Many other cases might be presented to the reader, and especially under the action of a doctrine repeatedly pressed in this journal, but steadily neglected elsewhere--viz. the "_devolution_" of foreign agriculture upon lower qualities of land, (and consequently its _permanent_ exaltation in price,) in case of any certain demand on account of England. But this one illustration is sufficient. Here we see that, under a free trade in corn, and _in consequence_ of a free trade, ruinous enhancements of price would arise--such in magnitude as never could have arisen under a wise limitation of foreign competition. And further, we see that under our present system no enhancement is, or could be, _absolutely_ injurious; it might be so _relatively_--it might be so in relation to the poor consumer; but in the mean time, that guinea which might be lost to the consumer would be gained to the farmer. Now, in the case supposed, under a free corn trade the rise is commensurate to the previous injury sustained by the farmer; and much of the extra bonus reaped goes to a foreign interest. What we insist upon, however, is this one fact, that alternately the British corn-laws have raised the price of grain and have sunk it; they have raised the price in the case where else there would have been a ruinous depreciation--ruinous to the prospects of succeeding years; they have sunk it under the natural and usual oscillations of weather to be looked for in these succeeding years. And each way their action has been most moderate. For let not the reader forget, that on the system of a sliding-scale, this action cannot be otherwise than moderate. Does the price rise? Does it threaten to rise higher? Instantly the very evil redresses itself. As the evil, _i.e._ the price, increases, in that exact proportion does it open the gate to relief; for exactly so does the duty fall. Does the price fall ruinously?--(in which case it is true that the _instant_ sufferer is the farmer; but through him, as all but the short-sighted must see, the consumer will become the reversionary sufferer)--immediately the duty rises, and forbids an accessary evil from abroad to aggravate the evil at home. So gentle and so equable is the play of those weights which regulate our whole machinery, whilst the late correction applied even here by Sir Robert Peel, has made this gentle action still gentler; so that neither of the two parties--consumers who to live must buy, growers who to live must sell--can, by possibility, feel an incipient pressure before it is already tending to relieve itself. It is the very perfection of art to make a malady produce its own medicine--an evil its own relief. But that which here we insist on, is, that it never _was_ the object of our own corn-laws to increase the price of corn; secondly, that the real object was a condition of equipoise which abstractedly is quite unconnected with either rise of price or fall of price; and thirdly, that, as a matter of fact, our