working classes ought to have shared the profits, and they were diligently instructed that they had gained as much as their employers. But their practical condition remained unaltered, and they looked with strange eyes upon the progress in which, for one cause or another, they did not find that they participated. The remedy of the economists was to heat the furnace still hotter, to abolish every lingering remnant of restraint, and stifle complaint by admitting the working men to political power. The enlightened among the rich were not afraid, for they were entrenched, as they believed, behind their law of nature. In its contracts with labour capital must always have the advantage; for capital could wait and hungry stomachs could not wait. In the meantime let the Corn Laws go. Let all taxes on articles of consumption go. Trade would then expand indefinitely, and all would be well. 'The wealth of the nation,' the Free-Traders of Manchester said, depends on its commerce. The commerce of England is shackled by a network of duties. The consumer pays dear for the necessaries of life, which he might buy cheap but for artificial interference. The raw materials of our industry are burdened with restrictions. But for these we might multiply our mills, expand our connections, provide work and food for the millions who are now hungry. With your Corn Laws you are starving multitudes to maintain the rents of a few thousand Elysians, who neither toil nor spin, who might be blotted off the surface of the soil to-morrow and none would miss them; who consume the labours of the poor on a splendour of living unheard of since the Roman Empire, and extort the means of this extravagance by an arbitrary law. You say you must have a revenue to maintain your fleets and armies, and that it cannot be raised except by customs duties. Your fleets and armies are not needed. Take away your commercial fetters, allow the nations of the earth a free exchange of commodities with us, and you need not fear that they will quarrel with us: wars will be heard of no more, and the complaints of the poor that they are famished to supply the luxuries of the rich will no longer cry to Heaven.