Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The same agreeable tidings pour in from all parts of
the kingdom, and indeed from all parts of the world." Alas for human
prescience! On the 21st, the note was changed, and the bulletin from
Corn-Exchange announced that "the trade was dull, and the prices
gave way 1s. to 2s. per quarter before any progress could be made
in sales." The aggregate average of wheat for the six weeks ending
May 11th, was 37s. 1d.--a rate at which no one, not even the most
sanguine dabbler in agricultural improvement, has ventured to aver
that corn can be raised, under present burdens, without occasioning
an enormous loss to the grower.
We do not complain of these calculations or prophecies, however
fallacious they may be; but we do complain, very seriously, that
Ministers, their organs and their underlings, are halting between
two opinions. If cheapness is their watchword and principle, then
they have no right to plume themselves upon any rise in the value of
produce. We can understand the thorough-paced Free-trader who tells
us broadly, that the cheaper food can be bought, no matter whence
it comes, so much the better for the community. That is, at all
events, plain sailing. But we say deliberately, that a more pitiable
spectacle of mental imbecility cannot be imagined than that which is
now presented by the Cabinet, who, with cheapness in their mouths,
are eagerly catching at the faintest shadow of a rise in prices; and
who, did such a rise take place, would be the first to congratulate
the country on the improved condition of its prospects! Mr Wilson,
who usually communicates to the Premier, in the House of Commons,
the invaluable results of his experience, has been blundering on for
months in the preposterous hope of getting rid of facts by trumpery
and fallacious statistics; and has at last landed himself in such a
quagmire of contradictions, that his best friends are compelled to
despair of his ultimate extrication. Yet this gentleman is one of
those authorities whom we are told to regard with reverence; and whom
we do regard with just as much reverence as we would bestow upon a
broker's clerk who had set up for himself in business as a dealer in
the scrip of exploded and abandoned lines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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