not your filthy mills built on these fields of
ours; on this soil of England, which belongs to--whom think you?
And we shall not offer you our own wheat at the price that
pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A precious notion!
What would become of you, if we chose, at any time, to decide on
growing no wheat more?"

Yes, truly, here is the ultimate rock-basis of all Corn-Laws;
whereon, at the bottom of much arguing, they rest, as securely as
they can: What would become of you, if we decided, some day, on
growing no more wheat at all? If we chose to grow only partridges
henceforth, and a modicum of wheat for our own uses? Cannot we
do what we like with our own?--Yes, indeed! For my share, if I
could melt Gneiss Rock, and create Law of Gravitation; if I
could stride out to the Doggerbank, some morning, and striking
down my trident there into the mudwaves, say, "Be land, be
fields, meadows, mountains and fresh-rolling streams!" by Heaven,
I should incline to have the letting of _that_ land in
perpetuity, and sell the wheat of it, or burn the wheat of it,
according to my own good judgment! My Corn-Lawing friends, you
affright me.

To the 'Millo-cracy' so-called, to the Working Aristocracy,
steeped too deep in mere ignoble Mammonism, and as yet all
unconscious of its noble destinies, as yet but an irrational or
semirational giant, struggling to awake some soul in itself,--the
world will have much to say, reproachfully, reprovingly,
admonishingly. But to the Idle Aristocracy, what will the world
have to say? Things painful and not pleasant!

To the man who _works,_ who attempts, in never so ungracious
barbarous a way, to get forward with some work, you will hasten
out with furtherances, with encouragements, corrections; you
will say to him: "Welcome, thou art ours; our care shall be of
thee." To the idler, again, never so gracefully going idle,
coming forward with never so many parchments, you will not hasten
out; you will sit still, and be disinclined to rise. You will
say to him: "Not welcome, O complex Anomaly; would thou hadst
staid out of doors: for who of mortals knows what to do with
thee? Thy parchments: yes, they are old, of venerable
yellowness; and we too honour parchment, old-established
settlements, and venerable use and wont. Old parchments in very
truth:--yet on the whole, if thou wilt remark, they are young to
the Granite Rocks, to the Groundplan of God's Universe! We
advise