Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

farms in the country that could not find occupiers, and we believe that if this rise had not taken place, many of our farms would already have been divided. Prices that will not enable the farmers to save, must inevitably create division, subdivision, and overpeopling. In proportion as large farms should be divided, and small ones multiplied, in the same proportion would the population of the village increase, and its consumption decrease. should soon have a country population like that of Ireland, feeding on potatoes, dressing in rags, and buying scarcely anything of the merchants and manufacturers.

We

But then, it is said, that we ought to buy foreign corn to avoid scarcity. This must mean, that by so buying, we should be enabled to keep constantly a far greater quantity of corn in the country than we can keep at present. Under the present system, the market is tolerably buoyant, and the farmers are in good circumstances; the latter bring their corn to market gradually, and all who are able hold at least a quantity of old wheat over the harvest, from the certainty that they cannot lose by it, and that they may gain greatly. The farmers are thus constantly very large holders of surplus wheat; and, for the six months previously to the harvest, the factors, millers, and merchants, who speculate in corn, are very large holders likewise. The greatest possible quantity of surplus corn is thus constantly kept in the country, that the market can sustain; and, in addition, we have always a new crop approaching, that on the average will supply us. Should the ports be opened, the market would be speedily glutted; the farmers would be reduced to poverty, they would have less corn to sell, they would be compelled to sell as soon after harvest as possible, and scarcely one of them would hold a grain of surplus corn for the four or five months preceding the harvest. The factors and millers would not venture to hold on speculation, and the speculators would not dare to enter the market. The market would break down under one-half of the surplus corn, that it can now sustain with the greatest ease; we should always have infinitely less corn in the country than we now have, and the coming crop, at the best, would fall very far below our consumption. So much for

the foreign corn being on this point a preservative against scarcity.

A bad harvest almost invariably affects more or less the crops of all Europe. The opening of the ports, by putting part of our land out of cultivation, and injuring the fertility of the remainder, would make us dependent on other nations for a large part of our corn, and what would then be our situation in the event of a general bad harvest? Those nations which could now ruin us with their surplus corn would have scarcely any to sell to us; our own bad crop would hardly supply half our wants, and to make up the deficiency by importation would be impossible. By making ourselves dependent on other nations for corn, we should protect them from scarcity, but we should destroy our own protection from it, and render its effects the more dreadful when it should visit us. In truth, were we thus dependent for onefourth of our corn, a general bad harvest would produce in this country, not merely a scarcity, but a horrible famine-a famine in which the mass of the lower orders could not possibly procure bread.

If we were in the habit of attending to the clamour of mobs, newspapereditors, philosophers, and free-trade ministers, we should doubtlessly think very meanly of the Corn Laws; but we are not, and therefore we think these laws most sound and wise ones. They assume, that in average years, we can grow quite as much corn as we can consume- -that the constant importation of foreign corn would cause a glut that would ruin our agriculture-and that we merely want to buy corn occasionally of other nations to meet occasional deficiencies in our own crops. They stand upon this, and their destruction will not establish its falsehood. They separate one kind of grain from another; and whenever the crop of any kind is scanty, and the price high, they open the ports until supplies from abroad produce abundance and moderate prices, and then they close them again. They guard equally against scarcity and glutsagainst the extremes of high and low price; and nothing could be devised that would so effectually keep the market in a healthy state, and protect it from great fluctuations. We are very sure, that they are as beneficial to the merchants and manufacturers as to

Agriculturists. They have been tried, and their working corresponds with the truth of the principle on which they stand. They may be destroyedfor what that is beneficial to the community can escape in these days of destruction—but wiser laws will not replace them.

