34 The Corn Laws. (Jury, 
truth—to his perceptions—that it admits that he is starving, and agrees 
that he ought not to be so. If there should be any leaf of the book 
‘which exhorts him to use a little “prudence” and tells him that 
this is the only weapon which half his betters use with such fearful 
efficacy against bim ;—which warns him to work hard (and not drink hard) 
‘when wages are high ;—to look upon parish charity as he would upon 
pestilence, and to wait till to-morrow for every thing which he cannot 
“pay for to day :—to stay with his family at home of an evening in his 
cottage, and not make the brewer's fortune, or the distiller’s, by deprav- 
ing himself at the ale-house ; and above all, though he gets but twelve 
shillings a week wages, never to spend one farthing in /wxuries, until he 
has laid by one shilling for the time when he may get no wages at all ;— 
if there be any page to this effect in the book, that is a page which he 
finds superfluous, or tedious; and accordingly, either pays no attention 
to it, or gets up and walks away. 
With all his faults, however—and your working mechanic, especially in 
large towns, is as idle as a duke, and as extravagant ;— indulging in ex- 
penses, which the man two steps above him in society shuns, and casting 
away safeties which the other is laborious to arrive at, and careful 
to maintain ;—with all these faults—the chief result of which is that the 
poor rogue remains fixed in his station of toil and poverty rather than 
aims to rise above it—with all his vices, the English mechanic must not 
‘be starved ; nor will he be argued (when the time comes) into any prac- 
tical admission that he ought to be so. The late discussions upon the 
expediency and operation of the Corn Laws—with the power granted to 
ministers to dispense with those laws, in case they shall see cause for so 
doing—may be regarded as (practically) decisive upon the fate of a 
question, as to the eventual success of which, we confess, we think 
nothing short of blindness could ever have entertained any doubt.—The 
rights of individuals may be tampered with; the gains of particular 
branches of trade may be cramped or lessened by ill-judged legislation ; 
but no system, the effect of which is to throw large bodies of men out of 
employment—to make one part of our population lastingly dangerous as 
well as burthensome to the remainder—can ever continue to exist.. “ 
The question then becomes this—Does that system which gives the 
Jand-owner of England’a monopoly of the home Corn market,—and, con- 
sequently enables him pretty nearly to put his own price upon his 
produce—does it, or does it not, tend to crush the general industry of 
the country? And this is a question, which both speakers and writers 
on the two sides of the controversy, argue upon principles (assumed) 
almost ludicrously opposite :—Mr. M’Culloch, on the part of the econo- 
mists, in his “Irish Absenteeism,” treating the home trade of every 
country—infinite of which must arise out of the expenditure of t 
incomes of land-owners—as a matter of no importance ; and toasting 
entirely for popularity, to commercial relations with foreign states: and 
the High Tory agricultural writers in Blackwood, setting out directly 
upon the opposite conclusion ; and insisting that our home trade it is that 
maintains us, and that we depend upon our sales of manufactures to 
foreign countries only in the most contemptible degree. 4 
Now all the difference between the agriculturists, and the manufac- 
turers, upon this question, seems to us—and we cannot give it a better 
title than it deserves—to be, most transparently, a question about gain. 
we 
