It will be observed that, as yet, we have put the case for
Protection upon very narrow grounds. We have shown that, so far
as the agricultural body is concerned, Free Trade has proved most
injurious, and that it cannot be persisted in without bringing
downright ruin to that section of the community. If we had nothing
more to advance than this, still we should be entitled to maintain
that enough has been adduced to show the necessity of retracing
our steps. The annihilation of such an important body as the
agriculturists of Britain, implies of itself a revolution as great
as ever was effected in the world; and to that, assuredly, if the
agriculturists stood alone, they would not tamely submit. When Mr
Cobden or his satellites addressed the people of Manchester, through
their League circulars, to the following effect, "If the Americans
will only put down their monopolising manufacturers, and we put down
our monopolising landowners here, when our election time comes, we
will lay the Mississippi valley alongside of Manchester, and we
will have a glorious trade then!"--and again, "Our doctrine is, let
the working man ply his hammer, or his spindle, or his shuttle, and
let the Kentucky or the Illinois farmer, by driving his plough in
the richest land on the surface of the earth, feed this mechanic
or this weaver, and let him send home his produce in exchange for
the products of our operatives and artisans"--they seem to have
forgotten the temper and mould of the men with whom they proposed
to deal so summarily. It is not quite so easy to expatriate three
millions of able-bodied men; nor do we opine that a power morally
or physically adequate to the task of such removal exists in the
manufacturing districts. But, in reality, of all idle talk that ever
issued from the lips or the pen of an inflated demagogue, this is
the silliest and the worst. It presupposes an amount of ignorance
on the part of his audience anything but flattering to the calibre
of the Manchester intellect: indeed we hardly know which is most
to be admired--its intense and transparent folly or its astounding
audacity. The home trade is a thing altogether kept out of account
in the foregoing splendid vision of a calico millennium. Mr Cobden,
it will be seen, contemplates no home consumption, except in so far
as the operative may provide himself with his own shirtings. The
whole production of Britain is to be limited to manufactures; the
whole supplies are to be derived from the hands of the reciprocating
foreigner!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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