61 



greatness and pre-eminence of Britain. " Her 

 peculiar facilities for manufacture, will always 

 secure for her this independence ; and her only 

 danger is, lest her overpassing facilities should 

 make her independence a precarious one, by 

 landing her in an excrescent population,"* a 

 population which cannot be supported from her 

 own soil. The manufacturers enter the field of 

 competition with many peculiar advantages, they 

 have not to engage in an unequal contest with so 

 burthensome a baggage on their backs as the agri- 

 culturalists have. The Vice President of the 

 Board of Trade, in his speeches to the Electoral 

 Body of Manchester, advocated the entire system 

 of universal free trade, and asserted the more 

 unshackled trade had been, the more complete 

 had been its success, and that the manufacturers 

 would have nothing to fear from a free trade in the 

 products of their industry ; that the relaxation of 

 prohibition has tended to the augmentation of our 

 prosperity and the increase of our wealth. He 

 mentions the cotton manufacture as a proof of this ; 

 " in the instance of this manufacture we have 

 the history of the advantages of free trade." Yet, 

 this great manufacture, be it remembered, has 

 arisen to its " giant strength" notwithstanding the 

 price of corn which has obtained for the last thirty 

 years; and I would ask, was it not more pros- 

 perous, were not the profits greater during the 

 first twenty years, when corn was nearly double 



* Dr. Chalmers, page 230. 



