Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846Various
History
Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The agriculture of England is the true treasury of England. We may exist
with diminished manufactures, and we must prepare for their diminution,
from the universal determination of other countries to manufacture for
themselves. But we cannot exist without food; and, from the moment when
the discouragement of tillage shall leave England in necessity, we shall
see the cheap corn of Russia and Poland taxed by the monarch, raised to
a famine price, all the current gold of the country sent to purchase
subsistence in Russia, and our only resource a paper currency, followed
with an enormous increase of expense in every common necessary of life.
Throw a fourth of the land of England out of cultivation, and what must
become of the labourers? They now complain of low wages; then they will
have none. What must be the condition of Ireland, wholly agricultural,
and ruined by a flood of foreign corn, at half the price for which the
Irish farmer can bring it to market? These consequences are so
notorious, that nobody attempts to dispute them. They are coolly taken
as inevitable things; and the whole dependence, even of the mob
advocates, is upon chance: "Oh, something will turn up! Things won't be
so bad as you think!"
But the true conspirators see deeper. They know, that a revolution in
the food of the people is the immediate forerunner of a revolution in
the state. From the moment when foreign corn is admitted free of
restraint, the confidence of the farmer must be shaken. From the farmer,
the shock will instantly reach the landlord; his rent must be
diminished. To one-half of the great proprietaries of the kingdom, a
diminution of rent, even by a third, would make their possessors
personally bankrupt. Their mortgages and loans must be repaid; and
nothing would remain. The landlord now pays the Church. If he is ruined,
the whole Church income, independent of the small portions of glebe
land, must perish with him.
Then will come the agitation for a still more daring purpose. It will be
asked why must the system of English life be artificial?--Because we
have twenty-eight millions sterling of interest to pay, and for this we
must have taxes. But, why not sweep the national debt away, as France
did in her day of royal overthrow? A single sitting of the Convention
settled that question. Why not follow the example? Then will come the
desperate expedient, and all will be ruin on the heads of the most
helpless of the community; for the national debt is only a saving bank
on a larger scale, and nine-tenths of its creditors are of the most
struggling order of the empire.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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