That man has the intellect of a fool, and not of a statesman, who can look at this nation in the present moment without discovering that a glut in any commodity is as destructive as a scarcity, and that all trading systems, and all governments, ought to guard as much against the one as the other. Upon this our Restrictive Systemthat system of truth and wisdom, that system to which England owes its wealth, happiness, and grandeur,was founded. It gave us, as far as possible, a separate market of our own for everything that we had to sell; it kept this market in the most manageable condition, and protected it from all gluts save those of our own creating. In what we had to buy abroad, it opened to us the general market of the world, and did its utmost to cause competition and low prices. Its restrictions gave us the fulness of trading, liberty, and protection. It would not suffer one interest to ruin another -a part of the community to crush our labour-market by importing foreign labour-the agriculturists to make bankrupts of the manufacturers, by buying foreign manufactures -or the merchants and manufacturers to make beggars of the Agriculturists, by buying foreign corn. It would not permit the individual to ruin his neighbour, or the nation to ruin itself. It restrained our jarring interests from robbing and destroying each other, as our civil laws restrain the members of the community from robbing and destroying each other; but beyond this it gave us freedom, nay, licentiousness. What were its fruits? While foreign agriculture was kept in constant penury by excessive supply, our own flourished and enriched the empire-while the market for labour abroad was distressed by a never-ending glut, in this country it was kept in the most prosperous condition;while in other nations commerce and manufactures languished and pined from the want of consumption, in this they throve beyond hope, and almost beyond possibility. The new liberal

system is of course the reverse in all things. Its grand object is to place everything that as a nation we have to sell, under a ruinous and eternal glut. When our market for labour is oppressed by superabundance, it calls upon all other nations to throw their labour into it-when our market for silks, cottons, and woollens, is sinking under excessive supply, it invites all other nations to pour into it their silks, cottons, and woollens-when our corn-market is abundantly supplied, it invites other nations to overwhelm it with their corn. It destroys our separate markets, chains us in what we have to sell to the general one of the world, and grinds us down to the poverty, weakness, and privations of other countries. To rival and hostile nations, it will no doubt be a system of freedom and riches; but to England, it will be a system for enabling her various interests to commit towards each other trading interest, theft, and murder-it will be a system of commercial oppression and tyranny, of wholesale plunder and confiscation -of ruin, pauperism, starvation, and misery. Speak of the Mississippi Scheme and past bubbles-of the South Sea Company-Mr Law, and the scheme-dolts of the Stock Exchange!-they are below contempt, compared with the free-trade bubbles, and bubble-blowers. They grasped only the fortunes of individuals, or detached portions of a nation's interests; but from the latter we have a stupendous scheme of ruin to ingulph the whole interests of the first empire in the universe. Never until this hour had mad imbecility, impudent quackery, and blind credulity, their full triumph.

There never was a period in our history so well calculated for making a patriotic statesman sigh for the direction of public affairs, as the present moment. At no previous period of our history was the government so free from serious difficulties, and so profusely supplied with everything necessary for promoting trade, wealth, and prosperity, as it is at present. So long as a nation possesses any considerable portion of superabundant land, it is scarcely possible to protect its agriculture from constant poverty, and to give it any large share of durable trade, wealth, and power. While land was superabundant in this country,

ture, we are giving away our commerce and manufactures to any nation that will accept them—we are doing what must immediately raise greatly our taxes-and still we protest that all this will benefit us-that it forms the longsought philosopher's stone. From the bankruptcy of the master, and the starvation of the servant, is to flow our increase of revenue-our trade is to flourish in proportion as it may pass into the hands of other countries-and the ruin and distress of agriculture are to fill to overflow our measure of national strength and greatness. One thing, however, seems to have been forgotten, that is necessary for rendering the new system complete. A law ought to be passed to compel us to people our soil with fishes, and to grow our corn and feed our cattle upon the sea.

our agriculture was almost always poor. Prices were only made occasionally good by seasons of scarcity; and if in these the farmers' circumstances were somewhat bettered, the first good crop caused a glut, and brought back the poverty. The government could apply no remedy-bounties on the exportation of corn only increased the superabundance of it, and made things worse instead of better. We have no longer any excess of land, and we have still sufficient to supply us plentifully with food for many years to come. Favoured pre-eminently in everything, we have gained that command over wealth and prosperity which was never possessed by any great nation before us. We have gained the means of keeping our agriculture constantly rich and flourishing-of keeping ten millions of our population constantly in plentiful circumstances-of keeping that gigantic interest in constant prosperity, to which belongs half our population, which employs two-thirds of our capital and labour, and regulates the profits and wages of the whole, and on which our trade, foreign and domestic, our riches, power, and greatness, depend. We have the means of doing this; and if our exporting manufacturers be suffering from the cost of labour, we have the means of grant--the measures of policy, foreign and ing them abundant relief, by the repeal of duties. Such a repeal, even in regard to the expenses of production, would benefit them more than a reduction of one-fourth in the price of

corn.

