sured that, in one week of 1845, the sums paid in wages within
twenty miles of Manchester exceeded by a million and a half the sums
paid in the corresponding week of 1841.

Gentlemen, both the capitalist and the labourer have been gainers,
as they ought to have been gainers, by the diminution in the price of
bread. But there is a third party, which ought not to have gained by
that diminution, and yet has gained very greatly by it; and that party
is Her Majesty's present Government. It is for the interest of rulers
that those whom they rule should be prosperous. But the prosperity which
we have lately enjoyed was a prosperity for which we were not indebted
to our rulers. It came in spite of them. It was produced by the
cheapness of that which they had laboured to render dear. Under pretence
of making us independent of foreign supply, they have established a
system which makes us dependent in the worst possible way. As my valued
friend, the Lord Provost (Mr Adam Black.), has justly said, there is
a mutual dependence among nations of which we cannot get rid. That
Providence has assigned different productions to different climates is a
truth with which everybody is familiar. But this is not all. Even in
the same climate different productions belong to different stages of
civilisation. As one latitude is favourable to the vine and another to
the sugar cane, so there is, in the same latitude, a state of society in
which it is desirable that the industry of men should be almost entirely
directed towards the cultivation of the earth, and another state of
society in which it is desirable that a large part of the population
should be employed in manufactures. No dependence can be conceived more
natural, more salutary, more free from everything like degradation
than the mutual dependence which exists between a nation which has a
boundless extent of fertile land, and a nation which has a boundless
command of machinery; between a nation whose business is to turn deserts
into corn fields, and a nation whose business is to increase tenfold by
ingenious processes the value of the fleece and of the rude iron ore.
Even if that dependence were less beneficial than it is, we must
submit to it; for it is inevitable. Make what laws we will, we must be
dependent on other countries for a large part of our food. That point
was decided when England ceased to be an exporting country. For,
gentlemen, it is demonstrable that none but a country which