If England work better
than all people, it shall be well. England, like an honest
worker, will work as well as she can; and hope the gods may
allow her to live on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else
being once well dead, how many 'impossibles' will become
possible! They are 'impossible,' as cotton-cloth at two-pence an
ell was--till men set about making it. The inventive genius of
great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and
pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head
of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a
Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a _Man's_ genius, I hope,
with a God over him!

Supply-and-demand? One begins to be weary of such work. Leave
all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of
applause:--it is the Gospel of Despair! Man is a Patent-
Digester, then: only give him Free Trade, Free digesting-room;
and each of us digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to
Fate! My unhappy brethren of the Working Mammonism, my unhappier
brethren of the Idle Dilettantism, no world was ever held
together in that way for long. A world of mere Patent-Digesters
will soon have nothing to digest: such world ends, and by Law of
Nature must end, in 'over-population;' in howling universal
famine, 'impossibility,' and suicidal madness, as of endless dog-
kennels run rabid. Supply-and-demand shall do its full part, and
Free Trade shall be free as air;--thou of the shotbelts, see thou
forbid it not, with those paltry, _worse_ than 'Mammonish'
swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are seen to be
swindleries for all thy canting, which in times like ours are
very scandalous to see! And Trade never so well freed, and all
Tariffs settled or abolished, and Supply-and-demand in full
operation,--let us all know that we have yet done nothing; that
we have merely cleared the ground for doing.

Yes, were the Corn-Laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing yet
ended; there is only room made for all manner of things
beginning. The Corn-Laws gone, and Trade made free, it is as
good as certain this paralysis of industry will pass away. We
shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of victory
and prosperity; during which, it is likely, much money will
again be made, and all the people may, by the extant methods,
still for a space of years, be kept alive and physically fed.
The strangling band of Famine will be loosened from our