Acres. 1848, 1,084,000 1849, 511,000 1850, 674,000[13] --------- Now, assuming--as experience warrants us in doing--this state of matters to be permanent, and the growth of wheat in the British Islands to be progressively superseded by importations from abroad, how is the _national independence_ to be maintained, when a _fourth of our people_ have come to depend on foreign supplies for their daily food? Nearly all this grain, be it recollected, comes from two countries only--Russia, or Poland which it governs, and America. If these two powers are desirous of beating down the naval superiority, or ruining the commerce and manufactures of Great Britain, they need not fit out a ship of the line, or embark a battalion to effect their purpose; they have only to pass a _Non-Intercourse Act_, as they both did in 1811, and wheat will at once rise to 120s. the quarter in this country; and in three months we must haul down our colours, and submit to any terms they may choose to dictate. In another respect our state of dependence is still greater, for we rest almost entirely on the supplies obtained from a _single_ state. No one need be told that five-sixths, often nine-tenths, of the supply of cotton consumed in our manufactures come from America, and that seven or eight hundred thousand persons are directly or indirectly employed in the operations which take place upon it. Suppose America wishes to bully us, to make us abandon Canada or Jamaica for example, she has no need to go to war. She has only to stop the export of cotton for six months, and the whole of our manufacturing counties are starving or in rebellion; while a _temporary_ cessation of profit is the only inconvenience they experience on the other side of the Atlantic. Can we call ourselves independent in such circumstances? We might have been independent: Jamaica, Demerara, and India, _might_ have furnished cotton enough for all our wants. Why, then, do they not do so? The mania of cheapening everything has done it all. We have ruined the West Indies by emancipating the negroes, and then admitting foreign sugar all but on the same terms as our own, and therefore cotton cannot be raised to a profit in those rich islands--for _continuous_ labour, of which the emancipated negroes are incapable, is indispensable to its production. In the East Indies, the cultivation of cotton has not been able to make any material progress, because the mania of Free Trade lets in American cotton, grown at half the expense, without protection. We have sold our independence, not like Esau, for a mess of pottage, but for a bale of cotton.