384 BrJTAIN FOR THE BRITON 



Cobden and his Free-trade following, with the avowed 

 object of benefiting manufactiwiiig interests, interpreted the 

 doctrines of Adam Smith and the great economists of long ago 

 in a manner which favoured the abandonment of our own agri- 

 culture. " Don't grow your own wheat if others can grow it 

 cheaper for you " was, and is, the keynote of their policy, and 

 this interpretation of Adam Smith and his fellow-economists 

 insured the destruction of British agriculture. 



So many evils have sprung out of a murdered agriculture, 

 so many strange and unaccountable things have happened in 

 our social and economic world to puzzle and confound the 

 British people, so much destitution, unemployment, pauperism, 

 strife, unrest, copious outflow of British capital to foreign 

 countries, such a wasteful drain of emigration, so many incon- 

 gruities in economics, and so many inconsistencies and paradoxes 

 in the Ijroad field of Sociology have cropped up to mystify 

 people, that one hardly knows what lias happened, while nobody 

 can predict what is going to happen. 



Cobden and his fellows, by stopping the natural flow of the 

 o-reat agricultural industry, dammed up the inlets and outlets of 

 national life, wdiich, once interfered with, will surely cause un- 

 looked for and untoward results. Dam up a swirling torrent, 

 and you will soon get results that will astonish you. Take 

 away your dam, and the trouble at once ceases. Economic 

 science may demonstrate — on paper — how to let your laud lie 

 waste and import your corn from a foreign country, in the same 

 manner that astronomical science can demonstrate the story of 

 the visible heavens ; but astronomers cannot trace the stars to 

 their source nor fathom the profound depths of inter-stellar 

 space ; nor can the economists trace or estimate the loss which 

 radiates from an uncultivated country and ramifies through 

 every section of public life, till it is lost in the distance of far- 

 away results. Those who destroy the agriculture of a country 

 launch into being a force of evil which gathers momentum as it 

 proceeds on its fateful course, and no man can measure its scath 

 nor trace the alplia and omega of its baleful results. 



To apply the laws of a doubtful, slippery science like 

 economics to the cultivation of a field or the cultivation of one's 

 back garden, is to apotheosise science at the expense of sense. 

 Of course both the field and the back garden, as indeed, every 

 plot of land in this, and every other civilised country on earth, 

 must be cultivated, otherwise, how are the people to be fed and 

 employed ? To ask Science to supersede Sense is to do that 

 which Adam Smith himself never would have done, and which 

 he never asked his degenerate followers to do in his name. It 

 is common-sense to cultivate the land, of this, or any other 



