusively applied; then, if each country had its fair share of work allotted to it in the scramble for custom, oftentimes on one manufacture alone might