after all are the end; wealth, population, and power are but the means. Malthus himself believes in something like a golden mean, a balance of the two industries, which legislation might possibly preserve.[508] There is another and less plausible argument on the same side. Assuming that wages vary with the price of corn, high money wages, and therefore high prices of corn, are an advantage to working men, who would have more money to buy the goods of the foreign countries where prices of corn were low and goods were cheap. This argument, though our author is inclined to yield to it, is inconsistent with his own views of wages and the facts he cites in support of them.[509] More cogent is the plea that it would be unfair suddenly to withdraw a long-established protection, though (it might be replied) we are no more bound to be gradual in abolishing protection than in concluding peace during war. But the real question is, whether once protected is to mean always protected, and protected in an always increasing degree, for it was this increased protection that was proposed in 1814 and 1815. It may be true that if we protect manufacture we ought to protect agriculture; but, instead of protecting both, why not set both free? Statesmen had no courage, however, to be free-traders, in days when the separate articles protected were as many as the millions in the National Debt, and each article represented a vested interest. Malthus does not seem to expect Parliament to give free trade a moment’s consideration. But the friends of the new Corn Laws, besides using the commonplaces of protectionism, argued from the change in the value of the English currency. When paper were paper prices,[510] the importation price of the law of 1804 could be soon reached, and foreign corn came in much faster than the real or the bullion prices of it would have allowed. There was also the long array of standing arguments for Corn Laws that lay stress on the heavy taxation of the country, and are meant to show that the agricultural classes bear most of it, and are thus handicapped against the foreigner. From Malthus himself the old leaven of protectionism was never wholly purged away. Like Pitt, though in a less degree, he suffered his politics to corrupt his political economy, and drag him back from the “simple system of natural liberty” into “the mazes of the old system.”[511] English people since the Repeal of the Corn Laws will hardly care to thrash the old straw out again. Perronet Thompson’s _Catechism of the Corn Laws_ is the best storehouse of the old arguments and their refutations, set forth with a liveliness to which no other English economical writing has the slightest claim.[512]