We have the means of soon making many articles that we consume much cheaper by a reduction of taxes; and of crushing every foreign competitor in every market that we are permitted to enter. Yet we find all this insupportable. While other nations are deploring the poverty and depression of their agriculture, we are thrown into a paroxysm of fury against our own, because it is rich and flourishing. We are labouring to drag it from its security-to trample it into ruinand to place it eternally under the penury and suffering which sit on that of foreign countries. The magnificent boon which to other states is unattainable, and which might almost enable us to gratify every wish, we cast from us in scorn; and we seem determined, even in spite of the will of Heaven, to be poor, and feeble, and wretched. While we are acting thus to agricul

To look at all this is sufficient to fill with flame the soul of a stoic. It is still consoling in some degree to reflect, that although all must suffer from it, the mass of our countrymen are wholly free from the shame and disgrace of having either originated or sanctioned it. The Whigs were its parents, and it gives the last tint of blackness to their character that this is capable of receiving. Were all the principles-the new laws and systems

domestic which the Whigs have originated or advocated since the time when Fox became their leader, printed in a book with the results which a trial of them has yielded, it would form such an amazing display of ignorance, folly, stupidity, madness, and idiotcy, as was never made by any other body of men since the creation, Perhaps from the course which certain of the Ministers have lately followed, the adoption of the "new system" was necessary to preserve us from the evils of a Whig Ministry. Perhaps we could only have escaped the greater evil, by being subjected to the lesser. There is not now-whatever there was recently-any danger of a Whig Ministry; and we shall be somewhat mistaken if a "liberal" Tory one can endure for twelve months longer. The people of England are at length awakening from their slumber; and the time we think is not far distant, when the Ministry will contain a far greater portion of English ancestry, blood, heart, feeling, and opinion, than it contains at present. The men who

disdain to wear the fetters of any public man or any party-who have made the Ministers what they are-and who can, with half their strength, crush every opponent-have never sanctioned the new measures; they have only looked on with passive disapprobation. These measures have been carried

through their neutrality of action, and by the support of the Whigs, Benthamites, and Radicals. Let these men be assured that though they have been deserted, betrayed, and left without leaders, they are still omnipotent-let them shake off their apathy, take the field of their former glories,

AND ONCE MORE SAVE THEIR COUNTRY!

DR LINGARD.

THIS Roman Catholic divine has been for some years producing volumes of what he calls a History of England. He is a thorough Papist, and of course his work is in the thorough spirit of his blinded and unhappy faith;-venomous with the most sanctified appearance of impartiality, ignorant with the most pompous display of authorities, and hostile to all the national feelings of religious liberality, with the most specious professions of national attachment, and freedom on principle.

As the Roman Catholics have throughout all this contest exhibited the most striking dearth of literature, a dearth to be accounted for only by the paralysing effect of a belief which enslaves the human understanding, they have of course magnified the miracle of a "History" appearing among them; and Dr Lingard is now the elected champion of the Popish Church against fact, feeling, and the faith of England. The Edinburgh Review has, in the habitual spirit of that mischievous and malignant agent, adopted this disciple of Jesuitism, and lauded his work as it lauded Buonaparte, and lauds everything that common sense and national honour would stigmatize and scorn. Dr Lingard is a man of some ability and some reading, not comparable for a moment to any of the leading names among the histo-. rians of England or her Church, yet of course a wonder in the general ignorance and dulness of the Popish writers of his time. His style is still that of the cloister, monotonous, creeping, and cold. He never rises into eloquence, the noblest events never rouse him into feeling. There are none of those splendid bursts and impulses, where history seems to assume a human heart, and speaks the burning VOL. XIX.

language of living indignation, or pays its proud and solemn homage to virtue. All is sluggish. We drag on to the close of his volumes, with the heavy smoothness of a track-schuyt, and are glad to have done with our voyage of hazy fog, and flat stagnation.

