“In considering this subject, there are two important circumstances to be kept in view, proved abundantly by experience, but which have not hitherto met with the general attention which they deserve. “The first of these is, that, in agriculture—differing in this respect from manufactures—the introduction of machinery, or the division of labour, can effect _no reduction whatever_ in the price of its produce, or the facility of its production; and perhaps the best mode of cultivation yet known is that which is carried on by the greatest possible application of human labour, in the form of spade cultivation. The proof of this is decisive. Great Britain, with the aid of the steam-engine, can undersell the weavers of Hindostan with muslins manufactured out of cotton grown on the banks of the Ganges; but it is undersold in its own markets by the wheat-grower on the banks of the Vistula, or in the basin of the Mississippi. It is in vain, therefore, for a state like England, burdened with high prices and an excessive taxation—the natural consequence of commercial opulence—to hope that its industry can, in agriculture as in manufactures, withstand the competition of the foreign grower. Machinery, skill, and capital can easily counteract high prices in all other articles of human consumption: in agriculture, they can produce no such effect. This is a law of nature which will subsist to the end of the world. “The second is, that a comparatively small importation of grain produces a prodigious effect on the prices at which it is sold. The importation of a tenth part of the annual consumption does not, it is calculated, lower prices a tenth, but _a half_—and so on with the importation of smaller quantities. This has always been observed, and is universally acknowledged by political economists. Although, therefore, the greatest possible importation of foreign grain must always be a part only of that required for the consumption of the whole people, yet still the effect upon the current rate of prices would be most disastrous. The greatest importation ever known was in 1801, when it amounted, in consequence of the scarcity, to an _eighteenth_ part of the annual consumption; but the free introduction of much less than that quantity would reduce the price of wheat in the first instance, in an ordinary year, to 45s. the quarter. “The repeal of the Corn Laws, therefore, is calculated to inflict a _permanent_ wound on the agricultural resources of the empire, and permanently injure all the numerous classes who depend on that branch of industry, and confer only a _temporary_ benefit, by the reduction of prices, on the manufacturing labourers. The benefit is temporary, and mixed up, even at first, with a most bitter portion of alloy; the evil lasting, unmitigated by any benefit whatever.”