al for scientific truth. A question was beginning to
come to the front which would make party lines dependent upon economic
theories, and Huskisson's view of this was characteristic.

The speech from which I have quoted begins with an indignant retort
upon a member who had applied to him Burke's phrase about a
perfect-bred metaphysician exceeding the devil in malignity and
contempt for mankind. Huskisson frequently protested even against the
milder epithet of theorist. He asserted most emphatically that he
appealed to 'experience' and not to 'theory,' a slippery distinction
which finds a good exposure in Bentham's _Book of Fallacies_.[48] The
doctrine, however, was a convenient one for Huskisson. He could appeal
to experience to show that commercial restrictions had injured the
woollen trade, and their absence benefited the cotton trade,[49] and
when he was not being taunted with theories, he would state with
perfect clearness the general free trade argument.[50] But he had to
keep an eye to the uncomfortable tricks which theories sometimes play.
He argued emphatically in 1825[51] that analogy between manufactures
and agriculture is 'illogical.' He does not wish to depress the price
of corn, but to keep it at such a level that our manufactures may not
be hampered by dear food. Here he was forced by stress of politics to
differ from his economical friends. The country gentleman did not wish
to pay duties on his silk or his brandy, but he had a direct and
obvious interest in keeping up the price of corn. Huskisson had
himself supported the Corn Bill of 1815, but it was becoming more and
more obvious that a revision would be necessary. In 1828 he declared
that he 'lamented from the bottom of his soul the mass of evil and
misery and destruction of capital which that law in the course of
twelve years had produced.'[52] Ricardo, meanwhile, and the economists
had from the first applied to agriculture the principles which
Huskisson applied to manufactures.[53] Huskisson's melancholy death
has left us unable to say whether upon this matter he would have been
as convertible as Peel. In any case the general principle of free
trade was as fully adopted by Huskisson and Canning as by the
Utilitarians themselves. The Utilitarians could again claim to be both
the inspirers of the first principles, and the most consistent in
carrying out the deductions. They, it is true, were not generally
biassed by having any interest in rents. They