There are two principles of fraudulent history, the "fictio falsi and the suppressio veri." To tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is the obligation of an honest historian, as much as if he were standing in the witness-box. Dr Lingard is not a bold man, and prefers the "suppressio veri" to the more resolute branch of the rule. He may not dare direct falsehood, but he will not tell "the whole truth." He has a prejudice against enlightening Protestant ignorance, and putting Popish feelings to pain; and no man shall detect him giving us the entire of the facts without palliation or disguise. He finds, on the most incontestable authority, that Mary, well named the "Bloody," burned 200 persons, and imprisoned a crowd of Protestants, of whom many died. Dr Lingard soothes his conscience by allowing that she executed almost 200! Thus goes on his whole history; crime is occasionally allowed, because to deny it, would be to make the world cry out upon the writer. But it is studiously softened down. Yet what is the value of this wretched attempt at palliation? Two hundred human beings avowedly murdered, and by the most cruel of all deaths, for the honour of Popery! Wretched advocate, sanguinary and godless superstition!

Dr Lingard's History has now come to the English Reformation. He treats it like a Jesuit, heaps calumnies on the men to whom we are indebted at 2 R

this hour for leave to look into a Bible, for leave to look into any book without the intervention of a priest, for leave to eat our bread in peace, without the permission of a priest ordaining what we shall eat, and whether we shall eat at all; for leave to sleep at night in our beds, without the terror of being dragged from them by some officer of a tribunal of blood, some familiar of the Inquisition, to die under the torture, or linger out a miserable life in a dungeon! The men to whom we are at this hour indebted, that England is the head of the civili zed world, and not the vassal of France and Spain, and like them both in insecurity and public distrust, with an unsettled throne, and a people ready for mutual massacre.

The memory of Elizabeth, the greatest queen that ever ruled a nation, a mind thoroughly English, the bulwark of freedom not merely among ourselves, but of whatever civil and religious freedom existed in Europe, is the chief subject of contumely to this unnational and perfidious historian.

He charges Elizabeth with persecution! The slaughter of heretics is the notorious tenet of his own church; authenticated in every age, and at this hour ready to be put in force, if our weakness, or our belief in their protestations, give them the mastery. The charge is altogether false-she persecuted none! Religious opinions brought no priest to the scaffold. But justice and the public safety demanded that the hired agents of Spain and France, and the declared conspirators against her life, and the liberties of England, should not be suffered to involve the land in bloodshed and convulsion. Yet, with all this provocation, but few died; and none but by a public trial, on unquestioned proof of guilt. They perished as traitors, detected in their treason! The reign of Elizabeth was the crisis of the great struggle of false religion with true, of despotism with liberty, of national debasement, misery, and anarchy, with national empire, happiness, and order.

What was her history?

Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558. She found popish Europe triumphing in the prospect of the subversion of British power, as it had already exulted over the prostration of religion in the blood of her people.

The first act of popery was the type of all that followed; the whole body of the popish prelates of England, with one exception, refused to crown her.

The vassalage of England was the object of France. It was hoped to become an easier prey, if Mary of Scotland was queen. France notoriously intrigued with the papal see. Pope Paul published an insolent denial of Elizabeth's right to the crown, and proclaimed that of Mary. Such was the condition of kingdoms that had acknowledged the papacy! France now reckoned upon the conquest of England, and actually put the English arms into its escutcheop. Mary attempted to raise Scotland against her in alliance with France. Both France and Scotland persecuted the reformed religion. The reformers in both threw themselves on the mercy of England. Thus began the justified hostility of England to both sovereigns.

But the power of the realm was not to be shaken by the poverty of her northern neighbour, nor by the unsettled and dubious throne of her continental enemy. What could not be effected by war, was tried by treachery. Conspiracies, in long succession, were formed against Elizabeth's life. In 1563, a conspiracy was entered into by the Poles, for the death of the queen, and the proclamation of Mary. The traitors were found guilty, but not executed. In less than two years after, a league for the destruction of the protestant religion, and England at its head, was formed in the famous Bayonne conference, by the two most remorseless persecutors of the age, Catherine of Medicis, and the Duke of Alva; the one given down to the execration of mankind, by the massacre of St Bartholomew, and the other by the massacres of the people of the Netherlands, through the Inquisition. This league was formed in 1565.

Within four years, another Popish conspiracy was formed in the realm. This suddenly took the shape of open war; an insurrectionary force appeared, headed by Northumberland, and openly proclaiming the restoration of Popery. Its banner was an idolatrous emblem of "the five wounds of Christ;" and its first and congenial exploit was, the burning of the Bible and Common Prayer in Durham Cathedral. This rebellion was notoriously advised,

« AnteriorContinuar »