mall advantage of the repeal of the Corn Laws would
be balanced, a new crisis would follow, and we should be back at the
point from which we started, while the first stimulus to manufacture
would have increased population meanwhile. All this the proletarians
understand very well, and have told the manufacturers to their faces;
but, in spite of that, the manufacturers have in view solely the
immediate advantage which the Corn Laws would bring them. They are too
narrow-minded to see that, even for themselves, no permanent advantage
can arise from this measure, because their competition with each other
would soon force the profit of the individual back to its old level; and
thus they continue to shriek to the working-men that it is purely for the
sake of the starving millions that the rich members of the Liberal party
pour hundreds and thousands of pounds into the treasury of the Anti-Corn
Law League, while every one knows that they are only sending the butter
after the cheese, that they calculate upon earning it all back in the
first ten years after the repeal of the Corn Laws. But the workers are
no longer to be misled by the bourgeoisie, especially since the
insurrection of 1842. They demand of every one who presents himself as
interested in their welfare, that he should declare himself in favour of
the People's Charter as proof of the sincerity of his professions, and in
so doing, they protest against all outside help, for the Charter is a
demand for the power to help themselves. Whoever declines so to declare
himself they pronounce their enemy, and are perfectly right in so doing,
whether he be a declared foe or a false friend Besides, the Anti-Corn Law
League has used the most despicable falsehoods and tricks to win the
support of the workers. It has tried to prove to them that the money
price of labour is in inverse proportion to the price of corn; that wages
are high when grain is cheap, and _vice versa_, an assertion which it
pretends to prove with the most ridiculous arguments, and one which is,
in itself, more ridiculous than any other that has proceeded from the
mouth of an Economist. When this failed to help matters, the workers
were promised bliss supreme in consequence of the increased demand in the
labour market; indeed, men went so far as to carry through the streets
two models of loaves of bread, on one of which, by far the larger, was
written: "American Eightpenny Loaf, Wages Four Shillings per Day,"