ent of land may be kept up, the
price of bread must be kept up. There may still be people who think
thus: but they wisely keep their thoughts to themselves. Nobody now
ventures to say in public that ten thousand families ought to be put on
short allowance of food in order that one man may have a fine stud and
a fine picture gallery. Our monopolists have changed their ground.
They have abandoned their old argument for a new argument much
less invidious, but, I think, rather more absurd. They have turned
philanthropists. Their hearts bleed for the misery of the poor labouring
man. They constantly tell us that the cry against the corn laws has been
raised by capitalists; that the capitalist wishes to enrich himself at
the expense both of the landed gentry and of the working people; that
every reduction of the price of food must be followed by a reduction of
the wages of labour; and that, if bread should cost only half what it
now costs, the peasant and the artisan would be sunk in wretchedness and
degradation, and the only gainers would be the millowners and the money
changers. It is not only by landowners, it is not only by Tories, that
this nonsense has been talked. We have heard it from men of a very
different class, from demagogues who wish to keep up the corn laws,
merely in order that the corn laws may make the people miserable, and
that misery may make the people turbulent. You know how assiduously
those enemies of all order and all property have laboured to deceive the
working man into a belief that cheap bread would be a curse to him. Nor
have they always laboured in vain. You remember that once, even in this
great and enlightened city, a public meeting called to consider the corn
laws was disturbed by a deluded populace. Now, for my own part, whenever
I hear bigots who are opposed to all reform, and anarchists who are bent
on universal destruction, join in the same cry, I feel certain that it
is an absurd and mischievous cry; and surely never was there a cry
so absurd and mischievous as this cry against cheap loaves. It seems
strange that Conservatives, people who profess to hold new theories
in abhorrence, people who are always talking about the wisdom of our
ancestors, should insist on our receiving as an undoubted truth a
strange paradox never heard of from the creation of the world till the
nineteenth century. Begin with the most ancient book extant, the Book of
Genesis, and come down to the parliamentary debat