w respectable
customers of twenty years' standing bought them in pennyworths to
moisten their potatoes. These shopkeepers contemplated nothing but
ruin from the impoverished condition of their customers. While
poor-rates were increasing beyond all precedent, their trade was only
one-half, or one-third, or even one-tenth what it had been three
years before. In that neighborhood, a gentleman, who had retired from
business in 1833, leaving a property worth L60,000 to his sons, and
who had, early in the distress, become security for them, was showing
the works for the benefit of the creditors, at a salary of L1 a week.
In families where the father had hitherto earned L2 per week, and
laid by a portion weekly, and where all was now gone but the sacks of
shavings they slept on, exertions were made to get 'blue milk' for
children to moisten their oatmeal with; but soon they could have it
only on alternate days; and soon water must do. At Leeds the pauper
stone-heap amounted to 150,000 tons; and the guardians offered the
paupers 6s. per week for doing nothing, rather than 7s. 6d. per week
for stone-breaking. The millwrights and other trades were offering a
premium on emigration, to induce their hands to go away. At Hinckley,
one-third of the inhabitants were paupers; more than a fifth of the
houses stood empty; and there was not work enough in the place to
employ properly one-third of the weavers. In Dorsetshire a man and
his wife had for wages 2s. 6d. per week, and three loaves; and the
ablest laborer had 6s. or 7s. In Wiltshire, the poor peasants held
open-air meetings after work--which was necessarily after dark.
There, by the light of one or two flaring tallow candles, the man or
the woman who had a story to tell stood on a chair, and related how
their children were fed and clothed in old times--poorly enough, but
so as to keep body and soul together; and now, how they could nohow
manage to do it. The bare details of the ages of their children, and
what the little things could do, and the prices of bacon and bread,
and calico and coals, had more pathos in them than any oratory heard
elsewhere."

"But all this came from the Corn Laws," is the ready reply of the
American protectionist. The Corn Laws were the doctrine of protection
applied to breadstuffs, farm products, "raw materials." But it was not
only protection for corn that v