The annual amount of the manufacturing productions of this country is estimated at £178,000,000; and it is said that last year we have exported £58,000,000. If this be the case, there remain goods to the value of £120,000,000, to be consumed at home; and the amount of the actual consumption mainly depends upon the consumers’ power of purchase. Mr Villiers tells us that £91,000,000 have been _lost_ to the agricultural classes—for depreciation is neither more nor less than direct loss. It is an obvious fallacy to assume, as Mr Muntz does, that this sum is merely to be considered as transferred from one pocket of the community to another, as a note for five pounds might be. In the latter case, the capital represented by the note is not destroyed; in the former, the agricultural produce having been purchased and consumed at two-thirds of its productive cost, there is clearly a direct loss to the producing party. The annual amount of agricultural produce in this country was estimated, according to former average prices, at £250,000,000; and if this be accepted as true, or even an approximation to the truth, the estimate of Mr Villiers will show a depreciation of more than a third of the value. To that extent, therefore, the power of purchase in the home market is lessened; for if £120,000,000 of manufactures are made to be consumed at home, and the means of the consumers are reduced by £91,000,000, how is it possible that trade can remain in a prosperous condition? If the dependence of the prosperity of manufactures on the amount of the demand existing in the home market is admitted—and no man yet has attempted to deny that intimate relationship between the agricultural and the manufacturing classes—it will follow, as a clear deduction, that to curtail the means of the consumer is tantamount to limiting the demand. No body of men understood this more clearly than the leading agitators of the League. They knew perfectly well, that agricultural distress must react fearfully upon that numerous section of the manufacturers, who look solely to the home market for the regular consumption of their produce, and who supply the greater number of the retail dealers and shopkeepers, whose means of livelihood depend on their intervention between the makers of the fabric and the buyers. Those leading agitators were independent of the home trade. Their interest lay in pushing exports to the utmost, and in maintaining their hold of the foreign and distant markets, in spite of a fierce competition with France, Germany, and America. That competition had latterly become so serious and formidable, that, in order to maintain their ground, they found it necessary to devise some means whereby operative labour, already brought down to the lowest point of monetary wage, might be stimulated and sustained; and the only scheme available to them was the breaking up of the corn laws, which, in this highly-taxed country, with the accumulated burdens of more than a