"The superior importance of the home market for all that the manufacturing industry of Great Britain produces, compared to what the foreign market, including even the colonial, takes off, furnishes one of the strongest arguments against the abolition of the Corn Laws.... The home consumpt, not the foreign, is undeniably that which the great mass of British manufacturing labour and capital is engaged in supplying. Take away from the home consumers the means to consume--that is, the high and artificial value of their labour, or rate of wages produced by the working of the Corn Laws--and you stop this home market. You cut off the spring from which it is fed. You sacrifice a certain home market for an uncertain foreign market. You sacrifice four-fifths for the chance of augmenting one-fifth. If the one-fifth, the foreign consumpt, should be augmented so as to equal the four-fifths--the home consumpt--it would still be a question of very doubtful policy whether it should be so augmented: whether the means of living of so large a proportion of the productive classes should be made to depend so entirely upon a demand which political circumstances might suddenly cut off," &c.[36] Knowing the opinions held by Mr Laing to be thus adverse to that change of the law which virtually gave to the _metayeur_ or proprietor of Holstein, Pomerania, or Poland, a preference in Mark Lane over the farmer of Norfolk or Lincolnshire, it was with some surprise, and some apprehension for the consistency of the author, that, in turning over the table of contents of the volume before us, we came to the following heading:--"On the abolition of the Corn Laws _as a Conservative measure_ for the English landed interest."