n these days, still
an indispensable, is a highly tragic one.

The Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go: would we were all as
sure of the Millennium as they are of going! They go swiftly in
these present months; with an increase of velocity, an ever-
deepening, ever-widening sweep of momentum, truly notable. It is
at the Aristocracy's own damage and peril, still more than at any
other's whatsoever, that the Aristocracy maintains them;--at a
damage, say only, as above computed, of a 'hundred thousand
pounds an hour!' The Corn-Laws keep all the air hot: fostered
by their fever-warmth, much that is evil, but much also, how
much that is good and indispensable, is rapidly coming to life
among us!

Chapter IX

Working Aristocracy

A poor Working Mammonism getting itself 'strangled in the
partridge-nets of an Unworking Dilettantism,' and bellowing
dreadfully, and already black in the face, is surely a disastrous
spectacle! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at
bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No
better;--if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if
not still more disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to
become human again, and rational; they have, on the whole, to
cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure
of the hemp round their neck!--My friends of the Working
Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which you also, in
your extreme need, will have to consider.

The Continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our
machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for
themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!'
Sad news indeed; but irremediable;--by no means the saddest
news. The saddest news is, that we should find our National
Existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling
manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other
People. A most narrow stand for a great Nation to base itself
on! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abrogations
conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came
honestly down from it, and said: "This is our minimum of
cottonprices. We care not, for the present, to make cotton any
cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton
cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton-fuzz, your hearts with
copperas-fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general
gnomes of