1826.] The Corn Laws. 35 
That both classes have a common interest in the strength and prosperity 
of the country, there can be no doubt; but, to deny that each will be a 
gainer, by keeping the profits of the other, in their mutual dealings, 
as low as they can be kept, without doing him vital mischief, seems to us 
to be impossible. To say that the manufacturer can be a gainer, by that 
increase of the land-owner’s income, which he himself (in the shape of 
high prices) gives, “because that increase of the land-owner's income 
is again expended with him (the manufacturer)” seems to be nonsense : 
the butcher who pays to the tailor forty shillings for his coat instead of 
thirty, in order that the tailor may have forty shillings, instead of thirty, 
to lay out again in meat with him, is just ten shillings out of pocket by 
the change of his tailor’s price ; less by the profit, whatever that may be, 
which he makes upon the sale of ten shillings worth of meat. 
In all dealings between the land-owner and the manufacturer it will be 
recollected, the land-owner has this advantage—he deals in a commodity 
which is indispensable to his opponent; his opponent has only a com- 
modity to offer, which may be dispensed with by him. The holder of 
land—these are propositions which we must put shortly—takes his land 
by a title which we will not question; but he has no title to impose any 
law upon his fellow subjects, for the purpose of making the enjoyment 
of that land especially profitable to him. Land must, under existing 
circumstances—however it may have stood formerly—stand in England 
upon the same footing with every other description of property; and 
has no more claim than every other description of capital to be protected 
from fluctuation in value. 
Burke, who described the manufacturers (according to Black- 
wood) as people “contributing little or nothing, except in an infinitely 
circuitous manner, to their own maintenance”—as “ truly the fruges 
consumere nati ’’—Burke talked then as he would not talk, ic he were 
alive—and in his senses—at the present day. The “bold peasantry 
—a. country’s pride!” and so forth, was a pretty thought in poetry: 
—our excellent agriculturists, however, are doing their utmost, we 
should remember, to degrade, and depress their “ bold pea- 
santry,” and make them workhouse paupers, every man :—but poetry 
is apt to catch at facts rather than analyze principles: and that line was 
written when ploughmen, and not weavers, were the prevailing produce 
of the land. The manufacturer, as we submitted a little way back, 
has rather uphill work in this—and almost every other discussion. He 
dwells in a close and smoky atmosphere; often has a black face; is 
tolerably vicious, and particularly insolent ;—in short, he is not at all a 
picturesque, or a pleasing personage—but he is a very powerful one— 
and he is here. And let him have his due of justice as well as of mainte- 
nance ; the land-owner, twenty years since, looked at him with a more 
favourable eye than he does now. When the storm raged, and the ship 
laboured, we felt that our strength wasin the numbers of our crew ; now 
we are at anchor, and in safety, we must not fling those numbers 
overboard. Warwickshire and Lancashire was it—or Bedfordshire—and 
Herefordshire—that fought the battles of England—that conquered 
Bonaparte at Waterloo? Our cotton mills, and our steam engines, with 
the swarthy, and what was worse, pallid rogues that worked them; . 
these were the powers that, through a contest which devastated four-fifths 
of Europe, protected the estates of the noblemen and land-owners of Eng- 
land ; and did more (it should seem)—for they doubled the value of them. 
F 2 
