“Now, the misery arising from the reduction of the resources of the farmer could not be confined to his own class in society; it would immediately and seriously affect the manufacturing and commercial interests. The great trade of every country, as Adam Smith long ago remarked, is between the town and the country: by far the greatest part of the produce of our looms is consumed by those who, directly or indirectly, are fed by the British plough. Not the haughty aristocrat only, who spends his life in luxurious indolence among his hereditary trees, but the innumerable classes who are maintained by his rents and fed by his expenditure—the numerous creditors who draw large parts of his rents through their mortgages, and live in affluence in distant towns upon the produce of his land—the farmers, who subsist in comparative comfort on the industry which they exert on his estates—the tradesmen and artisans, who are fed by his expenditure or the wants of his tenantry—all would suffer alike by such a change of prices as should seriously affect the industry of the cultivators. Every shopkeeper knows how much he is dependent on the expenditure of those who directly or indirectly are maintained by the land, and what liberal purchasers landlords are, compared to those who subsist by manufactures; and it is probable that the first and greatest sufferers by the repeal of the Corn Laws would be many of those very persons whose blind cry for Reform had rendered it unavoidable. “Now, the discouragement of British agriculture consequent on a free-trade in corn would be _permanent_, although the benefit to the inhabitants of towns could only be temporary. After the destruction of a large portion of British agriculture had been effected, by the immense inundation of foreign grain, prices would rise again to their former level, because the monopoly would then be vested in the hands of the foreign growers; and the bulky nature of grain renders it _physically_ impossible to introduce an _unlimited_ supply of that article by sea transport. But the condition of British agriculture would not be materially benefited by the change; because prices would rise _solely_ in consequence of the British grower being, for the most part, driven out of the field; and could be maintained at a high level only by his being _kept_ from an extensive competition with the foreign cultivator. Should the British farmers, recovering from their consternation, recommence the active agriculture which at present maintains our vast and increasing population, the consequence would be, that prices would immediately fall to such a degree, as speedily to reduce them to their natural and unavoidable state of inferiority to the farmers of the Continent.