But why go into details to illustrate a fact which, so far from being denied, is openly admitted, and even gloried in by the Free-traders? In a late paper on Free Trade, we estimated the decline in the value of agricultural produce, in the British islands, in consequence of free trade in grain, at £75,000,000, or a fourth of its amount. But the Free-traders tell us, and apparently with reason, that this is too low an estimate. Mr Villiers, in seconding the Address in the House of Commons, calculated the saving of the people, in the consumption of all the kinds of food, since 1847, at £91,000,000; and if to this is added the price of the 12,000,000 quarters of all sorts of grain, which were imported in the course of 1849, estimated at the moderate average of 20s. a quarter, the loss to the agricultural interest will be £103,000,000. But this is evidently too high, as the prices of 1847 were scarcity prices, owing to the famine in Ireland; and deducting £13,000,000 on that account, there will remain £90,000,000 at the very least which has been lost in one year to the agricultural interest of Great Britain and Ireland. This is more than _a third_ of its amount, which may be taken, under the reduced scale of prices, for three years prior to the Irish famine, at £250,000,000 annual value. But this, it is said, is all a landlords' question: the community at large, and, above all, the borough electors who rule the empire, have no interest in it. A landlords' question truly! Why, the whole _land_ rents of the two islands,[3] abstracting from them those of houses, are under £60,000,000 annually; and a loss of £90,000,000 a-year is a landlords' question only! It is, at least, as much a tenants' question as a landlords'; and as there are now 750,000 holders of land in the two islands of Great Britain and Ireland, amounting with their families to 2,500,000 souls, this body, one and all of whom have been impoverished by the change, must be taken as a clear addition to the landlords, who have been directly and deeply injured by the same causes. And what are we to say to the agricultural labourers, mechanics, millers, wheelwrights, and artificers, who depend directly, immediately, and almost entirely, on the market for the produce of their industry among the rural population? At the very least, their incomes would all decline a half, and they, with their families, amount to some millions more. And this is what the Free-traders call a landlords' question! [3] England, £47,000,000 Scotland, 3,500,000 Ireland, 8,000,000 ------------ £58,500,000 Apart, in the three Kingdoms, from rents of houses, which amount to about £45,000,000 more.